The planet cannot sustain rapid growth for much longer.

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half a century Some time ago, a small group of esteemed thinkers calling themselves the Club of Rome got together to ponder a thorny question: What would happen if humanity continued to consume the world’s finite resources as if they were unlimited? His efforts spawned the now famous 1972 article “Limits to Growth” in which they modeled what could haunt humanity.

It was not a pretty picture. The world, they predicted, was on track to exceed its capacity to support continued growth sometime in the first half of this century. Continuing business as usual, burning resources while polluting the environment and expelling carbon, would result in a “sudden and uncontrollable decline” in food production, population and industrial production by the end of the 21st century. Or simply put, global collapse.

Fast forward 50 years, and humanity is still in deep trouble. In 2020, econometrician Gaya Herrington revised and updated the Club of Rome model to see if we have deviated from this terrible trajectory and find that we have barely moved the needle. But while we are still on this terrible path, all hope is not lost. WIRED spoke with Herrington to find out what he thinks could happen, how humanity can safeguard its future, and how we have the opportunity to step up and not just survive, but thrive.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: How would you describe humanity’s chances at this time to avoid global collapse?

Gaya Herrington: Very succinctly, we are in a now or never moment. What we do in the next five to ten years will determine the levels of well-being of humanity for the rest of the century. There are so many tipping points coming up, in terms of climatein terms of biodiversity. So, change our current paradigm, or our well-being must decline.

You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We do not have the option of continuing to grow forever. It’s as simple as that.

When he reviewed the work of the Club of Rome, he found that we have not changed course in the last 50 years. If we continue as we are, what next?

Everything is interconnected. We are very interdependent, so our economy is 100% integrated into society, and our society is 100% integrated into nature. On a system, when it starts to break down, you can see it start to flicker. So you have social crises, governance crises, growing populism and political violence, falling in trust—and we have, of course, the environmental crises now—the flood and the droughts.

Those are warning signs, because the system is always trying to balance, to keep up. But you don’t want to reach the tipping point. You want to pay attention to blinking.

Ignore them, and the world would generally be a lot less stable and pleasant, because things like clean air, clean water, and nutritious food will be harder to come by. It is difficult to predict accurately for any one place, because we have never experienced this situation before, but parts of the world would become uninhabitable and we would experience more intense and frequent weather disasters and crop failures. Most likely, mass migrations will grow in size and frequency.