00:28Subtitles by ZDF, 2020
00:43From Sacha Gray's sex fantasies to a decidedly bleak vision of the future.
00:49What if an asteroid came hurtling towards Earth and threatened to destroy half of our planet?
00:56We would of course immediately mobilize all our forces to avert this catastrophe.
01:02Then things got going right away, because we're already in the middle of this dilemma, even without an asteroid, because we're getting more and more
01:08This will happen because we are fighting over habitats and because we are destroying those habitats.
01:12That's what the author of this book, Stephen Emmett, says quite clearly.
01:16He is a professor of computational science at Oxford, so unfortunately someone who should know.
01:22Philipp Rimmele spoke with him about our bleak future.
01:27When children go into the cellar, they whistle a little tune to drive away their fear.
01:33Now that the future of our planet is at stake, humanity is using the same tactic.
01:39She's already on her last legs.
01:4310,000 years ago, there were just one million people living on Earth.
01:48Around 1800, there were one billion.
01:50Fifty years ago there were three.
01:53And today there are already more than seven billion.
01:57By the end of the century, we will be ten billion.
02:00At least.
02:01Unfortunately, our planet hasn't grown along with it.
02:07I think we're screwed.
02:09We are undoubtedly heading towards enormous problems in this century.
02:14Billions of us are facing unprecedented difficulties.
02:18Apparently, we collectively decided not to do anything about it.
02:24Just to feed the current world population, we would need more food by 2050 than we have produced in the last 10,000 years.
02:32have produced over the years.
02:33In fact, the demand will double again.
02:37How is that supposed to work?
02:42There is an almost touching confidence that we are already so clever and resourceful that we won't have to worry too much.
02:50They have to be very worried.
02:51Even if we face the problems head-on, we will somehow find a way out.
02:58By the 1950s at the latest, it was clear that we needed more food.
03:02More, far more, than traditional agriculture could produce.
03:07We solved the problem by radically industrializing agriculture.
03:12Larger cultivated areas, higher-yielding plants, use of pesticides and fertilizers.
03:19People, at least in the West, could now not only eat better, they also had more money left over to spend it.
03:27to spend money on televisions, cars, or hair dryers.
03:32All the stuff, including the food, just had to be transported across the globe.
03:40The Green Revolution was about smart people thinking it was a good idea to take every little bit more
03:46to buy food with chemicals and energy.
03:50That's when our problems really started.
03:54Increasingly large areas were cleared.
03:56An unprecedented extinction of species ensued, along with the loss of entire ecosystems.
04:01Drinking water became scarce.
04:03Even today, 70 percent of our water is needed for agriculture.
04:10An example.
04:12It takes about 3000 liters of water to produce one citizen.
04:16In the USA, approximately 8.7 billion citizens are consumed annually.
04:20That would be 26 trillion liters.
04:23For citizens.
04:24In the USA alone.
04:26Every year.
04:29The world's oceans are overfished.
04:32The soils are depleted by intensive agriculture.
04:35Our dependence on fossil fuels leads to all sorts of evil, to a warming of the Earth.
04:41The result?
04:43Extreme weather and gigantic crop failures.
04:46So we need even more land, which in turn fuels climate change.
04:50In short, the problems are interconnected.
04:54If we could solve only one of them, we would only exacerbate the others.
04:59And every minute we grow in number and number and number.
05:05I think we could avert this if we radically changed our organizational structures and our behavior.
05:13The problem is, I currently see no indication of that.
05:19Stephen Emmert's book allows for only one conclusion.
05:22We're done for.
05:25Perhaps the tactic of whistling a song wasn't so bad after all.
05:29Go ahead and start.
05:34In light of this future forecast, the spectre haunting the Frankfurt Book Fair is, of course, not so bad.
05:40Paper books could soon be a thing of the past.
05:44Warnings are issued repeatedly.
05:54Was it a conscious decision, or did we temporarily lose our minds?
05:59How did progress become humanity's highest ideal?
06:03How could a lifestyle that threatens our future be considered desirable?
06:08Do we realize that we are not the center of the world, but merely part of a universal network?
06:15Let's understand that Los Angeles' energy consumption influences the melting of the polar ice caps.
06:20and can deforestation in the Congo cause typhoons in Japan?
06:24We have to overcome seemingly unsolvable problems.
06:28and to understand these challenges as something that could reshape our lives.
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