Thanks for the thoughtful response. I would love to see a debate between you and Diamandis.

To be fair, while technology is the main focus of what Diamandis says will “save” the world, it’s not the only thing he talks about.

I completely agree with you that the flaws in democracy need to be fixed and that we need a new model of sorts that tackles economics, as well as politics. I read this other interesting piece on Medium the other day about that: https://medium.com/united-people/a-new-human-operating-system-5f11cacebbd0#.jsza88m98

I disagree though that we have not recovered fully from the Dark Ages when compared to the Romans. The Romans were brilliant, but we’ve come so much further than they did and I don’t mean technology-wise because that’s obvious. I mean with respect to philosophy, democracy (even with its flaws), community, emotional intelligence, and more.

So, we need to lose 6B people in 50 years to survive, according to your calculations. Not even massive wars would eliminate that many and I don’t think the environmental problems from climate change will reach bad enough levels in that short of a time to create massive famine, disease, etc. to kill off billions of people, which is why advances in technology could — if not completely save us — extend our lifespan as a species, at least long enough to get us into space so we could colonize Mars to give us some elbow room so to speak. By the way, my degree is in aerospace engineering, so we have that in common, however I never wound up working in the field. Nevertheless, I’m still a huge supporter of space exploration.

Bottom line — both technology and new ways of organizing, running society are needed to get us through this.