Humanity isn’t failing because we’re dishonorable, we’re failing because we based our entire energy system on combustion, the exhaust of which turns out to trap heat. A few people in the 19th century understood this but they weren’t able to persuade enough people nor propose a suitable alternative.
That exponential graph I showed you up above doesn’t only apply to population, it applies to everything, including literacy, and intelligence. You and your [possibly rhetorical] children exist at the end stages of a knowledge explosion. That explosion may ultimately have horrible consequences, but it’s certainly the only truly interesting thing that’s ever happened on Earth. For the simple reason that only the beneficiaries of that knowledge explosion could even become aware of the history of Earth. For most of human existence, humans were similar to animals, in that they had no coherent concept of the past or the future.
Bonobos are probably happy but that doesn’t make them interesting. People who expect civilization to make them happy are going to be disappointed, as that’s not its function. Its function is to concentrate knowledge and power, so that we can have a clearer understanding of reality.
The scientific enterprise starts from the assumptions that reality is counterintuitive, commonsense is almost always wrong, and your senses are lying to you. In order to gain an accurate understanding of the universe, your senses have to be enhanced with artificial tools, and that is exactly why science coevolved with technology.
All life increases the entropy of its environment, but intelligence does so dramatically. Any intelligent species would tend to feel omnipotent and omniscient, because in comparison to every other organism on the planet, it is. Any intelligent species would tend to become intoxicated by its own power, experience irrational exuberance, and throw itself a wild party, burning all of its resources in the process.
An intelligent species would have a hard time reconciling itself to limits, because in the early stages of its expansion it would encounter no meaningful limits that couldn’t be overcome by ingenuity. There would be a delay (hysteresis) between the “wild party” and the intractable long-term consequences for the biosphere. By the time the species becomes aware that serious limits exist and are existential threats, much of the damage is already done and irreversible except on very long time scales.
More precisely: it was always a choice between either surviving somewhat longer on Earth, or escaping Earth. Earth only has about a billion years left, before it’s destroyed by the sun, and towards the end of that period it will be uninhabitable except possibly by bacteria. So there was always an upper limit to how long we were going to survive. But we were likely to be undone much sooner than that by the consequences of our intelligence explosion. Paradoxically it’s that same intelligence explosion that could allow us to escape from Earth. Which means we’re playing a very high stakes game. The odds of us escaping from Earth and spreading throughout the universe are extremely low, but it’s also the only path that’s likely to lead to us being a truly long-lived species (surviving for millions or billions of years).
In science, the word “never” has a very special meaning. I would put it differently and say that the probability of us escaping Earth is very low, and conversely, the probability of collapse of civilization is exceedingly high.
