I always enjoy reading your essays Mike. A lot of what you write about reinforces many of my own thoughts about the current predicament of human societies in a time of limits.

Early humans expanding out of Africa had so much to explore and experience. Life was immediate and raw. It was magical too.

In our time, science has revealed the diversity of the human genome and the truth that we had genetic consolidation (with periods of localized die off) during the long history of overall human expansion globally.

Once again in our present time we have pushed our expansion mode of greed living to the point of unsustainable consequences, made most evident by our rapidly heating planet.

Localized population retrenchment is being replaced by a more global population impingement and realignment.

My view is that the global population of eight billion (or more) human beings will be dramatically reduced over the coming decades through the natural consequences of our fossil fuel driven unsustainable human expansion.

I don’t know what the next iteration of human life will be. We might fall back to square one in a kind of monkey life.

Or maybe enough knowledge will cling to the whirlwind of rapid change that awaits us so that a significantly reduced human population melds into a sustainable equilibrium with the assistance of the burgeoning new life forms we have birthed as artificial intelligence, and so on.

Whatever happens it’s going to be a dramatic change from our current circumstances of greed and grievance overshadowing the magic of nature and her laws of sustainability.