[Serious] The Post-Technological World.

[Yonadav]

I have pretty much rejected the idea that colonizing space can give us relief from our problems on earth. We either master our problems on earth, or we just replicate them on other worlds in probably a pretty short period of time. People fleeing an over crowded, polluted, depleted earth could probably destroy a pristine earth-like world in just a few hundred years.

I am sometimes called a luddite because I actually do favor a more simple life of massively reduced consumerism as a response to global warming. A small minority of the brightest and most inquisitive could live in cities that are basically high tech research campuses. But about 95% of people would live pleasant lives in the countryside where they indulge in simple pleasures and work for about 16 hours per week.

I think that it is actually what a lot of people want, and they just don't realize it. Or they don't think that it is realistic to want that. Or they just resolutely believe that others won't want it, so they go along to get along.

But I think that it is the truly rational response to global warming. A technological messiah might solve the problem. But waiting for any sort of messiah is usually not a solution to anything, ever. So the sane response is to massively curb consumerism. And massively curbing consumerism completely destroys the concept of the continuously growing economy. So we would lose the majority of the world's jobs. We would have a whole bunch of people with nothing to do. Basically, their job would become living environmentally healthy lives and learning to enjoy themselves without setting gasoline on fire.

I agree that space colonization without changing the attitude would not be a completely proper solution. Moreover, in such a scenario the Humanity could become a sort of 'Space Locust'. But there's a principal difference. Space colonization helps spread human species which technically rises its chances for survival in general and buys Humanity more time. While on Earth humans are much more cornered with the problem of limited resources. So I had to mention it to specify the conditions for my further reasoning.

To add to what you've mentioned, limiting the consumerism alone would not be enough. Humanity will inevitably face the over-population problem. Even if the society you've described is possible it would still hit certain limits. So it's either environmentally healthy way of life has to include Medieval-style medicare to 'naturally' limit the lifespan or people have to get more reasonable about having and raising kids.

I think that not having too many children would be a natural part of living an environmentally responsible life. There is some cause for optimism on that front. There has been some evidence that people a sort of hardwired to want 2 to 3 surviving children. Throughout history, women who were able to survive it basically had as many children as they could. And despite having so many children, population growth was very, very slow. It took about a thousand years from 1 CE for the population of the world to double. Every woman who could survive it basically had to have as many children as she could, just to maintain global population, and create just a very slightly positive growth in population.

Evidence indicates that once a society has experienced a generation or two of a high survival rate among their children, then they naturally dial back the number of children that they have. We are more or less hardwired to want two or three surviving children. So in a sort of neo-luddite world like I described, where most people are just living pleasurable low carbon footprint lives which is basically their job, they would likely have an accompanying ideology about keeping it to two children or less.

I have frequently argued that people don't have reproductive rights. Despite believing that reproductive rights are an imaginary concept, I usually don't push the population angle very much in discussions about global warming. In fact, some of the people who have argued most vigorously for population reduction have then become very angry at me when I agreed that people don't have reproductive rights. As it turns out, most of these people want China and India to somehow reduce their populations because apparently the Chinese and Indians don't have reproductive rights, but when the matter of their own reproductive rights comes up they get sort of angry. And then it goes sideways even further when I point out that we would have to reduce the population by three average Chinese folks to reduce carbon emissions by the amount of one average American's emissions. So if we are going to eliminate carbon emissions by population reduction, then it is the American population that should be targeted most aggressively.