In the last 200 years, we were mostly lucky. Humanity runs like compulsive spender who keeps finding credit cards in his house. We&#x27;ve almost maxed out the ones labeled &quot;wood&quot; and &quot;coal&quot; and &quot;oil&quot;, since they were left on the table, easy to find. We stumbled upon &quot;nuclear fission&quot; which has a stupidly high line of credit but it&#x27;s green, and the other day we met a drunkard who told us green is evil, so we shy away from it. Credit agencies are starting to call, so we&#x27;re now hoping that the &quot;renewables&quot; card will help pay down the first three, while hoping that the &quot;nuclear fusion&quot; card we&#x27;ve ordered 50 years ago will come to us soon.<p>The point being, we&#x27;re not <i>solving</i> our most important problems, we&#x27;ve been merely leaving them out for later. If we hadn&#x27;t found that &quot;oil&quot; card, we&#x27;d already be fucked, per what &quot;overly dramatic forecasters of doom&quot; were saying. Lucking out of a problem is not something you should attribute to your skills.<p>Moreover, problems we had in the past weren&#x27;t serious. And we haven&#x27;t thought our way out of them - we just let them happen. War? Famine? Floods? Oh, people died. So what, there are people elsewhere, and civilization didn&#x27;t fundamentally change since the ancient history anyway. Only after the industrial revolution, when the progress of technology finally gained its pace, we&#x27;ve entered the times in which we actually have something to lose if we fail to maintain our civilization. We&#x27;ve also entered the era when for the first time in history, we&#x27;re creating extinction-level problems for ourselves.<p>I love science and I do believe in human power to solve even most difficult problems. But let&#x27;s not pretend that we got here by something else than just being lucky. And let&#x27;s not treat serious problems as if they were child&#x27;s play.