Are you suggesting a planned population intervention could extend industrial civilization? I would be very interested in hearing how that could be done. According to people like Gail Tverberg and David Korowicz, any kind of planned degrowth or recovery from a disaster such a major war or a pandemic would be impossible. The global economy is a networked system which is incapable of surviving such a shock. Imagine what would happen to demand for commodities, for example, if a couple of billion people died for whatever reason. We couldn’t possibly keep prices high enough to pay for extraction. If the oil price is too low now, imagine what it would be with far less people. And even more importantly, there are only so many nodes you can destroy in the networked economy before the whole system collapses. If Gail is right, there is absolutely no way we can get a “critical resource extension,” because the whole system collapses as soon as it can’t grow anymore, and then the remaining resources stay in the ground anyway. So I am not so sure even attempting a planned collapse intervention is better at this point. Collapsing right away would surely be better for the environment and perhaps future generations, but not for the vast majority of humans. The utilitarian thing to do is to try to keep the current system going as long as possible (probably by adding more QE and debt), which might not be possible for much longer anyway.

While “free energy” may stave off the entropy for humans a little longer, it will likely only accelerate our mad rush to an over-population collapse by pandemic and resource wars – already underway.

Anyone who is familiar with human history and basic economics recognizes that a sudden and controlled collapse (WWII) is better than a drawn out one (i.e. Dark Ages). Consequently, overpopulation/critical resource shortages will likely have a planned collapse intervention and probably instigated by the most population dense countries (most to gain), before we destroy the planet and ourselves. I think this “planned overpopulation intervention”/critical resource extension is far more probable for humans than one driven directly by random entropy events.