Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
If people are reasonable in 200 years, they will consider that we did the best with what we knew to do at the time. They should also realize that their advanced way of life didn't appear out of a vacuum, but instead was built upon a crazy number of incremental improvements.
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Agreed there were very, very few luminaries in 1900 that could foresee where the exponential growth that fossil fuel use enables would leave us when it inevitably starts to slip away. It's something we had to work through as a society to see what happens.
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As far as leaving an advanced civilization to the people of 200 years from now, we didn't do enough. Didn't save enough resources. Didn't build out enough replacement sustainable energy with our current energy wealth. Didn't incorporate a new economic system that can function on negative growth. There is no gleaming Star Trek future coming for them. Eventually everything will drift back more towards muscle and firewood (plus some solar PV) as it was before fossil fuel caused the population to explode.
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Which can still be pretty nice. Once the population corrects to fit the available energy flows.