> I was alluding to caution in reference to fossil fuels specifically because nuclear power

I follow you more clearly now- yes I agree. Maybe nuclear power gets undue scrutiny because its failures are rapid and local. I think I prefer this to an object so diffuse in space and time no one can point to it ("how can the earth be warming if it's snowing"). We are too likely to disbelieve or ignore anything that doesn't slap us in the face. A caveat: any waste disposal proposal which assumes continuity of governance or ecological predictability over any significant timescale is DOA imo. Even deep final repositories assume we can predict geologic activity half a million or more years into the future. I am not a geologist but this seems a gamble.

Yes, and the situation re: self-driving cars seems similar. We entertain death behind the wheel daily but hand-wring over the particulars of hypothetical autonomous vehicle accidents. It seems there is a preference (at least in the US) for injury to come with a human face attached rather than at the banal whim of an algorithm, but fleetwide hijacking is a different story. I wonder if offline AVs are feasible. Here too the present may preclude a more desirable future: e.g., we may feel compelled to connect navigation computers to the internet to avoid roadway congestion, but in an alternate reality perhaps we did not encircle ourselves with asphalt and invite a chariot powered by the fumes of the long dead into every home. As they say, "you're not in traffic..."

> We are living in a time of whalefall, with a surplus of resources sufficient to support a maximally extractive lifestyle for perhaps one generation more, before it is gone forever. I have grown increasingly disillusioned with our potential to avert the coming global ecological and subsequent economic catastrophe; it seems that our Neros would rather fiddle while Rome burns.

I feel much the same way. An economist turned tree farmer I once spoke to said: "We have failed to develop cultural tools of sufficient sophistication to manage the tsunami that is our technological inventiveness."

> My assumption is generally that for physical goods, robustness and long lifetimes are strongly favored over upgradability. Or rather, that "ease of transition away from" is basically never considered in the design or proliferation of new tools.

Good point- I didn't consider this in depth. I agree re: physical tools. The trend toward disposability or frequent upgrades is the wrong direction. Industrial processes and "cultural tools" (i.e., social technologies or memes as you say), on the other hand, have more destructive potential than a manual implement and longer lifespans.

> is a meme that provides a path to a better meme more adaptive than one that locks the target in? Can it be made so?

This is a fascinating question and I don't know the answer. I'm struck by the fact that one can substitute "gene" for "meme" and with a fair bit of confidence say yes. If life had "locked the target in" prior to the oxygenation of the atmosphere presumably we would not exist today.

An open question in plant biology, incidentally, is whether crop trait plasticity is itself a meta-trait we can pursue[0], instead of e.g. breeding or engineering germplasm for specific regions or conditions (although for some forms of plasticity the developmental basis is not well understood). I think of it a bit like the difference between a painstakingly programmed expert system and a neural net. We will likely need analogous reserves of sociocultural plasticity to survive on a planet growing more temperamental by the year, although the engines of financial and industrial metastasis do not appear so amenable to this.

[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00546...]