Soods said:
I get the impression that you're a junior high or high schooler who's learned a little bit about science, technology, and history, and are coming to all the wrong conclusions by building on what little you've learned with wild speculation. While I like your enthusiasm, you should learn to do research when you reach the end of your knowledge on a subject, or you will write posts like the one you just did. Here and now it's not so bad, but later in life you can make a real fool of yourself by doing this.
For starters, we were not monkeys 2,000 years ago. Rome was an empire 2,000 years ago. Before that it was a republic. Before that, there were the Greeks. Before that, there were dozens if not hundreds of other civilizations. The oldest written document is estimated to be 5,500 years old.
Also, we are not and have never been Monkeys. We are apes. Monkeys showed up after their branch and our branch of the evolutionary tree separated.
No organism in the history of life has ever been "in harmony" with its environment. They are only kept in balance with everything else by external forces, most of them derived from the presence of predators, the availability of food, and the prevalence of disease.
We aren't even the first organisms to cause environmental devastation and climate change. Blue-Green algae did that 3.3 billion years ago. They altered the composition of the atmosphere so drastically that they poisoned and killed off over 90% of all life on the planet. It was the greatest mass-extinction the world has ever experienced. The toxic gas, by the way, was oxygen. The atmosphere got polluted with a corrosive, dangerously reactive gas, and everything that survived evolved to either hide from it or use it as metabolic fuel.
You are right that as our production has gone up, our energy demand has gone up as well. However, it's really ignorant to characterize it as an addiction. It isn't even unusual or unnatural. It's merely a parallel to the same kind of mechanism that drives an organism's, or a community's calorie intake based on their size. Doesn't matter if the community is a bacterial colony, an ant hill, a city, or a civilization. The inability to sustain large populations is far from unprecedented. Yes, if it happens to us it will be a bigger crash, but it's not apocalyptic, and the mass famine will be followed by a period of stability or even growth.
The whole planet is most certainly not dying. As I said before, it's faced far bigger crises than us. The earth is too big, its climates too varied, and its life too adaptable, to be sterilized by anything short of complete crustal melting. Freeze it, bombard it, boil away its oceans, life will still persist on the earth in some form.
Now if you're worried about us, then sure, there's reason for concern. Even then though, just because we've adapted to be dependent on technology doesn't mean we're totally screwed if we run out of our main energy sources. A lot of people will starve, but there will be survivors, and they will get by with whatever's left.
Also, how is quitting technology cold turkey better than moving forward? Not even (some) non-human apes abstain completely from the use of tools. An energy crisis is bad but nowhere near as devastating as simply quitting technology.
