
All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth - BerislavLopac
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/15/all-rise-and-no-fall-how-civilization-reinforces-a-dangerous-myth/#more-525079
======
glenstein
I think there's a weird tendency in modern internet culture to take long-
established things and decry them as myths, where the whole debunking consists
of bad faith engagement with a straw man argument not attributed to anybody.
And sometimes even the debunking itself is just a more nuanced restatement of
the idea supposedly being debunked, offering to substitute it for the
'simplistic' view that someone, somewhere, supposedly believes.

And I don't think the thesis put forward by the Civilization franchise is
necessarily wrong, however dreary. As with anything, it depends on the level
at which you engage with it, and how much good faith you apply and which
things you choose to emphasize or not emphasize. Economic strength and
accumulation of resources and sheer population do have a lot to do with who
dominates. But maybe it takes other stuff, too. Maybe playing a game doesn't
mean you're ignoring it, and "correcting" the thesis of the game doesn't mean
we're due for an overthrow of a grand cultural dogma.

~~~
Avshalom
>Economic strength and accumulation of resources and sheer population do have
a lot to do with who dominates. But maybe it takes other stuff, too.

That may be but it's got nothing to do with the article which is talking about
Civilization--and games in general-- presenting monotonic, consequence free
growth as the only state of being until the "A Winner Is You" screen (the
dangerous myth)

Which as a side effect leads to grind-y end games where you have dominated
everyone but still need to put in another hour of grind to actually finish
them off or otherwise end the game (the bad game design).

~~~
glenstein
Huh? The stuff I'm talking about might as well as have been a verbatim quote
from the article itself.

>Through the Civilization lens, raw economic strength is success. Population
is power.

What's the difference between that and my statement, "Economic strength and
accumulation of resources and sheer population do have a lot to do with who
dominates." ?

~~~
Avshalom
nothing, but that sentence is not the topic of the article.

~~~
glenstein
As I read it the article has two parallel points.

One is that the game Civilization advances a supposedly dangerous narrative
about the myth of progress. Another is that, in gameplay terms, this infinite
expansion and growth leads to a grindy end game.

You seem to be saying that the latter is the real point, and that by
addressing the former I'm missing the point. I think the former is the more
important point and I feel like I did a reasonably good job of being
responsive to it, and I feel that cryptic comments telling me I'm missing the
point are unfairly dismissive.

~~~
Avshalom
You wabbled about click bait and then took issue with how dominance is
achieved, meanwhile literally every other sentence in the article is about
perpetual growth, how perpetual growth a dangerous myth, how other games deal
with it or how it's bad game design.

You didn't address the myth of progress at all, which regardless of it's
merits from a grand historical point of view certainly doesn't apply to
individual nations which rise and fall all the time. You certainly didn't
present any arguments against the idea that unthinking growth sometimes
actually has consequences which Civilization games have actively been
removing.

All you said economic power and resource accumulation probably leads to
dominance. But it's not dominance the article takes issue with, it's that
dominance is represented only by growth which is why one sentence after your
quote: "Only growth matters"

~~~
thaumasiotes
Civilization does not actually portray inevitable perpetual growth. It's quite
possible for your advanced civilization to be conquered by barbarians (actual
barbarians or a less-advanced civilization; it doesn't really matter which),
and when that happens, technology is lost.

As a matter of practice, this doesn't happen much because it isn't fun, but
it's well within the game's view of what can theoretically occur.

------
bastawhiz
The points are valid but let's step back and remember that this is a game.
When someone plays Call of Duty, there is a suspension of disbelief that
allows the player to ignore the horrors of war (and zombie nazis and whatever
else they're doing these days). When I play Civ, I suspend my disbelief when
Ghandi tells me that nukes are the way of the future in 200BC and Teddy
Roosevelt declares war on Cleopatra.

Civ is not a perfect reflection of history, society, or civilization, let
alone an idealistic society or civilization. And in truth, that's what makes
it fun. Pinning the fate of our "IRL" civilization on a game because it
perpetuates the myth of perpetual growth is a bit ridiculous. The perils of
capitalism are not going to be defeated by changing the mechanics of a Sid
Meyers game.

