Our economy, conceptially, including all Earth resources, is currently a closed box of capital.

Energy is money is capital is matter.

So we think of Earth as a closed box, including all energy also.

But it isn't, we are receiving orders of magnitude more joules per second from the sun than we create and use in our economy.

All pollution, and all anti-life effects that we are creating and doing, are done by consuming the capital of Earth.

Yet it isn't a closed box. Everything we know on Earth including all life was created by nature using the energy of the sun.

We can convert the energy of the sun to hydrogen fuel using known, proven, commercially available technology in minutes and hours, which functionally replaces fossil fuels that took nature millions of years to create, with no pollution in our production and consumption of it at all.

Similarly we can convert sunlight to food, with no pollution.

https://www.solein.com/what-is-solein

That fuel, and food, adds to the capital of Earth for sure.

So the economy has to change, to reflect how nature, and we have to work.

If/when we manage to do that, things will look a lot brighter.

Tardigrades don't have the technology to do that, but humanity does.

That is our advantage over tardigrades, I would say; technology.

We just need to learn how to use it correctly, it seems to me.