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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: E who wrote (49860)8/7/1999 11:39:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte  Read Replies (2) of 108807
 
I worry that we will run into disaster one way or the other. If we avert global warming ... if we manage to save some rain forest ...if we master the next superepidemic ... there's always the one we missed waiting to bite us on our collective toches. There are enough of us Homo saps now, and in close enough contact, that a real disaster takes on global scope.

At least I live in a time where libraries, personal transport and readily available semisynthetic narcotics are unremarkable facets of daily life.
<edit> Fwiw I have deliberately painted a worst-case scenario. I think it likely that we will find a way out - part technical, part social. The global village will make the old habit of "monkey see, monkey do" impossible. No more toxic "whoopsies" in the Barents Sea. No more water hose gold mines.
Ideally we will get a grip on population - and stem the tide of land development. We will figure out how to make clean energy (I am still a big fan of nuclear fission - it'll come back, just wait and see, it's easier and no dirtier than fusion) and largely close the resource loop. maybe "arcologies" (huge closed cities with small supply and waste streams) will become practical.

And soon it'll be practical to leave this rock cheap. It'll require a propulsion technology as far ahead of a Shuttle as that was ahead of the John Bull steam engine ... I give it a hundred years. Some of us right here might live to see it.
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