Insightful post, thanks. This conflict is also documented in various "Garden of Eden" origin stories (including likely the one at the beginning of the Bible). I

Insightful post, thanks. This conflict is also documented in various "Garden of Eden" origin stories (including likely the one at the beginning of the Bible). I discuss that here: http://pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html#A_history_lesson_pre-scarcity_times_Eden_then_scarcity_times_Dickens_then_post-scarcity_times_real_soon_now http://pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html#A_histo... That said, grinding up rocks to make rock dust is a fairly good way of making the Earth fertile again, so collapse is an ideological choice not a certainty: https://remineralize.org/ https://remineralize.org/ And nowadays we can make robots to do many dangerous or repetitive tasks instead of requiring human chattel slaves or wage slaves to do them. The biodiversity issue is not so easily solved. We can potentially recreate biodiversity through genetic engineering and simulated evolution (even as I might prefer the natural kind) -- but no guarantees on that. The ongoing loss of the wild origins of many crops is indeed one of the greatest tragedies of modern times. And such biodiversity is so cheap to preserve relative to the abundance agriculture provides. For an illustrative xkcd on the loss of mammalian biodiversity on land: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/ The needless loss of cultural diversity is also tragic -- although that is a much more complex topic given various conflicts of cultures. One can see such an ongoing loss almost everywhere in the world with a TV or internet connection -- as mass media drives out much local culture and family traditions by being a "Supernormal Stimuli" crowding out everything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli Frankly, my biggest concern about a potential collapse is not that is not that we don't have the know-how or technology or resources to make the world work for everyone. We clearly do, even for populations much larger than currently and even without spreading into the ocean or Antarctica or underground or outer space. Bucky Fuller pointed that out decades ago. The biggest concern is whether nukes and bioweapons and drones (and other fruits of the same advanced technology that could provide abundance for all) get thrown around in final tantrums by a very few people upset that their ideology or personal extreme power and privileges are being challenged. Or that such weapons get unleashed by accident while they are being kept in readiness for elite tantrums over ideology and poltical power (i.e. "War is a Racket" according to Major General Smedley Butler). Unlike previous collapses, nukes and engineered plagues and killer robots make any next collapse potentially very different -- even as the same underlying technologies make so much more possible. Or as I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."