The Human population explosion may turn out not to be that bad.
The Perfect Storm
Global warming? – don't worry about it. Human technological ingenuity will fix that. If we can put a man on the moon, we can put mirrors in space to reflect the sun's rays. If we can Air Condition a Shopping Mall, we can Air Condition the Air – suck all that CO2 back out and put it back into the ground.
Our booming economy will drive the pace of technology development as well as the growth in wealth of everyone including the poorest people.
“Peak-Oil” – and the exhaustion of fossil fuels supplies – may not be that much of a problem either, as long as that human ingenuity delivers. May be we wont be reflecting the sun's rays away with mirrors in space, but focusing them down to earth as an energy source. Of course that would exacerbate global warming, but then we could really Air Condition the atmosphere, with heat pumps to push the excess heat out into space. There's nothing technologically wrong with that – all it needs is power to run the heat pumps, which just means collecting more solar rays.
We've got it made. A beautiful positive feedback mechanism in which wealth makes things better for everyone, even the poorest, and generates yet more wealth through an economic boom, which fuels technological advances that not only generate yet more wealth, but also provides the solutions to the problems we are creating. We can find more energy, not only to power the wealth boom, but to power the solutions to the problems created by using more energy. .... to infinity and beyond!
But the dark side of feedback mechanisms is that they work both ways.
What happens if we stumble? Let's suppose the unthinkable happens and the economic boom falters and, for inconceivable reason, the world economy falls into a 1930's like depression. Let's suppose it happens right now – just as we seem to have passed the world's “Peak Oil” production. The silver lining is that the the depression takes the pressure of oil demand. It also takes the eyes off global warming – and starts to eliminate the means to fix it – technologists are going to get laid off too; businesses aren't going to invest – particularly not it the most speculative areas. The beautiful positive feedback mechanisms start to look less beautiful when they work in the other direction.
But may be we will glide to a nice soft landing – like a plane guiding into the Hudson after it loses both engines.
The problem is that there's some feedback mechanisms that aren't going to go into reverse for a long time. The CO2 we have already dumped into the atmosphere is going to cause the temperature to rise for hundreds of years even if we stopped adding more right now. The babies who might have not be born if their parents were wealthier have already been born. We chose not to fix global warming or oil exhaustion problems when the economy was booming, and we might not be able to afford it in a depression. We chose not to fixed problems when they were foreseeable and fixable.
At least we fixed one problem. When the economy was booming we made sure that plenty of the new wealth ended up in the hands of the poorest people, and that those same people saw the benefits of modern medicine and received the best education, so that they would see a future that needed less children to be born. -- Oh no, we didn't do that either. We've had a boom in concentrating wealth into the hands of the richest and most powerful people.
So when there was plenty, the rich hoarded it for themselves. In a depression, the rich are going to use their power to protect their wealth – they are going to be even less likely to allow wealth to go to the poorest people. So there's goes the dream of a stabilized human population.
But never mind, all of these problems will get fixed. People will die. The universe has no use for humans. It will survive without them.