Yes, but also antibiotics, vaccinations, child mortality down down down, life expectancy up up up. I wouldn't trade for living even 100 years prior compared to today, or 500-200k years ago for that matter.
With everything wrong and sick with today's world, let's not take the achievements of our species for granted.
You wouldn't make that trade because you are part of the last generation (loosely speaking, a collection of generations) before it all comes crumbling down. We are living unbelievably privileged lives because we are burning all of the world's resources to the ground. In the process, we're destroying the ecosystem and driving a mass extinction event. Nothing about the way we live is sustainable long-term. We're literally consuming hundreds of millions of years worth of planet-wide resource buildup over a span of a couple of centuries. Even if we avoid the worst case scenario, humans 200 years from now will almost certainly not be able to live anywhere near as luxuriously as we do now, unless there's a culling of billions. In the actual worst case scenario, we may render the planet uninhabitable for anything we regard as intelligent life.
In that sense, we have just enough collective intelligence to be dangerous and not enough intelligence to moderate ourselves, which may very well result in an evolutionary deadend that will have caused untold damage to life on Earth.
You lost me when you started narrating the fossil doom visage.
With the current progress in solar, as well as the remaining coal, gas and uranium reserves, energy is not going to be what finishes our civilization.
While I don't think we are going to get true collapse, I think we are going to get a lot of technical progress compensating for biosocial deterioration.
The demographics, mental health and dysgenics are all real, quantified trends, and we are going to face the reality of less capable, less taxable population for the rest of this century. It's baked in at this point.
We also live in an era we can create hydrocarbon fuel DIRECTLY from the atmosphere and desalinate fresh water in unlimited supply, from power derived directly from the sun or atomics.
We also live in a time where the human population, where it is most concentrated, is declining rather than growing, so far without too disastrous consequences.
Greening of the earth has been happening since the 1980s- i.e. about a .3% coverage increase per year in recent decades.
Places that were miserable and poor, like China, have been lifted to prosperity and leading out in renewable tech.
There is much to celebrate and after the recent passing of Paul Ehrlich, we should pause and consider just how wrong pretty much every prediction he made was.
That seems both fatalistic and doomerist to me, but time will tell. I would assume germ theory would survive regardless, as would immunology, so I'd hold on to those two at least.
Doomerism is a kind of religion that goes back as far as they eye can see. What's interesting about it is that in spite of being perpetually incorrect in its myriad predictions, it continues to adapt and attract new adherents.
See also (recent only):
- Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Malthusian collapse)
- The Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth (resource exhaustion)
- Thomas Malthus' Population growth / famine cycle
- James Lovelock's Global warming catastrophe predictions
- Hubbert's (et al) Peak oil economic disaster
- Molina & Rowland's Ozone catastrophe
- Metcalfe's internet collapse
I am not a doomer, nor a Malthusian, merely a realist. There are a few points I could make briefly:
- Everything lasts forever, until it doesn't. Ancient Egyptian civilization lasted for thousands of years, until it didn't. Any Egyptian could point to thousands of years of their heritage and say it hasn't ended yet, therefore any prediction that it will end is clearly bad and dumb. Then it was conquered by Romans, and then by Islam, with its language, culture, and religion extinguished, extant only in monuments, artifacts and history books.
- We have nuclear weapons now. Any prediction of an imminent end of human civilization before then would be purely religious, but there is a real reason to believe things have changed. We are currently in a time of relative peace secured by burning resources for prosperity, but what happens when those resources run out and world conflict for increasingly scarce resources is renewed with greater vigor?
- Note that I did not outright predict the end of human civilization, merely noted it as a plausible worst-case scenario. If civilization continues on more-or-less as it is, in the next couple of hundred years, we will drive countless more species to extinction. We will destroy so much more of our environment with climate change, deforestation, strip mining, overfishing, pollution, etc. We will deplete water reservoirs and we will deplete oil, helium, phosphorus, copper, zinc, and various rare earth elements. Not a complete depletion, but they will become so scarce as to not be widely available or wasted for the general population's benefit. If billions of people are still alive then, which I explicitly suggested was a possibility, they will as a simple matter-of-fact live much less comfortably prosperous lives than us. It will not take a great catastrophe to result in a massive reduction in living standards, because our current living standards are inherently unsustainable.