No technology has ever had this effect. There is a culture of extraction and reductionism. That is the real problem at the moment. With great improvements in efficiency comes enormous potential to expand. We are actually on the cusp of potentially accessing the resources of a near Earth m-type astroid. While it is not a major media talking point, this will change everything about civilization and is the catalyst for the first near Earth and cislunar colonies. A single gravitationally differentiated planetesimal core fragment, known as an m-type astroid can easily contain more rare mineral resource wealth than all that humans have accessed in the Holocene. The only reason humans have not built O’Neill cylinders yet is because of wealth and infrastructure. That is the long term future of humans once we shed the idiotic shackles of mythology and inbred conservatism.

The West is shackled by inherited wealth. Business acumen is not hereditary. All systems without meritocratic hierarchy stagnate and fail. Asia is poised to take the future, on the current trajectory, as it has better meritocratic checks and balances to protect against the cancer of conservative stagnation, cronyism, and the exploitation that the incompetent always turn to as the only reliable form of investment.

You have no land to farm, and lack the skills, like we all do. The population is much too large for the systems and infrastructure, but this kind of stupidity leads to most people dying a terrible death. I despise any monster pushing such stupidity. The Earth is more than capable of sustaining much larger populations for tens of thousands of years before the accessible resources are depleted and space colonies become the only solution. That requires us to access the final age of technology – mastery of biology as a fully understood engineering field. We are still a couple of centuries away from that achievement. The Armageddon nihilism is pure psychosis. Once there are real space colonies, there must be a shift to sustainable self regulating technology. That will become biological systems management. Such a system has a much different set of constraints that do not allow anonymous exploitation of global resources like an atmosphere. Heat dissipation is the primary constraint. All of this requires expansion of infrastructure and growth of economic wealth to remain relevant. Asia is investing in that future while elsewhere conservativism is cashing out the future with reductionism. The future is held by those that are given value and reinvest it. Time and efficiency are a gift of wealth. Those that extract that wealth, extract their future relevance. It is little worse than those that cut off their own lifeline in old age from a similar spurious mass social psychosis.