"So from now on history will be a matter of necessary adjustments to Earth’s biophysical reality. We will be deploying ever-more powerful technologies, and we may get better at understanding our problems and addressing them. We could very possibly build a sustainable civilization that shares the planet with the other animals, and gives all humans alive a chance at a fulfilled existence. This is what the combination of justice and science working on physical reality could do, if we were to successfully shove history that way.

So two possibilities exist at once and are in a kind of awful race: utopia or catastrophe are both possible from our current moment. The thing is, the catastrophes will be wide-ranging but not universal, and will play out over decades and centuries, and in those same decades we will be struggling to accommodate to whatever situation exists, to make the best of it, and even to make it better. So there will be an ongoing struggle."

- Kim Stanley Robinson, from this interview.