“What about ambulances, fire trucks, and hospitals?”
“What about ambulances, fire trucks, and hospitals?”, some people ask. “Don’t they help us and require polluting?”
“Checkmate,” I can almost hear them thinking. “We can’t get rid of them, so we have to keep culture going as is.”
Meanwhile Hawaiians lived sustainably over centuries, long past when Malthusian collapse, if inevitable, would have happened.
Hawaiians lived on their own for centuries, longer than the time since the Enlightenment to today. They seem to have reached an optimal or at least stable, sustainable population. In a stable situation like theirs, life-extending technology would affect everyone. The longer I lived, the fewer births could happen without overshooting the islands’ ability to sustain life. When I died, a couple could have another child. If technology or innovation enabled more life to live on the islands sustainably, the overall population could temporarily more could have kids until reached new optimal. They couldn’t grow infinitely.
Some readers may have just gotten scared. “Uh oh,” they thought, “someone is talking about population. He must hate humanity and consider people vermin that the planet would be better off without. The only people who talk about population are eugenicists, racists, sexists, and neo-Nazis bent on ethnic cleansing and genocide. He wants to control population and the only way to do it is how China did with its One Child Policy, meaning forced abortions and sterilizations, or worse.” Sadly, people with such views are a big part of our environmental problems.
“Uh oh,” thought some others, “another fool who thinks people are the problem and doesn’t understand that even if people cause problems in the short term, in the long term, people solve more problems than they cause. More people means more solutions.” Even Julian Simon agrees the population can grow too fast, so even the most ardent Julian Simon acolyte has to agree there is too high a population for a given time.
In any case, by talking about life and death, I’m not trying to be morbid. I’m only acknowledging our mortality. Denying that we will die doesn’t improve life. Acknowledging our mortality allows us to act more thoughtfully and deliberately. Then we can live our lives to the fullest as individuals and as a culture.
Sustainability doesn’t promise you’ll live forever or to end suffering. No matter how much technology allows saving and extending life, at some point a doctor will tell you that nothing can save you or someone you love. I hope I’m not breaking the news to anyone, but we will all die. People we love will die. We will conflict with neighbors forever.
In the meantime, innovations like those that enable technologies that extend lives also enable technologies that short and sicken lives. You can’t get stents extending life without also doof shortening it. Technology isn’t good or bad. It augments the values and goals of the people and culture using it and accelerates existing outcomes, with rare exception.
The difference between business as usual and the path I promote is how we restore stewardship and return to sustainable. The way I am promoting in my work, which is to stop polluting and depleting, thereby making markets less coercive, which will allow entrepreneurs and innovators to solve what problems come up. This way avoids credible projections from people whose predictions have happened so far. These projections include people suffering and dying by the billions, leaving behind a world polluted far beyond ours today, maybe irradiated, almost certainly infused with plastic like the oceans are now infused with salt.
I imagine in such a polluted future, humans and much of complex life would suffer birth defects as normal for centuries, resulting from all the chemicals leeching from the plastic flooding the world. I don’t want that outcome. I prefer restoring sustainability immediately, resulting in
- Retaining democracy
- Creating more art instead of passively looking at others’ art
- Playing more sports
- More liberty and freedom
- More culture
- Increasing innovation, health, security, safety, and so on.
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