If we want to talk about the harm video games bring about, let's talk about
loot crates and microtransactions in F2P games.

~~~
Brakenshire
There's nothing special about a game compared to any other form of media, or
any form of fictional storytelling which make them immune to having an
influence. You have to suspend disbelief in any novel, nevertheless no matter
how outlandish the material it always communicates some ideas about the way
the world works. I'm actually really looking forward to people giving up on
the implicit idea that video games are just fancies or toys, because it's at
that point that video games which set out to communicate interesting or
unsettling ideas or perspectives will become mainstream.

~~~
bastawhiz
Are you saying it's irresponsible, then, to publish a novel whose plot
revolves around the success of perpetual growth (or success of a civilization
embracing perpetual growth)? Influential or not, we shouldn't censor media
that we find enjoyable because its real world counterpart is destructive.

~~~
smadge
Critizing a creative work is not censorship. Using the authority of the state
to repress a creative work is censorship. I am free to, and in some sense
ethically obligated to criticize the ideological implications of creative
work.

~~~
humanrebar
You can use other kinds of authority and power to censor. "No platform" is a
form of mob censorship.

Though I agree that critical analysis and censorship are two different things.

~~~
bitumen
People have a right to free expression, they don’t have a right to have thst
expression amplified by third parties. I’ve noticed that when an emotive word
is overused, often with a new word in front of it, it’s bullshit. “Mob
censorship” “white genocide” and so on for some glaring examples, might as
well have the first words replaced by “Not really.”

Co-opting words with strong emotional valence for the sake of an appeal to
emotion is petty, and speaks to the weakness of the underlying argument.

~~~
humanrebar
Most dictionaries have a broader definition. Here's the ACLU:

> Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive,"
> happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or
> moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as
> well as private pressure groups.

[https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship](https://www.aclu.org/other/what-
censorship)

------
angarg12
That design feature is very deliberate.

I remember listening to a talk from Sid Meier and at some point he explains
how they tried to implement a rise-and-fall system in the original Civ. It
didn't go very well. Playtesters hated it.

When the first fall came, people just quit and start again, thinking that they
did something wrong. When they were told it was intended and they had to fall
to rise again, they just didn't like it at all.

I can see a niche for a hardcore strategy game where rise and fall is part of
the game loop, but given the current estate of affairs it would be just that,
a niche game.

~~~
Nomentatus
And just this phenomenon, of pandering to customers' desires, and giving them
the fake news they want, is where we get the pejorative word "stereotype."
Stereotypes were 19th century 3-D photographs. At first, these showed
realistic foreign scenes but it soon became apparent that the audience wanted
to see (and would only pay for) truly exotic costumes on those foreigners, and
exotic customs, whether this had much to do with reality or not.

~~~
ctchocula
Remind me of a quote from Alan Moore:

"Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as
people who manipulated magic.

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be
sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and
writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative
forces that can change a human being, that can change a society. They are seen
as simple entertainment—things with which we can fill twenty minutes, half an
hour, while we’re waiting to die.

It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience want. If
the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience; they
would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they
need."

-The Mindscape of Alan Moore

~~~
pas
> If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience;
> they would be the artists.

Games know what they want. They complain very loudly, when they get something
different than what they wanted/expected.

Of course game developers and publishers again want slightly (or completely,
I'm looking at you Electronic Arts) things. Developers want that artistic
meaning, publishers want a lot of safe money, while gamers want to enjoy the
game, they want the flow [0], the feeling of conquering a hard but not
impossible challenge.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\))

------
pavlov
This article is an interesting pair to Jimmy Maher's "The Game of Everything,
Part 2: Playing Civilization" [1] published just two days ago.

He makes the same point that the original Civilization was designed around the
assumption of a relentless march of growth and progress that will ultimately
benefit all mankind. This is encoded in the game's winning conditions: "You
win a game of Civilization in either of two ways: by eliminating all rival
civilizations or by surviving until the colonization of space begins."

 _" Bruce Shelley, who authored the manual, is thus explicitly discouraging
the player from approaching Civilization as a zero-sum game: you win simply
'by being in existence when colonists reach Alpha Centauri.' This doesn’t mean
that all or most players played under that assumption — a topic I’ll return to
momentarily — but it’s nevertheless kind of an amazing statement to find in a
game like this one, implying as it does that civilization writ large truly is
a global, cooperative project. There’s an idealism lurking within
Civilization, this game that plays not just with economics and war but with
the grandest achievements of humanity, that’s missing in the likes of Master
of Orion. It’s notable that, while the history of gaming is littered with
hundreds of galaxy-spanning 4X space operas, vanishingly few games beyond
Civilization‘s own sequels have attempted to replicate its model of grand
strategy."_

[1] [https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-
part-2...](https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-
part-2-playing-civilization/)

