At the current rate, would humanity ever have a chance to achieve this?
For the Ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids, they never had the chance to achieve widespread iron-working
For the Romans who enslaved and then stagnated, they never had the chance to achieve gun-powder weaponry and widespread steel-working
For us who industrialized but then stagnated beneath Intellectual Property Rights and Migrant Labor, we shall never have the chance to achieve asteroid mining and the run-away effect of refining our vessels entirely from stellar rock and large orbital solar arrays.
Perhaps the next civilization born out of the people we think are savage civilization-invaders too primitive to create their own?
As the society becomes more advanced, it becomes more dysgenic. Like ducks who are fed too much bread, humanity has become complacent and helpless. The nigger hordes were foisted on us, and all the resources needed to colonize space are spent to keep them happy. Kaczynski was right.
I genuinely think Rome was the exception, they managed to keep the game going much longer than China could once invaded and genetically replaced. 2039-2048 is the window I think will either see the great god of the American Economy dead along with its World Order or it will be us. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster.
Perhaps, but it won't come from the dying west.
The next civilization, clinging to northern America and Canada as well as Scandinavia if climate change really fucks the world up, might call itself the West and speak English as we once insisted on speaking Latin for educated talk. But it will not be the West, and our genetics will surely be dead. They might head to space on lower stage exotic Unsymmetrical DiMethylHydrazine or HexaNitrohexaazaIsoWurtzitane rockets with Nuclear Thermal upper stages, cursing how easy we had it by comparison. I wish we could have been the great civilization, but colonialism broke us into our current shit-lib society.
Measuring progress by amount of energy consumption is a backward communist paradigm. Why you need all that energy, it will not make you happy anyway?!
Its the difference between a witch-doctor and a hospital, salting our meat or refrigerating it, reading by light or sitting quietly in the dark.
Its like money buying happiness, people need up to a certain amount before that saying is true. If we are achieving things that will be remembered, it is good. If we are masturbating in the dark with a 3d helmet and no friends, it isn't good. Spiritual goals and lofty accomplishments can use up material resources without being mere petty materialism. I would like to terraform Venus by blocking the sun with huge structures made from asteroid metalworking. I think my descendants would remember me for my effort. That is enough for me.
Maybe in the future the pendulum will swing back, but that necessitate a full on war on current global power.
Its the economy, and only revolutionary upheaval away from the modern World Order would be enough. I don't think we'll see it in the timeframe of twenty to thirty years, and after that we'll have so many additional faults that people will turn to AI and centralization to fix things rather than decentralization and modesty. The sad thing is that it will just make things worse ultimately, mortgaging the future so the future has to pay our tab. Like the boomers taught us.
