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The difference here is that for the first time ever we are causing ecological damage on a _global_, rather than local scale. If you cut down a few trees to bui
by Turskarama 3y ago
The difference here is that for the first time ever we are causing ecological damage on a _global_, rather than local scale.
If you cut down a few trees to build a house then 50 years later the forest will reclaim the land. If you instead cut down the entire forest then that can't happen.
>We have been using nonrenewable resources for hundreds (tens of thousands?) of years, and yet we keep finding more.
Multiple civilisations in the past have collapsed at least in part due to resource shortages. Again though, because none of these civilisations were _global_ the collapse was local and could be recovered from using outside resources.
- hcurtiss 3y agoAnd, barring an eco-religious return to the dark ages, we will soon be an interplanetary species. That sounds fantastic now, but so also did AI fifty years ago. And the moon fifty years before that.
- Turskarama 3y ago"Soon" doing a lot of work there. The majority of people vastly underestimate how hard it is to actually build a _productive_ colony (as opposed to a scientific outpost) on another planet/moon/asteroid. Seriously, we can't even consistently land on the moon but everyone is convinced we're going to have space mines operating by the end of the century. Keep dreaming. The rate of technological progress has if anything _slowed down_ in the last 50 years. Compare the difference if you look at the 40s vs the 60s, then the 2000s vs the 2020s.