[tremon]

Our technological ability to destroy greatly outmatches our ability to preserve, and always has. I do not believe techological progress will save the day. Technology alone with not spontaneously generate more sustainable economics or more reponsible societies.

[trukterious]

Snikeris is snickety, but correct.

In the long run, only technology and creativity could create better substitutes for burning wood and dung. For making furniture and other structures out of rainforest hardwood.

Only technology will avert the next big meteor strike and the next super-volcano eruption (both otherwise inevitable, and both capable of wiping out a multitude of species, as has happened previously).

Reversion to a primitive way of life could make matters worse, environmentally speaking. The attraction is based on guilt. It's a response to the alienation and nihilism we associate with modernity; a response to philosophical and spiritual problems rather than to environmental ones.

So our duty remains not to prophecy doom but to work for a better world -- for all life.

[PeterisP]

Wood is a renewable resource - if the global population was (for example) a few million people, then building everything out of wood, clearcutting forests for farming and burning all the wood they'd need wouldn't be a problem; and without technology a high population can't be sustained.

What's dangerous, however, is a mid-tech low-income high-population situation, which can only be a dystopia.

High technology is a solution, stone-age technology can be a solution, but any semi-industrialized post-apocalyptic 'steampunk' will be worse than both high and low tech.

[trukterious]

>stone-age technology can be a solution

What about the next big meteor strike?

[titzer]

> In the long run, only technology and creativity could create better substitutes for burning wood and dung.

Burning wood and dung are probably the most sustainable sources of energy, considering the carbon cycle and what happens naturally (i.e. without humans). They just don't scale to megacities and jetliners. So much for tech.

> Reversion to a primitive way of life could make matters worse, environmentally speaking. The attraction is based on guilt. It's a response to the alienation and nihilism we associate with modernity; a response to philosophical and spiritual problems rather than to environmental ones.

I recommend reading Sapiens by Yuval Harari. There is much to be said for a simpler way of life. Also, Thoreau.

/rant

That said, we're all apes and we're far, far off in a fantasy world, IMHO. We either go back to our biology or this will just reboot itself over and over again. People just. Don't. Get. It. Technology at its core is anti-life. It is anti-biological. It is what results when the mind dreams up what it thinks are more efficient ways to build but inevitably ends up as more efficient ways to destroy. It starts as hammers and ends as robots. To some it seems innocent, neutral. To others even good. To some, tech is universally good. But tech begets more tech. And that tech creates problems that requires more tech, and on and on. It is a constant, never-ending treadmill. What seems so great at first always has dark offspring, or dark debt we don't see.

Take plastic. Wonder material! Light, strong, doesn't corrode or break down. Sterile! But now it's no accident that plastic peppers our planet and chokes our oceans and waterways, for exactly those properties are anti-biological. We produced fucktons of it, because best of all, plastic is a universal enabler for other tech--more food, more goodies, more icecream and all the stuffs. It's not coincidence that nearly all the plastic litter is one-time-use chip bags, soda bottles, straws, wrappers. It's gobble, gobble. Plastic is the purest expression of how ugly our stupid tech is. And people just won't look right in the asshole of that problem. Right in that 8-million-tons-per-year problem. And it's right in front of our fucking faces. Our tech is killing this fucking planet. At least, we are trying our best. Trash monkeys!

It's our stupid tech--of all kinds--that gums up the world, like all the streetlights and headlights and goddamn smartphones blinding us at night and jets and cars and bricks and concrete and lawnmowers and windmills. Tech is like a giant zit filled with self-replicating, sharp-legged metal nanobots, ready to pop and spill out over the biological world. And yeah that's a dim view. But it's the truth. We just keep dumping everything into tech and hoping it will save us. Yet we keep being miserable...keep being made miserable...and the "economy" just keeps offering us more tech to eat to salve our psychosis. Look where our tech really ends up. Our tech is now watching us, trying to learn about us so it can figure out a way to suck some money out of our asses some how...all the time. And it, whatever the heck it is, wants to take over, and run everything, be artificially intelligent. And people just keep blindly believing in it.

And a word about that, and suddenly you're some kind of luddite who wants to run around with animal skin speedos and spearfish. Actually I'd rather go naked and eat mango, swim and enjoy the sunshine.

/rant off

Yeah, and brought to you by tech. (When I should be sleeping!)

[snikeris]

> Technology at its core is anti-life. It is anti-biological. It is what results when the mind dreams up what it thinks are more efficient ways to build but inevitably ends up as more efficient ways to destroy. It starts as hammers and ends as robots. To some it seems innocent, neutral. To others even good. To some, tech is universally good. But tech begets more tech. And that tech creates problems that requires more tech, and on and on. It is a constant, never-ending treadmill. What seems so great at first always has dark offspring, or dark debt we don't see.

How about glasses or contacts? You'd have a hard time convincing folks that their glasses are anti-life, anti-biological and have some sinister dark side.

[trukterious]

Life is good. But technology is morally neutral: it can be used for good or ill.

It's a simple fact that only technology could possibly prevent the next big meteor strike, the next ice age, the next local supernova, etc.

If people feel greedy or jaded or wretched or guilty (or think that all their fellow humans are) I think this is a sign that they need to choose a genuinely important problem to work on. And to have fun working on it -- perhaps with the occasional mango/beach holiday thrown in!

[yesenadam]

Well, I read recently that most of the plastic in the seas is from dumped fishing nets. Not so high-tech. That's from humans not wanting to stop/not knowing/caring? about eating fish and other sea animals.

[snikeris]

I disagree. When you're struggling to survive, you don't care what your trash fire is doing to the environment. Caring about the environment is a wealthy person's problem. Technology creates wealth.