Any creature that manages to escape, for a period, limits on its reproduction is going to overrun its environment. That's just elementary ecology. It should only be surprising to the religiously-minded who never truly believed humans to be part of the physical world. This includes many atheists raised on a superstitious belief in inevitable 'progress'.
If you think about it, the notion that the assemblage of cognitive, conative and affective faculties that evolution installed on a primate for the purposes of hunting and small group coordination were somehow magically going to be up to the job of managing a whole planet was always pretty fanciful.
I am. I've been around and around this thing for decades, a misanthrope since my teenage years. A lot of us who delved deep into tech and scifi absorbed myths about the future of humans as a space-faring, enlightened and truly advanced race. After the internet and the great advancements in computing, it seemed maybe we were reaching into truths of the universe and would join God in his great datacenter in the sky, cranking pure mathematical harmony and joy in our ever-expanding understanding of scientific knowledge. But we weren't climbing into heaven, or building a space elevator up there. We weren't even making ivory towers or steel skyscrapers. It's still been our base primate instincts at work. Greed. All of that striving after science and mathematics and technology has never been any different than digging up the hills for gold or slashing down the forests to plant our wheat. We're dwarves; we're diggers, miners, destroyers, conquerors, killers, pyschopaths. And that guilt triggers in me because I see the delicate things, the beautiful things, that we have destroyed to get here. And the future just looks like one big highway littered with McDonald's with powerlines strewn across, dusty and dilapidated. We fucked Earth. You bet I am angry.
Still, on reflection, I'm pretty sure our current trajectory was inevitable the moment humans developed agriculture. We're the wildly pullulating caterpillar devouring our tree, and always were going to be just what we are. Just another species. Just another dead end in evolution's exploration of ecological state space.
> We're the wildly pullulating caterpillar devouring our tree, and always were going to be just what we are.
It's really mind-blowing to think of us as a planetary-scale caterpillar. Thanks for the analogy!
Cheers.
> every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating.
Is it human nature, or is it the design of money? [1][2]
[1] The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer
[2] http://ceptr.org
Yeah, unfortunately you are more right than you know. Like, right all the way to the bottom of the human soul. Climate change is both too fast and too slow for us to deal with effectively. In the past, humankind was never united in a global economy powered by fossil fuels and fed by financial markets driven by AI. It could never grow at a very large exponent. Now, fueled by massive population growth and even more massive economic growth, we've entered into a very steep exponent indeed. Running on theories generated by thousands of economic PhDs and underwritten by national monetary policies, the machine is finally eating the world. Literally. Capital is flowing everywhere for economic development, from vast palm oil plantations across southeast Asia, to Lithium mines in South America, to cattle farms in Brazil, to vacation homes in every picturesque spot on the planet, we're chopping it all down. And that's just the sheer physical digestion of nature. We're pumping out our waste products at record rates, and thirsty for more, we equate energy consumption with quality of life.
And worst of all, we will not stop nor even let our foot off the gas. We're locked in the patterns of international struggle for dominance even as we are locked in interpersonal struggles for sexual competition. He who makes the most money, touts the biggest consumer markets, the greatest exports or GDP or most powerful weapons...that person is crowned king of a smouldering planet.
We cannot right this ship. We are just apes, ffs. We can't evolve past our basal instincts and our antibiotics and satellites are no witness to the betterment of the human soul. We reached the apex of better angels of our nature and greed and corruption and the brutal mathematics of a game theoretic dilemma where every last human stands more to gain from defecting than cooperating.
We're gonna smash this motherfucker against the wall as hard as she will go. And the greatest irony of it all is there written in the bibles that evangelicals clutch to their chests as they gnash their teeth for more prosperity as god promised. And that was the simple wise truth, that cuts to the core of all that is today's sin: the love of money is the root of all evil.