Conflict due to water scarcity was going to be my answer but I was beaten to it.
So to the growing list, I will add yet another item we are burying our head in the sand about: the likely collapse of major elements of the ocean ecological network. It’s a huge and complex system of systems, and almost impossible to understand fully, so estimates of the damage we’re doing lead to predictions of failure on scales of anything from 10 to 100 years. So after 25 years, it may or may not all have crashed, but we will be over the cliff edge and the catastrophic degradation of ocean health will be impossible to deny. (Well, for variable definitions of “deny,” as we see with our current crises.)
True, but we print money. We can literally just print enough money to cover the debt and call it day. The only reason we don’t do that is that it would seriously devalue our currency.
There was serious talk several years ago about minting a trillion dollar coin and shoving it in Fort Knox or someplace safe, just so that they could use it to effectively raise the debt ceiling.
There are some very weird things that happen when your money has value solely because everyone believes that it has value.
All of the above is true, and another point that’s often been made in support of growing the national debt is that the only thing that really matters is the debt as a percentage of the GDP. As long as the country keeps getting wealthier, so the argument goes, it can support increasing debt.
From that standpoint, the graph below should be disturbing. It’s from the CBO, showing federal debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP, with projected numbers through to 2050. Debt that is growing much faster than the national wealth, and with the prospects of climate change and resource depletion potentially impacting GDP growth even further, doesn’t look sustainable. At least to this admittedly ill-informed non-economist.
That said, I think I have to agree with some other posters that climate change, along with its impacts on sea level rise and food supply endangerment, is the more immediate and pressing problem. There is now a lot of rhetoric about it, and denialism seems to be down to a dull roar, but we’re woefully short on concrete actions.
Sand. It’s being ignored because people simply cannot believe there’s a looming shortage. They look at Sahara and think those sounding the alarm is ding-dong.
Another one. People are freaking out about AI. Nobody seems too concerned about robots and automation. When the blue collar jobs vanished it was lamented as part of progress. We’ll see how the white collar class reacts when their jobs are gone. The largest cost for almost all employers is staff. If something can be automated, it will be.
A bit more farfetched:
Modern quarterly capitalism seems to be dependent on expansion. I doubt we’ll se the effects of that in 25 years, but I do wonder what will happen when expansion is no longer possible.
How about the helium shortage? We’re running out, it’s critical to a whole lot of high-end stuff, but people gotta have their mylar balloons for the office party.
The massive famines and drawdown of globalization and huge economic loss and unrest that’s going to happen in the next five to ten years is apparently going to be a tremendous shock to many people, but hoo boy, it’s gonna be a doozy. Within 24-36 months we’re not going to be able to make a lot of things we now take for granted, except at monumental expense.
Can you elaborate a little?
Because I think “the internet makes people feel worse about themselves” is a popular talking point but can sometimes be exaggerated by the media.
For example, when Facebook revealed that a survey said that a quarter of girls thought social media made them feel worse about themselves, it was headline news here in the UK. But what wasn’t mentioned was that a higher number said that it made them feel better about themselves.
In 25 years I will be a pensioner. But I am someone that has grown up with the internet and use it for a lot of social interaction as I am doing in this very moment.
IMO the bigger danger is the one that is already manifest in the US: people believing absolute nonsense because they only need to listen to the people they want to. And because the memes that spread most effectively are just the ones with the best properties for spreading, which often does not include truth.
Who’s going to go out into the universe to gather it up? Helium reserves on Earth take millions of years to accumulate underground, and have taken 100 years to use up a lot of it. It’s like water- there’s a lot of it on Earth, but not that much in a drinkable form we can easily access, and existing aquifers that took thousands or millions of years to accumulate are being used up in a lifetime.
The world population in 1960 was around three billion people. There were common discussions about how it couldn’t rise much higher because of limits on the amount of food the Earth could produce. If more people were born, it would just mean more people would starve to death.
The problem was solved by a substantial increase in food production. But this solution was not permanent. A main component of increased food production was widescale use of artificial fertilizer. Another big component is the development of pesticides. And both of these factors rest on shaky foundations.
Most fertilizers are produced from fossil fuels and we only have a finite reserve of fossil fuels, which we have already gone through a large proportion of. And evolution drives various pests to develop resistance to pesticides.
At some point we will run low on fertilizer (or it will become too expensive to use) and species will develop resistance to all the pesticides we have. At that point, global food production will drop back to the level it was around 1960. Which means we’ll be living in a world that has eight billion people and produces enough food to feed three billion people.
The erosion of privacy, coupled with an absence of concern for its value.
Of course, on-line privacy has virtually disappeared already. But it makes me cringe to see an article (as I did yesterday) where a police chief brags that the city’s license plate cameras were responsible for the arrest of 41 people last year. It’s shocking to me that so many citizens were stating, “Yeah, that’s a great thing!” It’s a very slippery slope. The city installs even more cameras, of course, and they are SO convenient to use for other important tasks. “That was license plate XXX-1234? He owes property taxes. Stop him and impound that car.”
Of course, I use the cameras only as an example. This is not going to end well…and a lot of people simply don’t give a s***.
Can’t it be all of the above, at once? We’re exceeding our capacity to meaningfully plan at scale, and our species is fragmenting into pockets of delusional tribalism with no clear path forward. We’ve propped up unsustainable societies based on mass exploitation of humans and natural resources, entombed their power by weakening democracies and strengthening class power divides, all against a backdrop of climate change and automation. A bunch of smart greedy apes ruling over a bunch of angry horny ones, blowing up the whole forest with their infighting.
I don’t think it’s any one problem, but the perfect storm of all of them combined, at a time where there is essentially no real hope for any sort of meaningful action on any of the problems. Our generational irresponsibility is catching up to us and we’re setting our kids up for a massive implosion of everything. Makes for good TV and online rants but probably not great for them, lol.
Shrug. Seems to me that the most likely outcome is the continuation of the boom and bust cycles accentuated by greater violence and greater power, further increasing the quality of life for a select few while plunging the rest of the world into further darkness. But the video games will get better, there will be more streaming, more porn, more angry commentators, more ugly dystopias gilded over by beautiful entertainment. Pretty much the same as our species has always been.
Here’s hoping that fusion and AI will make us irrelevant within a few decades.
It is certainly true that we won’t be able to access space resources within the next 25 years, so helium shortage will be a problem. We do waste a lot of helium when mining natural gas, of course, but in 25 years we will hopefully be reducing the amount of natural gas extraction anyway.
Eventually we will need to access space resources, since the Solar System holds vast amounts of useful elements we could use on and off this planet. Helium is very common in the gas giants as well as in the Sun, so we have plenty of locations to choose from. Earth is not a closed system - we can obtain material resources, and energy, from outside, and we almost certainly will in due course (unless civilisation collapses first, which is entirely possible).
I would say it’s the “Idiocracy” problem. As birthrates overall are in decline, the highly intelligent, more educated upper class will have less offspring and the lower class, less educated will continue having large families. Eventually you get a dumber society, and less people who can fulfill the needs of a highly technical workforce.
