>>On the disaster of the future planet now ... You could be right. The sky COULD be falling.
Of course the sky has fallen before. In the mid-14th century, the Black Death killed a quarter of the population in Europe. The Mongol Invasion was not a good time for thoughtful people either.
Plus as Arthur Koestler points out in _The Ghost in the Machine_, human knowledge has NOT been a slow and steady accumulation of information. Rather most of our progress has been in fits and starts, with sudden reversals. Archimedes knew more geometry than mathematicians who lived a thousand years after him, for example. DaVinci's highly sophisticated methods for making pigments are lost to us. And so on.
Your argument about Internet corruption is also an argument for good old analog, manual books. And even books are not secure, as we all probably know about the murder of Hypatia, librarian of Alexandria and inventor of conic solids math, by a Christian mob, or the later complete destruction of the Library by the Islamic conqueror who used all the scrolls and codexes to heat steambaths. ("The only book we need is the Koran.")
The barbarians are always at the gate, true. Equally true seems to be that small populations of light always persist in the darkness of barbarian times.
Finally, the disaster of the future planet is solely driven by the one factor people refuse to discuss: population. Human overpopulation drives pollution, resource depletion, damage to the biosphere, wars, famines, crowding of the poor in hypercities ... you name it. There are too many humans in the habitat. So maybe chaos and disease is a way of resetting the balance?
