NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

[Scootaloo]

29. "They got us to the moon!"

Yeah, and? Overcoming earth's gravitational pull and using trigonometry to land on our sattelite is certainly challenging, but it's an entirely different ballpark from what we're looking at with regards to the intricacies of human impact on the planet's overal ecology and hte ramifications that may have on what we consider "civilization."

Do remember that much of the world dwells in conditions you and i probably wouldn't consider to be very "civilized" (not a value judgement on the people, just a note of the technological and resource disparity between societies.) Most, simply because of flukes of economics or politics. The wrong guy(s) in office can send an entire nation into a civilizational death-spiral. The wrong people having economic influence can have the same effect. "Civilization" is a fragile thing supported by a very intricate network of interconnected things, where hte failure of one can threaten the entire network and send civilization into freefall.

And at the end of the day, every society is 100% dependent on the environment. We can't escape that, ever. There is no Asimovian magic pill to free us from the demands of earth or the biology thereof. We're plugged in, for good. Even if in some wild future we leave, we'll still be carrying earth-bubbles with us the whole way.