I am not a conspiracy theorist, but…

Which, of course, is how every conspiracy theorist begins.

Still, as I was reading the final pages of The Three-Body Problem, all my years of arguing against Malthusian pessimism suddenly took on a strangely cinematic coherence. In the novel, the extraterrestrials – the Trisolarans – realize that, given the pace of human technological development, they will not be able to conquer Earth by the time they arrive four hundred years from now. Faced with this problem, they devise a long-term strategy:

“Given a time gap of [four hundred years], the strategic value of any traditional tactics of war or terror is insignificant, and they can recover from them. To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way to: kill its science”.

“The plan focuses on emphasizing the negative environmental effects of scientific development […] in addition to highlighting the negative effects of progress”.

By amplifying environmental anxieties and recruiting the most misanthropic strands of ecological thought – while playing on humanity’s deep-seated longing for judgement and moral reckoning – the Trisolarans succeed in cultivating a kind of fifth column within humanity itself.

For a fleeting moment, I confess, I found the thought comforting: perhaps the reason I keep running into the same arguments in my academic writing is not that intelligent people sincerely disagree about technology and growth – but that they are unwitting agents in an alien plot to stall civilization.

Alas, the real explanation is almost certainly less dramatic. There is no extraterrestrial mastermind. Rather, many contemporary Malthusians seem to lose sight of the longer arc of human development. Moral outrage at how humanity treats nature in the present – an outrage I share – can easily obscure the possibility that scientific and technological progress might also be the very tools that allow us to repair, decouple, and ultimately transcend those harms.

No conspiracy required. Just different temporal horizons.