I read a Canticle for Leibowitz many times while growing up and growing older. I found the imagery profound. I guess we'll stay afloat until we sink, but we humans have muddled through the last 100,000 or so years and I think we will muddle through the next 100,000 or so.
Yes - though it is telling that Bacon's Novum Organum took just under 400 years to discover a way for humans to rob from the future to pay the present on a global scale (electric-powered manufacturing, which I vaguely intuit as being the actual cause of the Great Depression), ensuring the eventual crash of civilization even without the help of climate change (eh) or nukes. After a 100 years of such theft, the future does not have enough resources, especially ecosphere resilience capacity (it would probably take more energy just to achieve 1% replenishment than all the energy we've already used to date), to sustain a non-Leibowitzian resting point as far as I can see. If so, "muddle" will be the word, indeed.
I read a Canticle for Leibowitz many times while growing up and growing older. I found the imagery profound. I guess we'll stay afloat until we sink, but we humans have muddled through the last 100,000 or so years and I think we will muddle through the next 100,000 or so.
Yes - though it is telling that Bacon's Novum Organum took just under 400 years to discover a way for humans to rob from the future to pay the present on a global scale (electric-powered manufacturing, which I vaguely intuit as being the actual cause of the Great Depression), ensuring the eventual crash of civilization even without the help of climate change (eh) or nukes. After a 100 years of such theft, the future does not have enough resources, especially ecosphere resilience capacity (it would probably take more energy just to achieve 1% replenishment than all the energy we've already used to date), to sustain a non-Leibowitzian resting point as far as I can see. If so, "muddle" will be the word, indeed.