~~~
thaumasiotes
> "You win a game of Civilization in either of two ways: by eliminating all
> rival civilizations or by surviving until the colonization of space begins."

This isn't accurate at all. To win by colonizing space, it has to be you who
colonizes space. If all you do is survive until somebody else does it, you
lose.

~~~
pavlov
The Civilization designers say it’s a win even if you’re not the one who sent
the ship.

The text you quoted is from the original game’s manual.

------
twright
In the expansions of Civ 3 (or 4?) in the late game you can lose tiles to
effects of climate change and desertification. Though it was never a huge
issue for my cities, a little production lost here, a little food there. I'm
wondering why they took that out and what other set-backs they can add to Civ
to prevent this perpetual growth gameplay. The article touches on the
challenges of this, that with these balances the game still has to be fun. Civ
5 balanced (some might say over-balanced) perpetual expansion of civilizations
by making new cities a pretty heavy resource sink until they were of a certain
size. I'm not as big of a fan of that iteration because of that mechanic.

~~~
nafey
AFAIK it might have felt like unfairly penalties to the player. Sid Meier has
discussed in an old interview the prototyping rise and fall of civilizations
in the game. He concluded that it was not fun for someone to see the civ they
built over the course of hours being taken from them.

~~~
glenstein
I agree. As a person who has not played Stellaris but is aware of its
excellent reputation, I got to the part of the article where it said Stellaris
breaks up it's late game bloat, and was expecting the second half of that
sentence to be very different. I thought it would be something about
abstracting away the tedious low level details, and shifting toward
supermassive macro scale problems, maybe going up a higher level like Spore,
but in some salient strategic sense that fits the feel of Stellaris. I was
disappointed to learn but the actual solution was just random punishments.

~~~
breischl
It's not really random punishment, it's challenges. eg, if you use certain
dangerous technologies extensively (eg, strong AI, subspace drives) then a
strong late-game enemy may appear at an unpredictable time (eg, rampaging AI
bent on killing all races, rampaging fleets from another dimension).

I think this actually works well for Stellaris, because of the vassalization
dynamics. In most 4X games, if you get defeated then you're dead and may as
well quit. In Stellaris you can get defeated, become a vassal of another
nation, and later break out to defeat your former masters. Having a powerful
late-game enemy appear makes that sort of shakeup much more likely, as the
smaller/vassalized empires may be able to pick off systems from the more
powerful, but weakened or distracted, empires.

------
fallingfrog
I think many commenters are missing the most important bit of this article.
The author says, "There is a historical context for this modern myth of
perpetual growth. It emerged from the Industrial Revolution ... Many of us act
as if we believe this will continue forever, even to the stars themselves."
The implication is that such growth _won 't_ continue forever, and we _won 't_
reach the stars. It's a sentiment that I happen to agree with, but the author
takes it as something of a given, and spends the article talking about how
these games reinforce false assumptions, assumptions which many people don't
even think about. That's the real point here.

------
cjonas
As a civ player I would love to the the mechanics mentions where you could
overfish, overfarm, etc and mines and other production improvements had
negative impacts on through pollution & other risks (eg offshore oil platform
spills, etc). There could be techs & policies to mitagate these issues, but
investing/adopting in them would be a trade-off on production & wealth.

~~~
cuckcuckspruce
I remember in the first Civ that there was a notion of pollution that started
kicking in once you had built factories. The only way to clean it up was to
dedicated Settler units to go around and clean it up.

