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0 pointserispoe9y ago0 comments

Medieval economy relied heavily on wood consumption, in a very unsustainable way. Forests were cut down way faster than they could renew and, if no technological change happened, they would have hit a wall pretty violently.

But they didn't. Instead, people and societies adapted.

The lesson of that is that you cannot extrapolate our current technology and the resources we consume in the future and assume that everything will stay the same.

It's like saying medieval societies should have stopped growing so they could sustain on the wood they cut down.

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GrumpyYoungMan9y ago

>The lesson of that is that you cannot extrapolate our current technology and the resources we consume in the future and assume that everything will stay the same.

I am reminded of an old joke:

"A man jumped from the 10th story and is falling to the ground. A woman at the 4th floor sees him from her window and asks, 'Hey, how's it going?'. The man replies 'So far, so good.'"

Yes, technology has saved us in the past. Given that new discoveries are increasingly harder and more expensive to achieve, will technology continue to do so in the future...?

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