Throughout history, people have invented tools and techniques to resolve their problems. The earliest problem was access to food, and first people created hunting tools, and then developed agriculture, with techniques for land clearance and irrigation and farming. This caused an unprecedented growth in human populations. There was the problem of access to raw materials besides food, so people developed trade, with its accompanying currencies and modes of transport. These raw materials were made into finished goods by builders and craftsmen. As techniques for fabricating things improved, people were able to do it on mass scale, and developed industry. This allowed the average individual to own or have access to far more material goods. The progress of society and the progress of technology, if not synonymous, became inextricably intertwined.
Today, there are over 6 billion humans in the world, a truly staggering number compared to any other large animal that has ever lived. It occurs to me that every advance we make simply allows people to extract more from their surroundings, meaning there can be more people who have more stuff. Advances in technology allow their to be more people at the same standard of living, and since all of those people demand a better standard of living, they advance technology further, in a cycle that must culminate with all of the earth’s resources being fully utilized.
It seems then, that unless we come up with a means to get off this rock and colonize other star systems, the only truly relevant technologies will be those that allow us to limit either our own numbers, or our individual desire for resources. Everything else doesn’t address the real problem. We haven’t got any means to reliably change human nature to want less stuff, so birth control is our only escape from the war and famine that would accompany overpopulation, especially keeping in mind that at higher levels of technology, war can destroy our entire planet.
We see that in industrialized societies today, the birth rate is declining, correlating increased technological development and material wealth to decreased population growth. Thus I might ask, is there any other technology that will have as extensive an impact on the long-term well-being of humanity?
