Sandra Faber

This is Planet Money from NPR.

Over the last century or so. We've been seeing planet-wide GDP growing exponentially.

You will recognize 1.03, 3% as the...

We can see this number is completely ridiculous. This is.

A large number here is bad because it means that we want more of that product.

And my concern is that we're not talking about this.

We have been given the gift of cosmic time. We have hundreds of millions of years, if not another billion years. But we have not solved the problem of combining human nature with living in abundance.

My cosmic point of view at this moment is to try to figure out how people will live the best possible life on Earth after cheap energy has passed away.

Where is the next swerve? That's the thing. That's the thing. Specifically with regard to energy.

Some people call it the polycrisis and some people call it the metacrisis.

A crisis of crises. Yeah. So every time we think of one of these possible swerves, I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue them, but they leave a large fraction. Everyone leaves a gigantic fraction of the problem unsolved. So I would say a huge issue for a long-term, happy human history in the future is having a more mature picture of wealth, how it should be managed, and how growth should be managed.

So I'm going to sketch what we know about Earth's history, cosmically speaking.

Earth is a good place to live for, let's say of order, 100 million years at least.