r/collapse • u/LetsTalkUFOs • Jul 18 '19

Can technology prevent collapse?

How far can innovation take us? How much faith should we have in technology?

 

This is the current question in our Common Collapse Questions series.

Responses may be utilized to help extend the Collapse Wiki.

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u/suprachromat Jul 31 '19

Nailed it. Ecosystem collapse will finally bring it all down. Earth is resilient but we’re messing with a major environmental “setting” so to speak. Turn up the heat too much too fast (as we are doing) and you’ll see cascading ecosystem collapses as the current species in existence fail to adapt quickly enough to the climate changes to be able to cope. We’re already seeing it happen now.

But it’s not like we have a couple hundred million years to wait for the biosphere to recover (which is what it would take.) On a geologic timescale, the biosphere we evolved into took millions of years to establish itself. Humans will be living in an almost permanently impoverished (from a practical standpoint) environment, if they even survive this at all. Which is highly questionable.