[reasonattlm]

Malthus was wrong in principle. He didn't understand human action or economics, and that misunderstanding remains very common. See:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.ph...

"Common Malthusianism - the idea that a given resource (such as living space or food) will run out in the future based upon extrapolation of present trends - stems from fundamental misunderstandings about economics, human action and change. We create change in response to our environment; our self-interest leads us to constantly strive at the creation of new resources where old resources are becoming scarce and expensive. This is the path to profit for the individual - and progress for all. One needs a certain amount of willful blindness to avoid seeing the process in action now and in recent history."

[yummyfajitas]

"Common Malthusianism" is a strange name to apply to a claim Malthus didn't make. Malthus didn't attempt to extrapolate current trends, he merely pointed out (correctly) that there will eventually be a limit to productivity. From "An Essay on the Principles of Population":

We may be quite sure that among plants, as well as among animals, there is a limit to improvement, though we do not exactly know where it is. It is probable that the gardeners who contend for flower prizes have often applied stronger dressing without success. At the same time, it would be highly presumptuous in any man to say, that he had seen the finest carnation or anemone that could ever be made to grow. He might however assert without the smallest chance of being contradicted by a future fact, that no carnation or anemone could ever by cultivation be increased to the size of a large cabbage; and yet there are assignable quantities much greater than a cabbage. No man can say that he has seen the largest ear of wheat, or the largest oak that could ever grow; but he might easily, and with perfect certainty, name a point of magnitude, at which they would not arrive. In all these cases therefore, a careful distinction should be made, between an unlimited progress, and a progress where the limit is merely undefined.

He then observed the tendency of humans to reproduce until the limits of their environment are reached and concluded that poverty will be the terminal state of humanity.

Malthus was merely wrong on this empirical point - humans are willing to voluntarily stop reproducing under certain cultural and economic circumstances. These circumstances involve modern levels of economic productivity, technologies (birth control) invented 100 years after his death, and western cultures. He wasn't wrong on principle, he merely lacked the data we have today.

[spindritf]

> he merely pointed out (correctly) that there will eventually be a limit to productivity

I don't understand this point. Why would there be a limit to productivity, especially with machines and computers to leverage our efforts thousandfold and more?

And how could anyone know that such limit exists, even if it is actually reached one day? That would require predicting any possible innovation of the future.

[brazzy]

As long as the measure of productivity corresponds to something physical (which even bits on a harddisk are), then an exponential increase in productivity (as we have seen in the past) would eventually require humanity and its products to form a sphere whose radius grows faster than the speed of light.

Do you agree that that is a pretty hard limit?

[TheSOB88]

I think you may have skipped some steps... Could you fill in the middle a bit? I'm confused.

[Retric]

Let's suppose the amount of physical goods produced increases 1% each year. Let's add that as physical objects they take up some space minimum amount of time. Now let's add that humanity is spreading out in all directions at the speed of light. If humans cover 1 light year of space they can expand faster than the new amount of stuff. However Volume = 4/3 pi * radius ^ 3 so what happens when humanity covers 1,000 light years. Well, next year they need to put 1% more stuff into 1002^3 / 1000^3 = 0.6% more space which means they need to increase the density which at some point means you have a black hole.

PS: 1% growth per year seems slow and sustainable but in 20,000 years your talking about 2.7 with 86 zeros after it. Start with 1 atom for one second and compare it with every atom in the earth for a year and your only at 4.2 with 57 zeros. So if the total economic output of humanity was 1 atom we could not sustain 1% economic growth per year for 30,000 years.

Edit: This assumes that the economy is based on physical goods, if we assume intangibles can take up 99.99...9% of the economy then 1% growth is possible for long periods of time even if it's somewhat meaningless.

[brazzy]

In out three-dimensional space, volume grows with radius at r^3. If something physical grows exponentially (2^t), then the radius of its volume needs to increase over time at an accelerating rate, which means the growth of that radius will eventually surpass c.

[barry-cotter]

I don't understand this point. Why would there be a limit to productivity, especially with machines and computers to leverage our efforts thousandfold and more?

There are limits to what you can do with matter. It's unlikely the economy (our productive capacity) will continue to grow much for 100,000 years after all mass we can get at is weird ass artificial quark composite computronium.

[6ren]

Yes, I think a limit on productivity amounts to a limit on knowledge. Does knowledge have a limit? There's no evidence for it; all our present mathematics of complexity suggests not (but it's possible one will be discovered...)

However, energy needs do seem to increase with productivity, and there's limit on how much energy we can get from the sun (a dyson sphere encloses the sun, capturing all its energy). But there's some assumptions here: that we can't discover ways of being productive that require less energy (and wouldn't that enhancement itself be "productive"?); that we can't discover other sources of energy (e.g. room temperature fusion micro-suns - or something better).

Once you factor in the unknown (i.e. knowledge that we don't yet have) it's hard to know what the limits are. I guess the entire universe is a limit on matter... if we can't discover a way to make more matter... or more universes.

[Symmetry]

There are actually mathematical limits to the amount of information that can be stored within a given volume, the Bekenstein bound, which is a lot like a limit to knowledge.

[6ren]

Well... if we can make new universes, the volume isn't limited.

[G_Morgan]

Actually we know for a fact such a limit exists. There are physical limits on how much energy can be extracted from a certain mass.