We don't even need today's industrial output. We only need new stuff all the time because we only produce cheap shit that breaks easily and doesn't last, and because we design and manufacture things that can't be repaired. Most of the so-called "technological progress" isn't really good for anything. Most of what people make and do with brand new computers could be made and done with the computers of 20 years ago. Many appliances from the 1980s and 1990s still work, but most that were made in 2010 are already broken beyond repair.
If we just made things to last, we could cut overall production significantly and still have enough for everybody. If we made yarns and fabrics like we used to in the 18th century before the Industrial Revolution, clothing, towels, bedsheets etc. would last much longer. And if we didn't constantly replace technical standards with incompatible new ones, people wouldn't have to throw working TVs, computers, etc, away.
And if we still had 1950s technology today, and all that technology that only became available to the public within my lifetime had never happened, couldn't we still live happy lives?
Anyway, nothing of the sort that might theoretically save our high tech society is going to happen. Our industrial civilisation has never even once diverged from the trajectory of the middle run scenario in Limits to Growth (1972), and I don't think we ever will; we're headed for full blown collapse, just as projected. The Club of Rome was right. What needs to be done is so far removed from what our civilisation as a whole wants to do, from what the powerful elites want it to do (continue growing so their money becomes more money, Karl Marx has always been right about Capitalism as well), that it simply won't happen before it's too late; and looking at the state of the planetary systems, it may be too late already to avoid collapse.
Therefore I think that we must prepare for a future when everything is lost, everything falls apart, nothing works anymore, people are dying by the hundreds of millions, and whoever survives will have to make everything by hand out of whatever materials happen to be available. I think civilisation as a whole might end, humans might be reduced to small nomadic tribes for tens of thousands of years until the biosphere has healed to the point where it can support a larger human population and has become stable enough for humans to settle down again. By that time, everything we have learned and invented during the Holocene will be lost, our descendants will have to start from zero again.
But if that happens, it's still OK. Let's concentrate on not going extinct for the next 70 000 years or so, even if the survivors will live in tents and huts forever.
