What's it going to take?
They would also be left with a world that has no cheap fuel sources or easily accessible raw materials.
This may be the only chance our solar system will ever get at advanced civilization.
My point was that the OP assumed only humans can do it. I disagree. There's no law of physics preventing another species evolving and having a go, once humans vanish. In the meantime, while they're busy evolving, some cheap energy sources can be created for them. Plenty of time left before the sun changes too much.
That may or may not be true. The fossil fuel glut that helped humanity develop industrial technology was the byproduct of a pretty strange set of evolutionary and environmental circumstances: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...
If we wanted to have a genuine fighting chance of holding climate change to a safe level, the entire world would need to be on a war footing: rationing, mass revocation of driver's licenses, no coal power plants, anywhere.
Nobody will stand for that, there's no political or economic will. Our grandchildren will curse us for hard lives we've bequeathed to them.
But maybe we could identify with self-consciousness and intelligence, rather than with just humans.
So until another self-conscious intelligence presents itself, or until we have a more robust model that shows one should arise shall we die off, I think it's best to stick with our team for now, as it might be the only team.
Unless you're working to a different definition of these terms, self-consciousness and intelligence have been witnessed in many of the other species on this planet.
In the long run, only technology and creativity could create better substitutes for burning wood and dung. For making furniture and other structures out of rainforest hardwood.
Only technology will avert the next big meteor strike and the next super-volcano eruption (both otherwise inevitable, and both capable of wiping out a multitude of species, as has happened previously).
Reversion to a primitive way of life could make matters worse, environmentally speaking. The attraction is based on guilt. It's a response to the alienation and nihilism we associate with modernity; a response to philosophical and spiritual problems rather than to environmental ones.
So our duty remains not to prophecy doom but to work for a better world -- for all life.
What's dangerous, however, is a mid-tech low-income high-population situation, which can only be a dystopia.
High technology is a solution, stone-age technology can be a solution, but any semi-industrialized post-apocalyptic 'steampunk' will be worse than both high and low tech.
What about the next big meteor strike?
Burning wood and dung are probably the most sustainable sources of energy, considering the carbon cycle and what happens naturally (i.e. without humans). They just don't scale to megacities and jetliners. So much for tech.
> Reversion to a primitive way of life could make matters worse, environmentally speaking. The attraction is based on guilt. It's a response to the alienation and nihilism we associate with modernity; a response to philosophical and spiritual problems rather than to environmental ones.
I recommend reading Sapiens by Yuval Harari. There is much to be said for a simpler way of life. Also, Thoreau.
/rant
That said, we're all apes and we're far, far off in a fantasy world, IMHO. We either go back to our biology or this will just reboot itself over and over again. People just. Don't. Get. It. Technology at its core is anti-life. It is anti-biological. It is what results when the mind dreams up what it thinks are more efficient ways to build but inevitably ends up as more efficient ways to destroy. It starts as hammers and ends as robots. To some it seems innocent, neutral. To others even good. To some, tech is universally good. But tech begets more tech. And that tech creates problems that requires more tech, and on and on. It is a constant, never-ending treadmill. What seems so great at first always has dark offspring, or dark debt we don't see.
Take plastic. Wonder material! Light, strong, doesn't corrode or break down. Sterile! But now it's no accident that plastic peppers our planet and chokes our oceans and waterways, for exactly those properties are anti-biological. We produced fucktons of it, because best of all, plastic is a universal enabler for other tech--more food, more goodies, more icecream and all the stuffs. It's not coincidence that nearly all the plastic litter is one-time-use chip bags, soda bottles, straws, wrappers. It's gobble, gobble. Plastic is the purest expression of how ugly our stupid tech is. And people just won't look right in the asshole of that problem. Right in that 8-million-tons-per-year problem. And it's right in front of our fucking faces. Our tech is killing this fucking planet. At least, we are trying our best. Trash monkeys!
It's our stupid tech--of all kinds--that gums up the world, like all the streetlights and headlights and goddamn smartphones blinding us at night and jets and cars and bricks and concrete and lawnmowers and windmills. Tech is like a giant zit filled with self-replicating, sharp-legged metal nanobots, ready to pop and spill out over the biological world. And yeah that's a dim view. But it's the truth. We just keep dumping everything into tech and hoping it will save us. Yet we keep being miserable...keep being made miserable...and the "economy" just keeps offering us more tech to eat to salve our psychosis. Look where our tech really ends up. Our tech is now watching us, trying to learn about us so it can figure out a way to suck some money out of our asses some how...all the time. And it, whatever the heck it is, wants to take over, and run everything, be artificially intelligent. And people just keep blindly believing in it.
And a word about that, and suddenly you're some kind of luddite who wants to run around with animal skin speedos and spearfish. Actually I'd rather go naked and eat mango, swim and enjoy the sunshine.
/rant off
Yeah, and brought to you by tech. (When I should be sleeping!)
It's a simple fact that only technology could possibly prevent the next big meteor strike, the next ice age, the next local supernova, etc.
If people feel greedy or jaded or wretched or guilty (or think that all their fellow humans are) I think this is a sign that they need to choose a genuinely important problem to work on. And to have fun working on it -- perhaps with the occasional mango/beach holiday thrown in!
How about glasses or contacts? You'd have a hard time convincing folks that their glasses are anti-life, anti-biological and have some sinister dark side.
But we still have a good chance! Let's not focus at what is broken, failed or doomed but rather what might give us better chance achieving this. It can be supporting some moral company (not necessarily SpaceX but possibly a good example), or not supporting one that is oblivious to environment and our future and has the only focus to make money at all costs. it can be just about being a good person to everybody out there.
Tiny steps can lead to great future... maybe I am naive, but does it really matter in this specific topic? We have no clue about future, which decisions will be important and which not.