3 ms·
Society - with brief exceptions - lived with almost no growth for most of its existence. Since around the 1800s, the utilization of fossil fuels and industriali
by jay80 3y ago
Society - with brief exceptions - lived with almost no growth for most of its existence. Since around the 1800s, the utilization of fossil fuels and industrialization, we have been living in such an exception. Eventually, things will revert back to the mean. In the meantime, the higher our society rises and the more it overconsumes the harder the adjustment will be.
https://www.darrinqualman.com/2000-years-of-economic-growth/ https://www.darrinqualman.com/2000-years-of-economic-growth/
- justanotherjoe 3y agoBut our current world hinges on future growth. You must rewind the clock pretty far back to see what kind of society it could be, even with today's tech.
- api 3y agoLife has undergone multiple large scale evolutionary shifts. Did it revert to the mean? Were multicellularity, photosynthesis, or sexual reproduction fads or blips? Obviously fossil fuel use must be a blip, but non-fossil sources have achieved exponential takeoff. This could be a new normal, with humans possibly being joined by synthetic AI lifeforms soon. This would represent a giant shift toward neural cognitive intelligent life as a dominant process in the ecosystem, a change similar in magnitude to the birth of eukaryotes or the Cambrian explosion. Or it could all blow up and fail. I do not have a time machine or clairvoyance. I’m just pointing out that one cannot make definite statements about what complex evolving systems will do, and many very unprecedented weird things have already happened in the history of life.