Every artifact decays. Every quanta of decay is an opportunity to build. This will always be true.
Human artifacts were built to serve our way of life. Yet our way of life has heretofore been driven by a desire to dominate nature. Science has widened our view, now we know that a complex living biosphere is rare and precious, which implies we should attempt to live with a minimum of artifacts and minimum population, with the primary ambition of the remaining population to ensure the long-term survival of the biosphere, both on earth and beyond earth. I envision a garden planet with several major university cities, unobtrusively integrated with the natural world, and a Spacer community that is also colonization/research focused, but also tasked with protecting the Earth from stray objects.
This is a new "way of life" with new priorities, new beliefs, and new rules. It is no small task to get there from here. But I believe it can be done and moreover, even small steps in that direction would be greatly beneficial to us all, especially in the long-term.
Human artifacts were built to serve our way of life. Yet our way of life has heretofore been driven by a desire to dominate nature. Science has widened our view, now we know that a complex living biosphere is rare and precious, which implies we should attempt to live with a minimum of artifacts and minimum population, with the primary ambition of the remaining population to ensure the long-term survival of the biosphere, both on earth and beyond earth. I envision a garden planet with several major university cities, unobtrusively integrated with the natural world, and a Spacer community that is also colonization/research focused, but also tasked with protecting the Earth from stray objects.
This is a new "way of life" with new priorities, new beliefs, and new rules. It is no small task to get there from here. But I believe it can be done and moreover, even small steps in that direction would be greatly beneficial to us all, especially in the long-term.