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by nootropicat 1479 days ago
>Are there limits to the growth on a finite planet?

Yes, but we are 4 orders of magnitude away from them. Adding the potential for space industry, this grows to 13 orders of magnitude. That's ~1000 years of 3% annual growth assuming no efficiency gains, but we still have about 8 orders of magnitude available in computation efficiency, which gives us about 1600 years of 3% growth until hitting 2 on the Kardashev scale. Only close to it limits to growth become a real consideration.

Anyone claiming we are hitting fundamental limits of growth now is a doomer. We may be hitting limits of growth given currently deployed technology, but that's a completely different statement.

1 comments

> Yes, but we are 4 orders of magnitude away from them. Adding the potential for space industry, this grows to 13 orders of magnitude

Would you mind providing a reference for this? I don't doubt your statements, but it would be great to be able to research further.

+1