The Planet will be Saved. But Let's Move Onto the Stars Anyway

Reading this weeks Economist article on hunter gatherers, "Noble or Savage" has shed more light on agriculture's impact on civilisation and the biosphere. And it seems to show that the development of agriculture has been just one inevitable reality from our crisis stricken evolution. You need to read the article to get the detail but here is the gist as I read it:

• We've continuously been creating ecological crises for 10's of thousands of years. The current climate crisis is just another iteration
• And we've been successfully resolving them too, when the limits on resources and our well being have forced us to
• Then each solution has presented yet another crises on the next evolutionary level
• Remarkably no crisis has remained unsolved to date, but there is always some fall out, for specific interest groups
• Given the current climate crisis, when we eventually adapt to a low carbon economy, there will be another crisis awaiting
• So why worry, we will deal with it

This talks well to the David Cox theory around carbon reduction measures that are doing nothing but help us "feel" like we are doing something. David Cox, an unorthodox view on tackling the climate. He believes we should stop fiddling with individuals, organisations and states virtual carbon accounts, immediately get on with engineering macro planetary scale measures to mitigate carbon and continue to enjoy our current lifestyles because it is fun. And most importantly that history shows that humanity never acts in the collective interest until the danger is clear and present.

Questions remain though, and big ones. What will the crisis to follow climate change be for starters. Longer but more miserable lives due to such close human proximity and intolerance? What else might be on the table.

And previously we have had the space, reserved, to expand into to cover the previous crises. The sustainable limit used to be the local environment, which once mastered, opened up more of the "reserved" planetary space, through technology or better management and control. This time we have just about reached the limits on the planets resources, in terms of population per km2 and how much pollution the biosphere can sink. Any additional gains we can squeeze from technology and politics might already be saturated.

But have we really saturated the planets scope for expansion and survival? That could be just a convenient popular or religious myth? How long can we go on expanding and what will the fall out be to this expansion as each new crisis evolves.

The most attractive question remaining to me is this. If we have truly run out of space and resource, perhaps the time will have finally come to start a real search for an extra terrestrial home... and then onto the next evolutionary level of crises at the astronomical level!

The limit used to be our local land resource, then the planet. Crises never stopped us before. Lets move on to the stars