Nobody said better things require more resources. If anything, modern manufacturing uses far less than it did decades ago, with less pollution, people renting things more than wasteful owning, etc. E.g. when driverless taxis come along, expect to see car manufacturing plummet.

> there is more to life than working 50%+ of our awake time to watch netflix and buy iphones

Life is what you make of it. If you want to write poetry or symphonies in your free time, or watch Netflix and play Candy Crush, I'm not going to judge you either way. You have the choice to make your life what you want. You can focus on yourself and you don't need to judge others.

Who told you that modern manufacturing produces less pollution? It may produce less of some things, but plastic and evergy use is way up in recent years. For example, a modern car has far less recyclable or recycled content than one from the 80s (more plastic, less steel).

On top of that even if we made cars (and other things) less polluting we still use xxx% more than 50 years ago.

I always use the plane engine analogy, 10 years of research gives you a 3% boost in fuel efficiency, during the same time you doubled the number of flights per day ....

> If anything, modern manufacturing uses far less than it did decades ago, with less pollution, people renting things more than wasteful owning,

I don't think we live in the same world then, we've never imported/exported so much shit, third world countries are catching up with the west in term of how they want to live (personal cars, bigger houses, more electronics), we're polluting more than ever, &c. all the metrics are going up, not down

> Life is what you make of it.

Well, yeah, exactly, but what can you make of it when you work 8 hours a day 5 days a week for the 40 best years of your life

> You can focus on yourself and you don't need to judge others

Or I can think about myself _and_ others by thinking that the world would be a much better place for everyone including myself if people didn't have to work so much for so little.

> I don't think we live in the same world then

I was referring to manufacturing per output -- e.g. per-car or per-toaster uses less energy, pollution, etc.

People consuming more or less objects total is a choice people make, not manufacturers.

The distribution is wider, more bad shit and more good things happening at the same time.

> Earth is a finite environment, with finite resources, at some point it won't scale anymore, especially with today's ecological concerns.

Fortunately we have an entire solar system. That should last us a shocking amount of time.

We're already seeing how we badly impacted earth* not even 200 years after starting to pollute it... I'd like to see how we'll make dead rocks without atmospheres more comfortable than home before we collapse

* literal biological paradise we've been engineered for millions of years to live on

But now you’re moving the goalposts a little. If the problem is limited resources, the solar system has a ton of resources, and we can use those resources to improve life on Earth. Eventually we are going to learn how to live in space by managing small habitats there, but as those habitats gradually grow in size and in number we will learn from that and even become better at managing the very large and complex habitat that is the Earth.

The goal post was moved when you shifted the discussion from real life to sci-fi...

It was sci fi from the beginning. You just prefer the dystopian, “Soylent Green” style.

I don't prefer it, it's just the path we're following so far: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/