Lowrise won’t cut it globally, though; the Netherlands has very few people compared to many places. The “15 minute city” movement is going for what you suggest, and in places like Western Europe, at current population levels, it seems to work well. I just don’t see it working in Mumbai or Shanghai or Lagos.
Paris has a population density (20,700/km2) nearly two-thirds that of Mumbai (32,300) and five times that of Shanghai (3900).
I’d say we have as good a shot at predicting what the future will look like as a Western Roman at the height of Empire had at predicting the Middle Ages.
And we’re probably in a really similar situation, at the height of a system that is going to have to change.
In terms of human culture and civilization? Sure, I’d almost agree.
In terms of scientific understanding of physical processes that define our global environment? I don’t agree at all (are you really saying science hasn’t progressed in ~1900 years?).
Exxon (and shell) predicted global warming models in the early 80s that we’re yet to deviate from.
We know how the physical environment is going to progress, mostly, what that’s going to mean to the people living in x years, we really can’t know, loads of technologies being studied, eventually someone will attempt a geoengineering project that might work / blow up in everyone’s faces, and as the planet becomes less livable, who knows what happens then, war changes stuff real quick, especially when “old tech” means nukes.
So; shrug our shoulders and do nothing about something entirely predictable… Simply because something entirely unpredictable may happen.
I won’t brake my car on the street if I’m about to run you over, because someone may shoot you first. Or you grow wings.
Huh. Interesting. I don’t know though whether that makes something like the 15 minute city more or less possible!
I just mean that Paris is very dense, and it is not high-rise, and anyone who’s spent any time there knows it isn’t a hellhole either. Very high densities in livable environments are quite possible. The main challenge to it IMO is economic inequality; how do do it without the inevitable slums.
The piece of Paris that makes up the city of Vincennes, BTW, is the tenth most densely populated city in the world.
Yeah, this is one of the things projects like the 15 minute city seem to be less persuasive about. It’s easy to conjure up a vision of a walkable, livable, densely populated but humane urban environment when everyone is a yuppie technocrat with a bulging 401(k) and an au pair.
Futurist handwaving is usually the go-to for the folks who can’t quite embrace the inevitability of death and destruction. I wish I could, but then I remember that we still eat things squeezed out of animals and use steam power for most of our electricity, and I realize that we haven’t really come as far forward as we might think.
Oh no, that’s not what I meant at all, we should be working towards fixing the issues as best we can, I don’t think we can know how people in 200 years are going to be living, but I think we can confidently predict that there will be less humans and that their lives won’t be as rich as ours are.
If I had to bet, I’d bet on a rapid population decline through less than nice means and our descendants living lives much more constrained than we do, but who knows, there’s always a chance that we can science ourselves out from a catastrophic result.
I just wouldn’t bet on that.
I don’t see all of humanity dying off, but we could see an order of magnitude drop or two when the food/water wars happen. Unless there’s runaway greenhouse effect and then we turn into venus and nothing survives.
I think we’ll avoid that effect. We’ll kill folks to avoid it, or countries will start taking unilateral action.
We’ll avoid some of it, Venus isn’t in the mix because we aren’t Venus, Earth will reach its own equilibrium based on its distance from the sun, but that is probably a millions-of-years thing rather than a human timeline thing. The big movements will still take a hundred or more years, even if it goes as badly as the worst projections we can still burn fuel to stave it off until we can’t anymore, that will keep the cycle rolling for a long time from now. But, compared to right now, things are going to suck a lot harder in a much shorter timeframe.
A poll that precisely captures this sentiment:
( I don’t know why she has the same poll question listed twice)
https://twitter.com/KHayhoe/status/1235206404765552640?s=20
Related: Thread on wet bulb temperature and links with related studies
https://twitter.com/mateosfo/status/1409664424000950277?s=20
https://www.pnas.org/content/107/21/9552
Form 2014: Comprehensive analysis on economic risks
I think most Americans were. I wonder what the 90s was like for non-Americans, but here the Californian Ideology had full sway. Then came the dot com bust, 9/11, the disastrous Forever War in Afghanistan/Iraq, the 2008 crash and so on…
I’ve been thinking about that change over the last couple of decades, that strange kind of what seems almost time compression and how a novel set in the modern day could practically be a dying earth book and how to deal with that in my own writing.
The Dying Earth genre differs from the apocalyptic subgenre in that it deals not with catastrophic destruction, but with entropic exhaustion of Earth. Themes of world-weariness…entropy, (permanent) exhaustion/depletion of many or all resources (such as soil nutrients)…dominate.
I do feel like as a species, we’ll have to crack the egg of the Earth to expand beyond it, or perish when the sun becomes a red giant- the ultimate global warming.
That’s an incredibly optimistic view.
Heh, yeah. If humanity is still alive in 5 billion years when the Sun becomes a red giant, that’s a damn amazing run.