~~~
masklinn
Nuclear clouds were also a giant pain in the ass IIRC, could they even be
cleaned?

Convenient way to strangle enemies though, nuke their cities and they have a
very hard time rising back up because they can't produce.

~~~
isostatic
Civ5 had fallout, but while factories require coal, they don't produce any
pollution.

Even Civ 1 had global warming.

------
Paul-ish
There's a game called Banished that has cycles to it unless you are careful.
The economic model is complicated enough such that if some event hurts your
ore miners, then your ore output drops, when your ore output drops then your
blacksmiths farming tool output drops, when the farming tool output drops your
food output drops. When your food output drops, your food stores drop your
people start starving. It can cause a population of hundreds or thousands to
drop to a few dozen. But all the infrastructure you built for your large city
becomes a burden at that scale, and it take longer to grow to your old size
than it did the first time.

What I found fascinating is after playing for a bit you can start to see these
cascades start early and try to stop them and still fail. All you can do is
try to efficiently route resources as you watch your entire city fall into
decline.

~~~
conorcleary
I'm very impressed by that game and was hoping you'd have more of a positive
endgame note ;)

~~~
Paul-ish
I admit, my experience may reflect my skill more than the game.

------
MichaelMoser123
Collapse of civilization is always pictured as something dreadful, that might
not always be universally true, for it also brings change: the slaves of Rome
were finally free, the collapse of the Soviet Union also brought freedom (that
was really good for those who could take advantage of it), the non German
subjects of the third Reich were very happy when that one came down! Somehow
the big narrative that is embedded in the civ games is missing these details
completely.

Also collapse of a state does not mean that civilization is gone completely.
Maybe exploring collapse may be fun too. (At least it would teach an agility
that could come quite handy for an individual). However building such a game
would be really hard, as it would go against the patterns of historical
discourse, there is probably less data to build on.

On the other hand we had a lot of instances during the past century when the
established order of things did come to a crashing halt...

~~~
astrodust
When Europe "collapsed" because of the plague the rest of the world didn't
really notice.

Today things are more inter-connected so it could domino in ways it never
could before.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
The world took notice in the long run.

The survivors of the plague had it good though, salaries were up and the
institution of serfdom was finished in western Europe, the stage was set for
rapid modernization.

Also westerners got some level of immunity to these germs so that people in
far off places would just die off when they came around.

~~~
astrodust
The Plague was never really a problem outside of Europe because it required
particular conditions. Other diseases did spread, but those didn't have the
same apocalyptic effect on society.

When smallpox and other diseases rampaged across the New World the rest of the
world didn't notice. It was geographically and demographically contained.

That's not the case now where things like SARS can go world-wide in a matter
of weeks.

A failing society could cause considerably more damage today than at any other
time in history.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
No problem outside Europe? Asia is outside of Europe. Now the plague caused
the decline of the Mongol empire - the first trans continental, almost global
trading network, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica)

~~~
astrodust
Maybe it was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back but it doesn't
seem to be the deciding factor in that decline.

Like the Roman empire before, the fractured bits of the Mongol empire survived
for hundreds of years after.

------
SubiculumCode
In these types of games, when an empire becomes large, all the minutiae
decisions very relevant in the early game become tedious exercises. It seems
then that in 4X games, the game could evolve in response to the change your
empire's complexity, including new UI, new strategic considerations, and even
removal of features from the earlier stages of the 4X game. Individual units
might be glommed together into a larger superunits. The map might change to a
larger field of view..move from warfare to economic rivalries. The point I am
making is that the tedium of late levels versus the intense fun of the
beginning, is partly because the game stays the same. Change the game, and
that expansionist fun can be highlighted again.

------
GuB-42
It is a game FFS. It is designed to maximize enjoyment, realism is way down
the list, and it is obvious to any reasonable player. It would be a "dangerous
myth" if state leaders started using Civilization as a model, but thankfully,
it is not the case.

And the way the rise and fall mechanism is implemented in practice is simply
by ending the game. Once you've won (or lost) you are back to the stone age on
a different map.

~~~
thirdsun
> It is a game FFS. It is designed to maximize enjoyment, realism is way down
> the list...

I see this argument often, but it always fails to consider that some players,
including me, get enjoyment from realism, simulation and faithful
representation of a matter/topic/process.

