Have you ever played the factory building game "Factorio"?
It's an amazing lesson in scale. In the early game, it's pretty easy to recover from supply chain issues and refactor your setup to adjust to your growth needs and expansion across the land. Once you reach mid to late game, and something goes wrong, your whole factory starts to grind to halt as you try to diagnose where in the whole system things have clogged up, you need to measure and monitor throughput to make sure you are producing the materials needed for consumption by other machines at a rate that is sustainable. Refactoring at this point really means shutting most of it down and building from the ground up again.
Kind of like humanity 100s & 1000s of years ago. Most of life was localized, food, raw materials. We were not over fishing the seas or pushing the soils to the limit. The scale of humanity now, is such that all the supply chains, food and resource requirements depend on such a plethora of things running as they have been, uninterrupted (gas, food, water supplies, raw materials, spare parts).
That is why this argument about "climate disasters in the past" really never made sense to me. This is an entirely different game.
And yes, "humanity" may survive. But just like the factory that stops working that needs to be largely deconstructed and re-built, a lot of people will be unnecessarily plunged into hardship, famine and probably death. Economies and societies will be affected in ways we really can't imagine.
The question then is, what will humanity and society look like after? And what will our successors and future generations think of their ancestors who had the time, knowledge and the technology to ease or circumvent their suffering.
It's an amazing lesson in scale. In the early game, it's pretty easy to recover from supply chain issues and refactor your setup to adjust to your growth needs and expansion across the land. Once you reach mid to late game, and something goes wrong, your whole factory starts to grind to halt as you try to diagnose where in the whole system things have clogged up, you need to measure and monitor throughput to make sure you are producing the materials needed for consumption by other machines at a rate that is sustainable. Refactoring at this point really means shutting most of it down and building from the ground up again.
Kind of like humanity 100s & 1000s of years ago. Most of life was localized, food, raw materials. We were not over fishing the seas or pushing the soils to the limit. The scale of humanity now, is such that all the supply chains, food and resource requirements depend on such a plethora of things running as they have been, uninterrupted (gas, food, water supplies, raw materials, spare parts).
That is why this argument about "climate disasters in the past" really never made sense to me. This is an entirely different game.
And yes, "humanity" may survive. But just like the factory that stops working that needs to be largely deconstructed and re-built, a lot of people will be unnecessarily plunged into hardship, famine and probably death. Economies and societies will be affected in ways we really can't imagine.
The question then is, what will humanity and society look like after? And what will our successors and future generations think of their ancestors who had the time, knowledge and the technology to ease or circumvent their suffering.