<sigh> This article, overall, makes great points but it fails to see what the issues are. Simply consider: "Our energy return on investment is decreasing and that trend is irreversible." Oh. So he thinks solar is the only renewable, but just the potential of modular nukes blows away that argument... Think about the folks in Amsterdam building modular thorium reactors. Yes, energy is one key, but it can be solved.
More to the point, he's asking about the survival of civilization so why not look at it as a what civilization is? Warning, I've spent decades writing about this in the context of ecology. Ecology is a species' life support system and we need to create a new "stable" ecology to replace the one we left when we started making the farms and cities of civilization. Civilization is that ecology and it can support from 20 to who knows how many times as many people as the hunter gatherer ecology could. It has to be created though, as it doesn't exist in nature. So how can a civilization be built an maintained? Taking an ecological view of how humans can genetically and strategically adapt to this new ecology can be very revealing about civilization. The key to all ecologies are Energetics and Reproduction so the author is correct about the importance of energy and technological innovation but he... and most observers of this topic, seem to forget that what it is about isn't simply progress, it is about survival. So how much and what progress is needed for long-term survival? Now the question becomes about strategy because as the author correctly states "we're the most adaptaptable species on earth". Muddling through is part of it. The battle for civilization is not a war to be won but the daily battles of all good men and women to fight the fall of darkness. That is pretty powerful but he's also right that we don't think in the long-term and that is the key requirement. We let chance and nature decide human destiny. We do need a long term strategy. So how can we get humans to mature enough to take their own destiny in hand as they must? Well, from my decades of study, the answer is surprising. You can't do it directly. Again, as he said, we largely don't have the thought processes for long-term thinking. but there is another route and we must take it.. for reasons I've never really seen anyone consider. Scoff at that silly statement, but we must at least walk that path and it's not even that hard which is also a requirement. It also has to be ethical and economic. It's a gene thing. To make it short, we have to adapt both genetically and strategically adapt to civilization and to support it but there is a time bomb built into our genes. What we call human progress has been the removal of natural selection. No species can survive without natural selection to remove the genes that break every generation. They are now called "de novo" mutations, Latin for fresh, but they aren't fresh. They are broken and they occur every generation. Medicine, smaller families and other things have reduced natural selection at the same time that older parents have increased the mutation rate. It is not sustainable. We will develop a genetic load that will destroy the civilization until we go back to some social form where natural selection operates. It will be a brutal time as natural selection is, where we have short lives, starvation, disease, warfare and all kinds of annoying things killing us but keeping our genes healthy. The alternative is to husband our genes. I wrote "Genetics For A New Human Ecology" to describe the problem and how to ethically and economically solve it. (Cheap... at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1544900996) Now the book offers incredible value in so many terms including monetary, philosophically and as a key requirement to preserving civilization, but the best part might be that if we make the fairly simple and valuable decision to control our genetic destiny, we might then come to make the harder and more complicated decision to husband our strategic destiny, to think in the long-term. I gave up trying to convince people to think in the long term, short term profits just seem to be how we think, so I've pinned my hopes for the future of humans on us first guiding our genetic destiny, then later our strategic destiny. There is an older version of it that can give you the idea of it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjVieFKevMk
I'll bet that it is something you never ever considered and it lays out a pretty complete path. Enjoy, M
