Milky Way Galaxy, Planet Earth, Year 2020 from the birth of Human Civilization's Messiah Gesus Christ. An influenza pandemic is puzzling the scientific community and damaging the planetary economics. Mankind is facing one of its several challenges after the birth of human civiliazion 12000 years earlier.
Just few months earlier of this pandemic, as usual, the politics were discussing about the necessity and opportunity of further global GDP growth, without which the most advanced countries would be facing a dangerous decline. They were not considering the depletion of planet Earth resources and the planetary pollution doom as a consequence of infinite growth expectations.
In the meantime, the antagonists of infinite growth were arguing that the only solution of such a resource exhaustion was a kind of "controlled degrowth" to a poorer and simpler life style in which resources consumpion would have been sustainable on the whole planet. Recyling, resilience, renewable resource were among the most important concepts. But they were not considering the fact that there were more than 7 billion inhabitants on Earth yet, and they were all people to feed, somehow. All that people would never have been capable of growing efficiently their own food in some contry house, without any diesel powered machine.
Moreover
such a deindustrialized society would lead to the decline of scientific
knowledge and manufacturing infrastructures. So none of the approaches
could perform a consistent reorganization of society and industry. The
only solution could be to... find another America, maybe. They did not
consider tha the planet is finite, and on the other hand a peasants'
"sustainable" society simply makes no sense. Seven billion people means
millions of intensive farmings, millions of square miles for growing
wheat intensively by means of tractors, pesticides, chemical fertilizers
and so on. That means also non reversible depletion of minerals such as
potash for fertilizers, or aluminium for food preservation. Seriously.
In short, we have nothing to lose, so why not considering the expansion in the solar system? That's only a matter of technologic limit, and physics allow it, as I will explain in a future post. That's an idea quite close to the utopia of infinite growth, but such an utopia states that economics must grow "by design"; how to do that in a finite world is a mystery. However, if look uip and expand in our solar system, then growth should become a mere consequence.
Se let's work on it.
