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> To question growth is taboo It's not taboo, it's just basic antropo-ecological mechanics: if you don't focus on growth the other who will and will do more of
by catchclose8919 5y ago
> To question growth is taboo
It's not taboo, it's just basic antropo-ecological mechanics: if you don't focus on growth the other who will and will do more of it will outcompete you out of every niche. So selective pressure will increase the number of growth focused civilizations comparative to others.
We actually need more growth and we need to think outside of nature's and Earth's box... We have the technology to practice closed-circle-agriculture and that only needs power (more nuclear + more renewables) + raw materials (more extraction, more oil but less of it burnt as a fuel), let's just forget about maintaining the "natural balance" and put serious research work into techniques for manipulating and tweaking so called chaotic systems... There absolutely no reason why Earth can't support even a 10 trillion humans population if we just quit on "nature" (keep it just in small reservations), and go full nuclear (imagine 1+ billion reactors!) and fully embrace semi-synthetic food (sure, first iterations on sythetic proteins were carcinogenic as hell, but we know how to solve such problems now, or how to avoid them with bugs and closed-circuit-shrimps and lab-grown-meats etc.).
Yeah, a couple tens of millions might die of extra cancers and other pollution induced illnesses, but we can compensate by accelerating population growth (baby factories/camps can work if campaigns to motivate people to reproduce more don't work - though I'd guess we're good enough at the technology of brainwashing and economic incentivization by now to make masses of people do anything if we put our best efforts into....).
We just need a solid serious global responsibility frameworks instead of our anemic "globalism", so that if anyone just dumps X tons of eg. mercury in the ocean, they don't receive just sanctions but also swift targeted assassinations of all guilty parties +/- a sprinkle of tactical nukes for good measure and punishment against "pissing in the pool"...
- revscat 5y agoI agree with you, but forced degrowth is an option when other solutions become ineffective.
- catchclose8919 4y agoMany share your opinion, but I think it really wrong: through "forced degrowth" we're saddling future generations with a problem in a way very analogous to pollution and wrecked climate... And it's much much nastier problem that they won't have even the remotest chance to engineer their way out of that we really don't like to think about. The problem of being left behind! Of being a laggard civilization/species/etc. That will manifest either in pseudo-predictable ways when humans meet other civilizations and it goes like with the conquistadors and amerindians (conquest and extermination, minor asimilation). Or it goes in an inconprehensible for us way but probably still really bad when Earth-origined-super-AGI meets X-origined-super-AGI that is more advanced than it and either canibalizes it or preemptively extincts it before even making contact, for its/their own self-preservation. Any slow down is a silent cosmological civilizational technical debt trap in a way! At least by temporarily increasing risk of extinction by wrecking some parts of our life support systems a bit we can have the hope of whatever comes after us (I don't believe much in the future of bio-humans beyond 2-5 generations from now) has at least a fighting chance to engineer their way out of the mess we're leaving them, and at least they'd have their science well sharpened and minds battle hardened by the trials!