Our unsustainability is exponential, and our innovation is exponential. We have two exponential curves. If the depletion/unsustainability curve wins, we all die horribly in something resembling a cross between Mad Max, ISIS in Iraq, and Day of the Dead. If the innovation curve wins, we might reach 'escape velocity' and achieve some kind of post-scarcity society.

This is the road we are on: hideous mass death or utopia. I don't see a third possible outcome. Exponential stuff is like that-- the only potential outcomes are extreme.

Makes me wonder if the ancient religious visions -- e.g. Revelations -- about a 'heaven or hell' outcome aren't prescient bits of intuition about the fundamentally binary nature of human destiny. One way of thinking of it is that we're a cosmic civilization in its early startup phase... meaning that success or failure are the only two possible outcomes.