Hi, a nitpick: I think the comment you quoted about the future fate of the Sun got it a bit wrong - it's not becoming a brown dwarf, but a white dwarf.
We can radically increase the carrying capacity of the Earth by adopting food production and other methods that are far more efficient than the current state of affairs. Here's a primer on some of those methods: https://buildingabetterworldbook.com/
Well Tove, you are definitely not the prototypical human being; this physical restless that drives you to accomplish tangible goals involving wet concrete is indescribably alien to the typical person. In fact, for many humans, work occurs for one reason and one reason only: to get paid. It does turn out that plenty of people do things for free that could be considered paid labor (baking apple pies, going to the grocery store three times a day, changing diapers, etc). But hauling freight, going to meetings designed to enhance productivity or build morale, putting up with unruly customers, and staying up late to meet deadlines are not things most people do to change their environment; they do all of that because if they don't, their economic and social prospects will be poor.
When Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, I think he just told half of the human population that their lives were worthless. When Tove writes that "An existence of idle subsistence is not worthy of our species," I think she's doing the same thing. Or maybe rather she means what Nietzsche meant when he said: "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal." To people trying to cross that bridge, 5 million years really does seem like much, much less than 5 billion years.
Hi, a nitpick: I think the comment you quoted about the future fate of the Sun got it a bit wrong - it's not becoming a brown dwarf, but a white dwarf.
We can radically increase the carrying capacity of the Earth by adopting food production and other methods that are far more efficient than the current state of affairs. Here's a primer on some of those methods: https://buildingabetterworldbook.com/
Well Tove, you are definitely not the prototypical human being; this physical restless that drives you to accomplish tangible goals involving wet concrete is indescribably alien to the typical person. In fact, for many humans, work occurs for one reason and one reason only: to get paid. It does turn out that plenty of people do things for free that could be considered paid labor (baking apple pies, going to the grocery store three times a day, changing diapers, etc). But hauling freight, going to meetings designed to enhance productivity or build morale, putting up with unruly customers, and staying up late to meet deadlines are not things most people do to change their environment; they do all of that because if they don't, their economic and social prospects will be poor.
When Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, I think he just told half of the human population that their lives were worthless. When Tove writes that "An existence of idle subsistence is not worthy of our species," I think she's doing the same thing. Or maybe rather she means what Nietzsche meant when he said: "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal." To people trying to cross that bridge, 5 million years really does seem like much, much less than 5 billion years.