Competing visions of the human future

There are two compelling visions of the future, but only one of them can be true in the longer term. Vision 1, "the conventional idea of progress" is focused on increasing miniaturization and technological complexity, advanced networks, virtual reality, highly efficient transportation, advanced genetic therapies and artificial organ development, solar and wind electric systems, etc. Vision 2, "the limits to growth," is focused on the world as human industrial societies bump into hard limits on the availability of cheap energy, the law of diminishing returns, an exploding human population that cannot be supported on existing resources, an acidifying ocean and a deteriorating climate that is leading to increasingly severe droughts, floods, extreme storms, rising sea levels, pestilence, epidemics, famines, power outages, heating and transportation fuel shortages, resource wars, collapsing infrastructure, civil violence, fracturing of large nations into smaller more governable regions, technological declines in all areas including medicine, and a series of declines and falls in industrial civilization accompanied by a massive plunge in the human population level and the disappearance of 1/4 - 1/2 of all species.

We cannot have both of these in the long term, although we can, and do, in the shorter term. Eventually, like two species competing for the same resources, one will die out. My bet is that it's vision 1 that is not sustainable, crushed by the horrors of vision 2.