[PKop]

Part of this question is whether there is a limit to human cognition that we can leverage to answer increasingly difficult questions. It isn't whether there are still unanswered questions. So this is truly an issue of diminishing resources and exhausted low hanging fruit. One of those resources is human cognitive ability, relative to difficulty of finding new discoveries.

Just as there are true limits to for example pursuing economic growth from burning finite cheap fossil fuels, "growth" in the forms that pertain to the issue at hand... economic, cheap energy consumption, scientific discoveries, human cognitive ability to solve problems..these can all certainly bump up against at least short term limits, and the issue of cost matters greatly in a given time period because even bringing to bear the actual resource we have to develop new science and technology suffers from crowding out if economic "growth" is constrained because of diminishing cheap energy.

This shouldn't be surprising if one conceives of what consistent and steady compound growth even at small rates results in after a relatively short period of time. Inevitable that limits in many inter related areas will be reached...and either a collapse occurs or a long period of low or negative growth happens with all the sort of conflict that entails (competition within scarcity).

[JumpCrisscross]

> this is truly an issue of diminishing resources and exhausted low hanging fruit

The fulcrum of disagreement is the power of paradigm shifts. Paradigm shifts change how existing knowledge is interpreted, even by a feeble mind. These are, from what we can tell, randomly distributed. There is no indication that we are running out of them. If anything, their rate of discovery is increasing.

Since paradigm shifts are about prospective, not knowledge, there is no reason to believe they are limited. If anything, our growing knowledge base implies the next shifts will be more powerful than the prior ones.