When you view forest fires in terms of passing decades you see that they’re increasing slowly over time. This is because the trees are running out of nutrients. During the Ice Ages, the glaciers carried lots of rock with them as they went grinding across the landscape, and ground and crushed a lot more into powder.
When an Ice Age ended, like the last one did, the land dries out and wind carries the rock dust all over the planet, fertilizing the earth and feeding the new forests. Eventually it gets used up, the forests become unhealthy, more trees die and provide increasing fuel for fires.
In this same way, humanity has spread across the most arable lands and turned the farms into cities, where nothing grows. Already, 40 percent of arable land in mostly the poorest nations, according to this link, is dead now and I don’t think they’re including all the land now covered by concrete and asphalt, but just the land wrecked by natural droughts and flooding. Add in the rest and it’s much worse.
Bad farming practices, not putting any nutrients back into the soil, has degraded a lot of it and made it unusable as well.
When food for a species is abundant and predators are few, that species grows and expands until it’s using the maximum available resources. Eventually all the resources are used up and the species dies out.
Everyone who was getting rich off the steadily increasing population kept telling us that Growth was good, and it was, for them. It kills the rest of us.
The problem is that if we don’t die off fast enough we will go to war over the diminishing resources first and devastate the planet. This is the purpose of The Jab, to speed things up. Death by starvation, which has already begun (someone dies of it every several seconds now) and the various little wars flaring up, aren’t going to kill us off fast enough by themselves to prevent nuclear war.
Everything cycles, and we have to cycle ourselves this time around because otherwise we’ll wipe ourselves out by unleashing the power of our weapons. The goal is to bring humanity to a controlled state, a steady population and to do this, some growth must be allowed or the species stagnates and dies.
This is why we need space travel. Keep a constant population here on Earth and send the increase to new planets. To do this we need to develop the same technology as that of the alien craft that we know are here.
When we start spreading out to the nearest stars, we may find that others have already beat us to them.