DragonI

"Surviving Progress," a bone-chilling new documentary, argues that the world has financed an unsustainable growth rate by essentially encouraging whole nations to take out unpayable mortgages on their own futures. Brazil is given as an example. Enormous loans are given to the nation, which cannot meet the payments, and is then encouraged to liquefy its own natural assets — the rainforests. When the assets are gone, the wealth will have been taken out in the same process, and corporations will leave behind a drained nation and move on to another loan customer.

If China were to reach the level of consumption of, say, the United States or Europe, it’s very unlikely that the world could support the addition of a billion consumers at that level.

Instead of thinking that nature is this huge bank that we can just, this endless credit card that we can just keep drawing on, we have to think about the finite nature of that planet and how to keep it alive so that we too may remain alive. Unless we conserve the planet, there isn’t going to be any “the economy”

You can relate the destruction of the rain forest in Brazil directly to the Wall Street and London financial sector. The story begins in 1982, when countries couldn’t pay their debt anymore. And the result is that the Latin American countries, generally, stopped paying, because they said, 'We’re already paying all of the balance of payment surplus we have to the banks. We don’t have any money to import to sustain living standards, we don’t have money to import to build new factories and to pay the debt'. So the International Monetary Fund, at that point, said, 'Don’t go bankrupt, you have an option. You can begin to sell off the public domain; you have plenty of assets to sell to pay us. You can sell off your water rights, your forests, your subsoil mineral resources, you can sell us your oil rights.

And so, Brazil, Argentina, and other countries began to sell off their resources to private investors. And the private investors bought these resources on credit

Instead of writing software for computers, we can now write software for life.

By changing and taking over evolution, changing the time course of evolution, and going into deliberate design of species for our own survival at least gives us some points of optimism that we have a chance to control our destiny

If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. 

If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe. 

We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. 

Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.