I think this is one of your best stories so far, Indi. Great thinking!
I agree with you, the only way we are going to survive as a species, is to pool our intelligence assets, and get together to start thinking as a united species.
I am guessing physics might not be something you are much interested in, otherwise you might have dug deeper into the scenario of taking all our energy from the ground (I loved the way you put that in terms of dead bodies), and compared the effects of that, on how we think, with the only alternative; accepting all our energy from the sun, and how that will make us think differently.
When we have to use energy to get energy, ie to fight for it, or at least compete for it, we obviously start to think of life as just one big competition.
Winning the competition, is profiting.
Which is why I don't think corporations as they stand, are the future.
Maybe non-profits, but definitely not profit seeking organisations.
How will we think, after we start getting used to just accepting energy handed to us on a plate?
Technically, the only way to get the energy we need as a species, without taking any from Earth (which we know always comes at cost of toxic pollution), is to use the technology we have to effectively monetise / fuelise all of our energy from the only real source of it, the sun.
When we create models and simulate the outcomes of how to do that (my bread and butter to date is as a consultant modelling and simulation based Systems Engineer, a job I love, if not always the system), we start to notice all of the best systems are those which align collaboratively with nature.
In fact, nature is one big, rhyming, collaboration, of all different things working together, in harmony when it works well.
We start to notice a kind of hierarchy in nature, through which all energy flows, when things are working well.
Trees are currently at the top of that hierarchy.
We have to partner with trees, to share that top level, with them.
We have to realise that by making them stronger, we make us stronger.
We have to realise that nature passes the energy of the sun down, from the sun, to all of the layers of life below. Everything in life, except us humans, (and maybe squirrels!) , passes the energy it doesn't need onto all other things needing it.
I trust that we will come to this very soon, we are networked like no other lifeform we've known about, forming a structure not unlike one massive brain, billions of people-neurons all connected together (See nature rhyming?).
We might realise another rhyme of nature, humanity is an embryonic organism, the energy stored on earth was the energy of a kind of placenta, or the yolk of an egg, that we were always meant to use, on Mother Earth, but now it is used, and we now have an energy deficit to pay back to Earth, which can only be paid by processing sunlight.
That also is why we can't go extinct yet, our function is not complete, we still have to put things right, to look after mother Earth.
On how we will organise, I believe we have to become a new kind of creator economy.
It is sourced from sunlight, everyone has to have their own currency or representation of currency, like all businesses and governments have stocks, shares, and currencies in markets.
When all monies and all energy are received for free, with no limits, the marketplace becomes a democracy, a kind of voting forum, where we determine the values of all things, and all people.
We saw this happen once in history already, though it didn't last long.
At the beginning of covid, 4Tn stimulus was issued and a new wave of non profit "Investors" got to run amok in markets using the Robinhood app.
They voted for the things they thought were important, and neglected the things they didn't particularly like.
Stocks in technically bankrupt companies still offering much loved products, soared, whilst oil went negatively priced, the only time ever in history.
We might realise that just there, we saw a brief flash of how things need to become.
There are folk who will never accept this.
But the physics keeps working nonetheless, to remove the value perceived, in all capital.
That is what we are seeing with inflation, I believe.
This isn't the same as the inflation seen in history, like as in Weimar.
Several things are different.
Now we are connected, not only to one another, but increasingly to the sun, and money is already digital.
The pressures on printing free money are not just in a few countries, they are in all of them at the same time.
Now money is moving away in function, from being aligned with capital, to being aligned with live energy from the sun.
We are doing what we have to with money, to make it represent the endless, free energy of sunlight.
Even though the bankers and other capitalists, those "in contol" currently don't like it, it is happening anyway.
They are losing control.
Everyone else is gaining control, very, very soon, it seems to me.
There is much more, in about 230 stories of mine, and those of probably thousands of others, like yours.
We are getting there.
Not long now.
Thanks for prompting me to respond with some rambling, I hope it might help a little.