The future represented in this image has little chance of actually happening: it is the mythology of fossil fuel powered capitalist society, which has expanded past the planet’s environmental limits but needs to expand somewhere, or admit it is at the end of its useful life.
Do we think that’s actually true, though? Life, all life, has a tendency to spread out when a niche is open in a new environment which it can fill, and there’s nothing shown there that isn’t technically within the bounds of humanity. Before capitalism, before humans were even Homo sapiens, we were already migrating out of Africa and into Eurasia. The drive to explore is, in my opinion, deeply human, and nothing says that the model of that exploration or expansion needs to be capitalistic. We wouldn’t have colonized the world in prehistory if it did.
The future represented in this image has little chance of actually happening: it is the mythology of fossil fuel powered capitalist society, which has expanded past the planet’s environmental limits but needs to expand somewhere, or admit it is at the end of its useful life.
Do we think that’s actually true, though? Life, all life, has a tendency to spread out when a niche is open in a new environment which it can fill, and there’s nothing shown there that isn’t technically within the bounds of humanity. Before capitalism, before humans were even Homo sapiens, we were already migrating out of Africa and into Eurasia. The drive to explore is, in my opinion, deeply human, and nothing says that the model of that exploration or expansion needs to be capitalistic. We wouldn’t have colonized the world in prehistory if it did.