3 ms·
If anyone thinks anything about the future of humanity will involve us consuming less instead of more, they're forgetting the entire history of most human endea
by southernplaces7 3y ago
If anyone thinks anything about the future of humanity will involve us consuming less instead of more, they're forgetting the entire history of most human endeavors and tendencies up to the present day, completely. We may find cleaner, better, less invasive ways of consuming and creating things from what we consume (I would hope), but I would bet any amount of money that across all metrics of practical use, humans will consume more food, energy, needed materials and so forth by far in 2100 than they do today, unless some truly enormous catastrophe sets our civilization back or causes depopulation.
I can see us consuming less of any given resource we heavily use now, but only because we no longer need it due to some new innovation, and for no other reason.
- tsimionescu 3y agoPerhaps what we need are some decades of social advancement, not just technological. Our last significant social experiments and discoveries date from the 1850s or so (nationalism, socialism, slightly later fascism). While that period led to some of the worse massacres in history, it also led to some positive changes in attitude that persist today - mainly respect for the rights of each people, an end to the colonial mindset. Perhaps just like a mostly peaceful independence of India, Australia, Canada etc would have seemed unthinkable at the height of the British Empire, perhaps a non-consumerist society which seems unthinkable today is still in the cards. Either way, we will obviously see less consumption in the coming century - either voluntarily, as I hope, in order to stop the worse forms of global warming; or else global warming will continue in its current path to 3, 4, 5 degrees of warming, and the ensuing catastrophes will force it on us.