Has anyone considered the following historic/ecological irony?

There will be a point when the earth is enveloped by the sun. In the last stages of our star’s existence, it will expand to become a Red Giant—some 5.5 billion years from now. All life as we know it will be eradicated long before the sun starts to cool down again as it burns itself out and becomes a White Dwarf.

This is certainly Global Warming on a massive scale…but I digress.

Anyway…If humanity had been content to live in harmony with our natural environment, our technical prowess would approximate that of the Neolithic Age.

The technical progress achieved up to this point in human history (2009) rests squarely on a massive pile of trash and the destruction of nature. Start thinking about the literal trash-in-the-aggregate and pollution that every step of human technical progress has generated and you’ll get what I mean. After all, when you consider your cell phone for a moment, you will realize that its existence is not simply dependent upon technology and industry currently extant. Rather, the cell phone is one example of nearly countless technologies that depend on a long and diverse historic trail of previous technological steps—all of which produced pollution and various forms of environmental damage.

This same technology has allowed humans to see the damage and potential damage and create the scientific tools to predict the life cycle of the sun, for instance. Without it, this discussion would not even be taking place!

It is a strange thing indeed to contemplate the fact that we would have had no chance of survival, ZERO, as a species, if we had continued living as a Neolithic creature—relatively “in harmony with nature.” However, that massive pile of trash has given us a chance at getting the hell off this rock and going elsewhere BEFORE the sun turns into a Red Giant.

A weird dilemma, huh?