~~~
GuB-42
There is a niche for players who want realism above all.

Sometimes there is a studio that fills the niche, sometimes not. And while the
team is usually very passionate, they simply don't have the resources to match
to polish of AAA titles. I don't know what the state of the art is for 4X
games. You can probably find realistic wargames though.

------
nitwit005
Civ 3 had pollution, and managing it created a number of complaints:
[https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/an-option-to-turn-
off...](https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/an-option-to-turn-off-the-
pollution.57841/)

Civ 4 had global warming, and it annoyed people enough they hacked the game to
get rid of it: [https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/global-
warming.145922...](https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/global-
warming.145922/)

People already complain the games are too complex. If you add a bunch of knobs
for various forms of pollution and exploration, you'd just get thousands of
requests to turn it all off.

------
dwighttk
Maybe they should try upping the difficulty level.

I usually play at Prince or lower because my civilization does much falling at
higher levels.

~~~
Applejinx
Cities:Skylines does a relevant thing with traffic. Because the granularity of
all activity plays out as individual vehicles and pedestrians going from place
to place, as you scale up you run into bottlenecks and traffic issues that
affect lots of things in the game.

Some of it's simply dumb AI bugs, but some is a legitimate requirement for
designing road flow (which you can do around the bugs as well if you know
they're there). A comparable thing could be done with Civilization-type games
if you had something that worked at a low enough level of granularity. Rather
than 'because you did this, enjoy 20% more productivity', implement it as
something where it depends on underlying factors following a good design.

~~~
SiempreViernes
To me C:S is another example of how every town you make has to be an american
town: its all about how you place the roads.

The original game doesn't have any way to build something away from a road,
even if its something like a park or a statue, and certainly you can't make an
area with just pedestrian access. Good luck making a medieval city centre, or
collage town.

------
golemotron
"Rise and Fall, the first major expansion for Civ VI, makes bold moves to
enliven the endgame, like introducing Dark Ages and “city loyalty” , which
makes your cities more liable to defect but also gives you a chance of
phoenix-like rebirth into a Heroic Age. The intent is to inject that early
game dynamism into established empires, encouraging them to, well, rise and
fall."

It's all biology. Empires grow and decline and die like animals. The leave
offpsring.

There is perpetual growth but it happens in a cycle. No empire "wins", it
breaks down and the pieces then grow and compete.

~~~
jschwartzi
And the memories continue to accumulate until we have no more need of
progress.

------
Nomentatus
Civ II solved the 4x end game grind in an odd way, contrary to this quote from
the article:

"That means that sooner or later, in every Civ game, you’ll reach a point
where the challenge is gone but there’s still a long grind before you reach
the point at which you have enough capital cities, culture points, rocket
launches or religious conversions to win the game."

It solved it with tubeworlds. You were allowed, in Civ II to build, say, 24 x
160 worlds, and that made all the difference. Games were exciting all the way
through as you raced to deal with the Civilizations next to you and fight
toward the ends. No matter what, when you came up against your last one or two
computer opponents, they were advanced civilizations that weren't boring to
fight even though you were already close to a win. Very sadly, this was
dropped from subsequent games, in which you could only generate rather square
maps. I have absolutely no idea why. A great loss. I don't play Civ now.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
One game not mentioned in the article and that managed to keep the late game
pretty damn exciting was Medieval: Total War II [1].

There's many ways in which the game shakes things up in the late game. One
aspect of it is squalor, a metric that rises as your cities grow and advance
in technology. High squalor increases unrest. There is very little you can do
to reduce it- it will just keep rising over time, as your population grows.
And even with careful management the cities at the edges of your empire (where
the population tends to have cultural differences to the center) are always at
high risk of a revolt, that kicks your army out of the city and replaces it
with a rebel force. A hack around that is to artificially cause the city to
revolt in an opportune time (when you have a good army to take on the rebels),
take it back and slaughter the population, bringing it back down to a
manageable size. Still, large cities will always eventually get to a point
where they just suck for everyone involved.

The other thing that shakes the late game up is the Mongol invasion. Actually-
two of them. First you get the regular Mongols that are the hardest thing
that's hit you until then, by a wide margin. Don't worry- they don't want your
cities; they just want to pillage them, raze them and move on to the next.
Once you 've dealt with them and a few decades have passed, the Temurids come
on, who are like your worst nightmare married to its own worst nightmare, but
trailing elephants with cannons strapped on their backs. You know you're in
trouble because their banner is black and red. That spells "evil" even in a
real history-based gaming world.

Then of course there's more stuff that happens in the late game- somebody
discovers a New World and a whole new map is added to the game. Things like
that. It's very hard with the game to end with total domination. If nothing
else, I've abandoned most games because I got bored of the constant strife,
that got a little too repetitive after a long enough time, to be honest.

The point is- there was no constant march of progress in this game. You really
got the feeling that the world hated your guts, as things went on and the more
you played, the more it hated you. Such fun :)

_________________

[1] I played this game primarily as a 4x game, for the city management and the
map expansion - I know that's not how it's meant to be played and that the
focus was on the realistic battles, but MTWII had probably the best balanced
campaign map than any Total War game and playing it this way was way more
satisfying than many 4x games I've tried, including various Civs that didn't
even come close, to be honest.

