And yet Deutsch finished his talk by advocating passionately for absolutely trying to develop a sustainable economy and ecosystem. At least in the written form

And yet Deutsch finished his talk by advocating passionately for absolutely trying to develop a sustainable economy and ecosystem. At least in the written form of his talk, it’s not convenient for me to watch the video at the moment. He’s putting on an impressive intellectual show, but at the end of the day he’s not actually arguing against any of the conclusions we might draw from the spaceship Earth concept. As is often the case merely quoting the opening of a well considered argument and skip the body and conclusion, you’ll end up completely missing the point. He does contradict himself though. He starts saying where we are is different because not everywhere has life and intelligent beings and such. But then points out (not in these words exactly) that wherever you go in the universe it’s all just varying distributions of protons, electrons and photons anyway so its all of a muchness. No matter how you choose to think about the uniqueness or mundanity of our place in the universe though, we’re still right here, right now, with the same problems and constraints whichever perspective you prefer. Hence he finally turns to proposing effective environmental management. His grand perspective doesn’t help him escape the fact our problems are real and need to be urgently addressed, and he makes no attempt to evade that.