Part II -- Human Footprint Reduction Prevents Civilization Collapse -- little else will

There are a lot of good people in the world, that are working on imperfections in the human experiment. They are trying to resolve human injustice, undelivered healthcare and education, malnutrition, poisoning of the air, water, and land, woman's rights, species extinction, deforestation, and a whole gamete of social conflict from spousal abuse to weapons of mass destruction.

However, in the next essays I show that, resolving all of these issues will not reduce the human footprint and thus will not prevent civilization collapse, die off, and an unrecoverable dark age.

After successful implementations total human footprint will remain 20 times too big for the earth to support. Stopping population growth, capping excessive individual consumption, quadrupling the efficiency of operations, plus intensive conservation and recycling measures, will not reduce footprint. The have-nots of the world should not be expected to want to live on less than the haves. Everyone will still want to improve their lot. If nothing else everyone wants to live longer.

Redistributing wealth will not reduce total footprint. Reduced consumption in one sector is replaced with increased consumption in another.

The technological advances that could produce a reduction in footprint to 1/20th and provide an ever improving life style for our global population would require sending 99% of the world's population into space, or moving them into other time dimensions, or miniaturizing each individual's physical footprint by a factor of 100. Nice idea but we have to learn how to do this before civilization collapses. The scientists and engineers can't do this in downtown Sarajevo or Mogadishu.

Learning science, the development of extended cognition in a whole future generation, is another possible solution to the human predicament. Education might be able to induce different cognitive processes that let people use future images (e.g. civilization collapse) to shape there personal behaviors. It's a nice idea. I have worked on it for 40 years. But even if I could start creating these minds tomorrow, it would take half a century before these peoples' decisions began charting a new human course. And another half century before that course was capable of diminishing footprint to a level that could prevent civilization collapse.

It appears that footprint reductions remain the only change that will prevent civilization collapse and new technology and learning science strategies won't come on line to reduce footprint soon enough.

Zero population growth, social justice, better peace keeping, and live smaller programs, are just songs sung in the hospice of the human experiment.

Until the people who are trying to address the human predicament realize the too-little-too-late nature of their current actions, no one will consider implementing the programs that will reduce total human footprint.