~~~
manfredo
I also liked Shogun 2's realm divide mechanic. Right around when you take over
~1/4 to 1/3 of the map, the Shogun declares your clan an enemy of the state
and the rest of Japan declares war on you after a few turns. It forces the
player to bide their time, build up their forces, and think carefully how
they'll plan their late game.

------
smsm42
"Computer games are unrealistic". Sure they are, thanks about informing us
about it. That's the whole point. In real life, you are not Emperor Of Earth,
you do not control economies or vast armies, and if you try to pull any of
video-game shenanigans, you'd die a horrible death. The whole point of playing
is to escape - in your imagination - into a world where it's not true. I can't
believe people can be dense enough to not realize it. So what's the point in
such articles?

------
MistahKoala
Are there any games reviewers out there who actually enjoy the play aspect of
games without any hand-wringing?

------
Zigurd
Civilization was created as a fun computer mediated version of tabletop
strategy games where commerce and technological innovation was so hard to
simulate it was even more superficial. Decrying them for not being didactic
about unsustainable development, poisoning the environment, or techno-dystopia
seems rather petty.

That said, it would be pretty neat if it were possible to make a fun game that
did all that. The hazard is that didactic games often aren't fun. Don't make
games that aren't fun.

------
xg15
Do I understand correctly that they don't have mechanics for
overfishing/overfarming/etc either? That seems strange.

However absurd the reasons are, I can at least understand the assertion that
climate change is a "controversial" topic, so if your goal is to even cater to
the lunatics, fine.

But that overfishing can damage the environment shouldn't be controversial -
or is it?

~~~
afterburner
Of course it is. How dare you threaten short term corporate profits. /s

------
Brakenshire
> In Civilization VI, climate change has been written out entirely, even as we
> live through planet-wide ecological collapse in the real world. The novel
> inclusion of natural beauty (as ‘Appeal’) only gives modifiers to growth.
> Famine is a minor inconvenience in your grand plan, as it was to empire-
> builders in Ireland or India. While older Civilization games included
> climate change mechanics (Alpha Centauri even set psychic death worms on
> polluters) Civilization VI is reluctant to take a side on ‘controversial
> issues’.

Culture victory for United States of America!

To be somewhat less facetious, does the game have any mechanisms for
environmental issues? Do you have to handle pollution, loss of species,
depletion of stocks through overfishing or overhunting, etc?

------
AJ007
TLDR: Civilization should be more roguelike. Or maybe that’s what Dwarf
Fortress already is.

------
dude01
I really hate zero-sum thinking. It's true, if we were stuck on this ball of
dirt forever, _and_ technology is stagnant, then yes we should conserve a lot.
But we're not stuck here (help Musk!), and technology will keep progressing.
So I gotta say I completely disagree with this article.

~~~
rebuilder
If we consume too much, we'll never make it off the planet.

~~~
krona
If we consume too little, there will never be the required return on
investment required to attract the capital required to make it off the planet.

