As a species things do just keep getting better for us, except in periods of systemic transition.
I think that’s been generally true since the first agricultural revolution led to the emergence of civilization, 10,000 or so years ago. But, progress has not been linear, it’s been exponential, with most of the progress occurring in just the last few hundred years, since the industrial revolution. In that regard, the progress that we’ve experienced over the last few hundred years has been anomalous.
The way of life that we take for granted today is very different from how most of humanity has lived through the vast majority of history (and that was itself very different from how our species had lived through the vast majority of our existence, with humans living in small hunter-gatherer tribes for most of our time as a species).
Modern life has existed for only the blink of an eye, on evolutionary time scales. Yet, in that time we have used up an incredible amount of natural resources, and we have made significant, irreversible changes to the Earth’s biosphere and climate.
It took our species nearly all of the 10,000 years of civilization’s existence to go from a few million people on the planet to a billion, but it only took a little over two centuries to do from one billion people to over eight billion. That kind of exponential growth simply cannot be sustained indefinitely on a planet with finite resources. Even at maximum possible resource use efficiency, and even with the maximum possible environmental impact mitigation efforts, the Earth still wouldn’t be able to sustain our growth forever. We would reach some hard, physical limit to growth, eventually.
I think that’s been generally true since the first agricultural revolution led to the emergence of civilization, 10,000 or so years ago. But, progress has not been linear, it’s been exponential, with most of the progress occurring in just the last few hundred years, since the industrial revolution. In that regard, the progress that we’ve experienced over the last few hundred years has been anomalous.
The way of life that we take for granted today is very different from how most of humanity has lived through the vast majority of history (and that was itself very different from how our species had lived through the vast majority of our existence, with humans living in small hunter-gatherer tribes for most of our time as a species).
Modern life has existed for only the blink of an eye, on evolutionary time scales. Yet, in that time we have used up an incredible amount of natural resources, and we have made significant, irreversible changes to the Earth’s biosphere and climate.
It took our species nearly all of the 10,000 years of civilization’s existence to go from a few million people on the planet to a billion, but it only took a little over two centuries to do from one billion people to over eight billion. That kind of exponential growth simply cannot be sustained indefinitely on a planet with finite resources. Even at maximum possible resource use efficiency, and even with the maximum possible environmental impact mitigation efforts, the Earth still wouldn’t be able to sustain our growth forever. We would reach some hard, physical limit to growth, eventually.