Long Term Stable Configuration of Humanity

If you scan through catalogs of movies or TV shows about the future of humanity, most of them postulate a technological revolution future. Posterity will have space ships, teleportation, and other technological marvels. Of course, there are dystopian futures portrayed as well. The "Idiocracy" future, for example, is really pretty bleak as is the "Time Machine" future of HG Wells. In both cases, humanity devolved in retards and monsters.

I've written about "Elf Tech" as a concept many times on my blog, but not much lately, since I'm actually trying to do some version of that on my farm and it's much easier to hypothesize about something than it is to carry it out. Anyway, if there's a stable future for people, it's something like Elf Tech. There's no Star Trek future.

In my view, it's pretty likely civilization went off the rails right from the start. Once human beings began consuming nature, rather than participating the the natural cycle like every other animal, a bad course was set. People knew this in their bones thousands of years ago--it's hinted at in the Eden story and the Cain and Abel story and in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Then once fossil fuels and engineering unlocked their potential to produce a lot of mechanical power an even worse course was set.

Maybe a combination of pastoralism, like the Native Americans and my pre-classical era European ancestors practiced, and agriculture that supports pastoralism could work as a long term model.