The technical innovation that might help us avoid the climate crisis and extinction of species ....and this is not the usual stuff.

I have been following the climate crisis and other global threats to humankind since 2008. It has actually been quite depressing. If you remember then in 2008 the global threats that everybody was talking about were:
- Peak Oil
- Food crisis
- Exponential growth of population
- Global warming.

The only one of those, that has been "solved" or actually postponed a little (by inventing economically viable fracking), is Peak Oil. Unfortunately, this postponing has made the problems of global warming and extinction of species now much worse.
 Overall between 2008-2019 all indicators of global warming and the extinction of species have followed the pessimistic patterns. The situation is bad and becoming worse fast.

 The fundamental problem why humans are not doing anything about reducing CO2 or methane emissions is, that doing so would conflict with (the perception of) how good our lives are. As for most of us, better lives mean more things and more travelling. So "better lives = more emissions and less space for other animals." Until now, the solutions humans are working are in the area of having the same amount of stuff and travelling with less emissions. For example by using renewable energy, nuclear energy or recycling.

 But the real solution has to be in changing the meaning of "better life" that humans strive for. This is a very big cultural change and as our very minor success in promoting vegetarianism shows, it is almost impossible. However, there is just one thing that might do it! This definitely isn't the thing that your parents would promote, but there are even more powerful influencers that do. The thing I am talking about is spending time and money online instead of buying things and travelling. The influencers driving this are the online gaming, online betting and social media companies.

 Although this might sound evil or "bad", but think about the following:
-  Compare the natural resources needed for an online gaming tournament, where everybody takes part from home, to an international swimming competition where to the participants fly by plane.
-  Or how much CO2 your 100 euros would create if you gamble it online vs. if you drive to a shopping mall and buy new clothes (that you could very well buy a year later)
- You don't have to move to Europe or the USA to be happy - "League of Legends" and "Dota 2" work the same wherever you are. (Yes, I know you have to have a good internet connection and a PC, but these are way easier and cheaper to get than to move from one country to another.)

So the ideal behaviour for avoiding climate crisis is to live in an apartment, sit at home, walk on foot to get exercise, spend as much time and money online as possible and have maximum two kids and maybe we could even start promoting it.

This change might require a generation change, but humans are making quite good progress in this already:
Have you noticed that over 10% of people walking in any city are "in their phone". Driving a car is nowadays mostly impossible, because you cannot chat during that. So why walk or drive overall if your life is in the phone? Why would you need to fly to a vacation to the Mediterranean if you mostly sit in Facebook there, which is the same thing you would do at home.

If you think this is a joke or an utopia, then spending time online is considered as one of the main reasons why young people drink and smoke less and why crime has declined in some major cities. So if online gaming has managed to fight drinking then it might be strong enough to fight the climate crisis.