https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04573
But you know, changing paradigms is a slow process and physicists have been shown to be the slowest to accept new things, especially multidisciplinary theories/findings:
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426.full
Which confirms my contact experience with many of them - not all of course :)
I'm not sure that's the proper thing to take away from that paper.
The technological level required to survive in a purely hostile environment is enormous. Image the production line to create something like a oxygen generator from scratch.
Me may even need to build a sun shield to artificially reduce the sun impact on arctic and other critical zones. You can't build a sun shield with chemical propulsion, you have the sunwind as constant acceleration which you have counter.
Don't get me wrong, we have social problems as well, starting from money to distribution of power. But those can't be solved if the earth is in ruins.
There are solutions to all of those problems, at least the physical ones. I stumbled upon another physical model over a year ago and the philosopher in me said, that the basic assumptions sound very logical and sound. I want to understand this model and spent quite some time trying to understand the model from the ground up. I checked references and tried to interpret newer findings under the perspective the new model provides. For me it sounded reasonable but I frequently asked physicists, my old profs, popular ones, ones with other "crazy" ideas, ...
The feedback is very, very sparse. The arguments are very often not even remotely logical sound and I found in my attempts to openly talk about that model 2 types of 'scientists'. The ones that openly try to understand new ideas from the ground up and those that are so convinced of their model, that they consciously or subconsciously (confirmation bias) ignore counterfactual measurements and logical reasoning. I stopped talking with later ones as they are a wast of time.
If your model fails to explain one experimental observed phenomena, it may be wonderful to predict certain effects, but you can never use it to argument against something, because it can't be the real implementation.
I go with the author of the theory that the whole strangeness of our standard model resulted from 2 assumptions that are not even well grounded. The late Einstein was right as in so many things.
Other than the trifling details that "shortest", "distance", "points", and "terrain" have little relationship to what most people would consider the normal meaning of the term, and that you also left out the fact that the terrain can be "chosen" somehow which is even less connected to what most people expect, yeah, sure.
I understood enough of what the article is trying to get at to be pretty convinced it just can't get there with the level of terminology it wants to use. There's limits on what concepts you can get to with any given degree of sophistication in terminology.