Neither was theirs — things spawned! It was just overexploited, much like our own ecosystem.
>Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy.
A rose-colored summary.
We also frequently engage in futile activities that seem profitable, but in fact destroy wealth by failing to appropriately manage the biogeophysical life-support system of Spaceship Earth. See our current ecological collapse - climate change, soil erosion, wilderness destruction, higher rates of species extinction, aquifer pollution/depletion, overfishing, ocean acidification, ocean plastics, etc.
What is ecologically optimal should also be what's economically optimal, because ultimately they're part of the same overall system. The imaginary economy/ecology divide (like the imaginary human/environment divide) is itself a source of inefficiency, because it incentivizes ignoring problems by pretending to push them "outside the system."
If we can't make economy and ecology align our species is SOL & JWF — shit out of luck and jolly well fucked.
In my opinion, this is the biggest and most intractable of the possible Fermi Great Filters. Not destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons or nano-goo, but restraining our own species from self-annihilating global ecocide via perverse economic incentives (aka "Capitalism, the Bad Parts™").
The free market is an incredibly powerful decentralized decision-making tool, but it should be used to enhance humanity's long-term survival rather than undermine it.
Neither was theirs — things spawned! It was just overexploited, much like our own ecosystem.
>Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy.
A rose-colored summary.
We also frequently engage in futile activities that seem profitable, but in fact destroy wealth by failing to appropriately manage the biogeophysical life-support system of Spaceship Earth. See our current ecological collapse - climate change, soil erosion, wilderness destruction, higher rates of species extinction, aquifer pollution/depletion, overfishing, ocean acidification, ocean plastics, etc.
What is ecologically optimal should also be what's economically optimal, because ultimately they're part of the same overall system. The imaginary economy/ecology divide (like the imaginary human/environment divide) is itself a source of inefficiency, because it incentivizes ignoring problems by pretending to push them "outside the system."
If we can't make economy and ecology align our species is SOL & JWF — shit out of luck and jolly well fucked.
In my opinion, this is the biggest and most intractable of the possible Fermi Great Filters. Not destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons or nano-goo, but restraining our own species from self-annihilating global ecocide via perverse economic incentives (aka "Capitalism, the Bad Parts™").
The free market is an incredibly powerful decentralized decision-making tool, but it should be used to enhance humanity's long-term survival rather than undermine it.