It's a story I cite fairly often. A few others which examine this sort of thing are: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella) https://en.w

It's a story I cite fairly often. A few others which examine this sort of thing are: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_(novella) - https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo (originally published as: https://qntm.org/lena https://qntm.org/lena ) and I can never miss a chance to recommend "Raindrop" from Hal Clement's _Space Lash_ (originally published as _Small Changes_) At some point in the future one hopes that a technology will be developed which allows doing more than just pillaging the earth's resources for some additional comfort/convenience/energy, agriculture and improvements on it would be that, except that by making Malthus wrong, they've just increased the number of people for whom problems need to be resolved --- computing had the potential to do this, but the discussion about taxing CPUs to fund a universal basic income or even job re-training for displaced workers never got out the gate --- solar may be the first such, but it really needs more adoption, and an implementation which doesn't depend on batteries which added a fifth item to the resources humans plunder: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112974899-material-world (the newcomer is lithium, the others were sand, salt, copper, and oil) We keep crossing tipping points which no one talks about much: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ and folks have been writing science fiction stories on this sort of thing since _Make Room, Make Room!_ (and the public is moderately familiar with the movie version _Soylent Green_) What technologies or social changes offer an escape hatch? - cold fusion? - making limestone out of CO2 in warm moist air (needs abundant energy and either an affordable/available reagent or a new process) - switching folks from eating beef to something else? - desalination (needs abundant energy, and a compleatness which will prevent issues such as: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S106422931502009X https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S106422931502009X )