You have to free people from drudgery and spend tons on their education, and provide them with a stable environment in which to work, and cultural encouragement for the parents to nourish children's curiosity.
Only then can you hope to generate ideas that surpass our already quite formidable body of knowledge, and it's still not guaranteed.
> yet in spite of the continued failed predictions of disaster people have been making for the past couple hundred years, people still persist in making such predictions.
They only have to be right once. On a geological time scale, a disaster is certainly inevitable. Not that I necessarily agree with doomsaying all the time. Population growth isn't the biggest issue we're facing.
We are the one species that might just have a chance if we don't succumb to the dystopian pessimist view that is a much bigger risk than anything else.
Standards of living globally are better than at any time in the past, yet in spite of the continued failed predictions of disaster people have been making for the past couple hundred years, people still persist in making such predictions. Willfully ignoring humanity's ability to adapt and overcome, that's the real nonsense.