First off what kind of dark age are you looking at?
Something more like the Bronze Age one but slower like the Roman Empire collapse and not as far of a fall. I think thanks to us being in the information age we'll do much better at preserving useful knowladge than in previous falls.
global warming is real and man-made or not
I think so too. I just didn't bother claiming if it's real or not when talking about Great Reset, because I didn't want to get in a debate with anyone on that subject here.
The point I was making is that it's still used as a distraction from other problems reversing our economic growth. Focusing only on Global warming (real or not) just makes it easy for them to argue for more centralization in their hands. However, admitting most other factors could serve to argue more for decentralization.
Energy is a problem but there are solutions, its just not as simple and straightforward as oil. Electricity will get cheaper while liquid fuels go up, this means that things like travel and logistics are gonna become expensive again. In short you're gonna have your AC and internet access but might never leave your town nor buy fruit that has been shipped from the other side of the world.
I just don't see our current world system being sustained without the "straightforwardness of oil". I don't see any growth in moving to electricity and batteries. It's all just compromises and softening of an inescapable decline coming from oil restrictions (which might as well be justified because of Global warming).
I think you are severally underestimating how much of the "post cheap oil" growth was possible thanks to integrating offshore cheap Asian labor (also an abstract form of energy) into the US globalistic sector. Now even that gravy train is ending since that labor is becoming less cheap and huge parts are incrementally isolating and resigning out from the US lead global system (Russia, China and even India is aiming to become a world power.)
Africa might be the next frontier, but now that pie will have to be fought over by several competing global sectors and China already has secured a big slice. Additionally Africa won't be as easy to wrangle as the far more stable Asian countries in the 90's.
As for the economy I think that as material goods become more expensive then conspicuous consumption will move to the virtual space. NFTs and metaverses already showed normies are more than willing to pay for shit that doesn't actually exists. If an actual human-built matrix ever goes online expect a trillion dollar economy to form within it.
That also is something yet to be seen if such computing intensive bullshit economies are able to hold under the coming material pressures in the real world. The last crypto bubble already did a huge number on the chip supply chain. I don't imagine it fairing well in a processing power arms-race once blockchain actually goes mainstream.
Lower birthrates are not the real problem, we just crossed the 8 billion mark when the planet can't sustain 2 billion without shitting the bed
It is a big problem. As the birth rates go down we still have to take care of a very long demographic tail of unproductive retirees that we worked really hard to extend by making our life expectancy the longest in history.
Automation already shows even the knowledge industry isn't safe and in fact its way easier to automate than manual work.
That is yet to be seen if automation ends up adding enough productivity in areas that would allow automation to pay for itself. I don't think "Knowledge industry" is mainly that area. Most of the critical upkeep will have to be done through manual labor and we have yet to see if it complexity will just keep growing indefinitely or if it balances out somewhere.
However if automation does take over, does it not make Metaverse and all that stuff redundant? Why upkeep anything like that if there is no value to be extracted from its users? Internet now runs on advertising and subscriptions. If 90% people stop generating any substantive material value why would any automation-run-technocracy care about maintaining a huge virtual daycare center for useless eaters?
As I see it, ether way it goes, it may be better to learn to grow.
Space exploration is a nothingburger and things like asteroid mining will likely be done by drones and not people, so why you want more humans?
I think it's far more likely that even drone asteroid mining will go in the way of the
Concorde because of it's economic return on investment.
Frankly the real threat is cultural decay,
It is far from the only real one. However it is a big one, because the apathy multiplies the severity of the many other problems if there is less and less will for people to fix them.
