Letters to the Editor
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Questions for humanity
This sounds like an excellent book, even if the themes have been explored in bits and pieces in other articles. I did hear about the 500 year range for houses to become wholly overgrown, although I'm not sure where. Another interesting view is that another sentient species would have far more difficulty establishing a civilization after we are gone, due to our depletion of hundreds of millions of years worth of fossil fuels.
Regardless, the central question raised by the book seems to me whether we as a species will have enough foresight to prevent our own extinction and avoid a hard crash, or will we overpopulate our petri dish, consuming all the agar before dying of hunger or by drowning in our own waste (while taking down most other species and the biosphere along with us).
In Ursula K LeGuin's The Dispossessed, there is a haunting and prescient account of future Earth that is given, where the population reaches 9 Billion before collapsing. Humanity hangs on, but barely with most of Earth under suffocating heat with the ruins of cities and bits of plastics as reminders of a failed species.
As it stands right now, our political leadership is far behind in comprehending the precarious position at the asymptotic limit of civilizational expansion. In most cases, they are actually exacerbating the catastrophe that scientists see looming over the horizon.