We may get total societal collapse well before the ecological disasters fully kick in just due to poor management and adaptation to "normal" problems such as pandemics, economic, political and worldview issues. The ecological problems are currently making it worse of course but they are very minimal compared to what is anticipated in the coming decades and centuries.<p>I feel like our management and coordination needs to improve by an order of magnitude to survive. As it is, we may nuke ourselves out of a planet before the decade is out.
Reading this first helps.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries</a>
"In all of these scenarios except for ‘stable earth’, the achievement of global targets and accompanying frameworks is negatively impacted,” the report states. “Furthermore, in the absence of change, scenarios ‘Earth under uncertainty’ and ‘Earth under threat’ tend towards that of ‘global collapse’.”<p>The paper explains that, by adopting a systems analysis, it is possible to see how “the crossing of one planetary boundary systematically results in the crossing of others”. They are crucial to providing a ‘safe operating space’ for human societies to develop within a stable earth system, “with the passing of these boundaries subsequently, and most likely resulting in societal destabilisation and potential GCR events”.<p>Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR) events are defined as those leading to more than 10 million fatalities or greater than $10 trillion in damages."<p>We should stop being in denial about this and think about adaptation strategies and, of course, force the industry to change.<p>It seems like the Fermi paradox has a reason, after all.
tl;dr<p>> While land system change and climate change are in a zone of “uncertainty with increasing risk” of overstepping the safe operating space, the report says, biochemical flows and ‘novel entities’ (“new engineered chemicals, materials or organisms and natural elements mobilised by human activity such as heavy metals”) have “far exceeded” that space.