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Thinking about the long run future [1]

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Date: 2024-11-11  

Still licking wounds from the election. Here are some other thoughts, about the long run future.

We need to provide strong resilience to allow human survival in the long run future covering the fickle nature of Mother Earth which in the past has had disasters like super volcanoes that blanket the upper atmosphere with impenetrable clouds of material that reduce plant growth and food supplies for many years at a time, ultra cold spells, ultra hot spells, long run regional drought, ice a mile thick over much of the northern hemisphere. All this has happened in the past and most likely will occur in the long run future.

We need a much smaller population in the long run to allow a good standard of living without exhausting needed resources -— water is perhaps the most serious resource problem. Right now we are headed for 11 billion. Be nice to get it back to around let’s say 1 billion, more or less. .

In high income America, enormous amounts of resources are wasted on needless transportation of goods and people — energy, materials, time. We need to greatly reduce transportation costs by shifting most of our population into small communities that are mostly self sufficient, satellites close to large cities supplying most needed stuff. Humans developed in small groups where everyone knew each other over their life times. Small communities can reduce alienation and shift reliance from canned entertainment and remote internet interaction to much more face to face interaction with others in sports, games, parties, home visits. Traditionally, small communities can sometimes be horribly stifling with negative beliefs and rules of behavior that stimulate distrust and exclusion — witchcraft, communal violence, fights with surrounding communities, bandits in spaces between communities. There is no reason to allow this to happen in these more enlightened times.

We probably need to retreat from the current coastline, if ocean levels continue to rise.

Automation will greatly reduce the need for human labor to produce basic necessities. Vigorous recreation should increase. But there should still be substantial human labor, in education, in all kinds of research and development, including medical care, space exploration, materials science, exploration of unexplored spaces, advancement of science in general. And yes, vigorous recreation.

There is a lot of talk about “human survival through emigration to other planets”. If we just want survival of just a few humans, this might be achievable — with probably many failures. But to allow the survival of a billion or more people, without a mass extinction event, we need to work hard to make sure we can survive on fickle Mother Earth. Sure, at the same time develop some lifeboats to escape Earth and settle elsewhere. But the far more basic need is to work on strategies for survival of all humans without a massive dying off.

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