[dwaltrip]

Fair enough. That's quicker than I would have guessed, but exponentials are pretty powerful.

If the growth is 1%, then we are good for ~3000 years, even in just our solar system. A tenth of a percent would give us ~30k years in the solar system.

Although, very very low growth would last quite some time on the galactic scale. A hundredth of a percent would give us more than 500k years to reach galactic energy levels. Which may actually be realistic given the difficulties of interstellar travel and cosmic scale engineering.

But yes, it seems that in the next few tens of thousands of years, barring an Earth-shattering revolution in our understanding of energy, we will likely have to learn to live in something much closer to a steady-state system, at least in this solar system.

And even such a paradigm shift would just push out the deadline. But I do think such nitty gritty details of when and how the ceiling is hit will effect how things play out.