> For decades, we have been absolutely deluged by prophecies of doom and dystopia. From the nuclear threat of the Cold War, to the “Population Bomb” of the 1970

> For decades, we have been absolutely deluged by prophecies of doom and dystopia. From the nuclear threat of the Cold War, to the “Population Bomb” of the 1970s, to claims that “Peak Oil” and climate change will render the future a living hell, to the latest worries about artificial intelligence, there has been a constant drumbeat of pessimistic visions of the future. These forecasts regarding material disaster are typically exaggerated, understate the system’s ability for an adaptive response, and have been consistently proven wrong in retrospect. The famous "impending disaster was averted, therefore the threat was never real in the first place and all warnings were overblown" school of thought. I don't know about the particulars of peak oil or the population bomb (too young), but to my knowledge, the threat of nuclear disaster was definitely real, and so is climate change. Earth Overshoot Day [1] 2023 will be in August, it used to be in October. It should be on Dec 31. Currently, even though humanity may reproduce below replacement rate, we're still managing to overwhelm the planet. Maybe the first step to saving the author's beloved "industrial civilization" is to make it actually sustainable instead of bullying everyone into having children. (The singular focus on "cultural decay" as the root cause is also quite telling from which political direction the author is coming from. At least I don't see how the observation that some countries with social welfare also have below-replacement reproduction "proves" that economic factors play no role in the decision to have children) > Great dreams seem possible again. Expansion through the solar system, orbital colonies, cities on Mars, and the population growing to tens and even hundreds of billions off-world. I still don't quite understand his weird obsession with population size, but this paragraph also makes clear that he (or the movement he stands for) sees population growth not as a means to avert civilisatiorial collapse but as an end to itself, ideally humanity spreading throughout and populating the entire universe. I find that vaguely creepy. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day