A lot of people think technology will save us. But we haven’t yet found a cure for the common cold or the flu or cancer. We have no permanent human settlements on the ocean floor or deep underground or on high mountain peaks. We haven’t found a way to solve social problems like hunger or war or homelessness. We haven’t found a way to make Hydrogen energy efficient. We haven’t found a way to make personal jet pack transport safe or efficient. We haven’t found a way to cheaply desalinize ocean water or to scrub carbon from coal stacks or pull carbon out of the atmosphere or de-acidify ocean water. We thought we solved the hole in the ozone layer but recent research shows that it’s thinning at the equator and we don’t know why.

We’ve been working on all these challenges for years, decades, or generations. Even if we had a miraculous technological invention that solved one of our global ecological problems, there are just too many other problems, and not enough time, and not enough money. A technological miracle would ultimately only buy us time until we needed another technological miracle, and then another, and then another.

That’s the problem with infinite growth and infinite resource depletion and infinite consumption. It will eventually kill us if we don’t stop.