[jessenichols]

There are no resource limits, only limits to the creativity of people to create explanations that allow us to transform raw materials from one state to another.

See The Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch and More From Less by McAfee.

[gnramires]

This is false. There are resource limits, unfortunately (I guess?). Thermodynamics is a hard limit. There are many soft limits as well. Please look at this paper for an incredibly well researched physics-based review: (to appear in Nature Physics) https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pd...

[gnramires]

Excerpt:

> At present, the waste heat term is about four orders of magnitude smaller than the solar term. But at a growth factor of ten per century, they would reach parity in roughly 400 years. Indeed, the surface temperature of Earth would reach the boiling point of water (373 K) in just over 400 years under this relentless prescription. Clearly, extrapolating our recent — seemingly modest — 2.3% annual energy growth very far into the future quickly becomes ridiculous, and cannot happen.

> This is not intended to suggest that waste heat is a bigger problem than, say, climate change from carbon dioxide emissions (...)

[adastra22]

Limits which are millions, billions, or trillions of times beyond current capacities. For the moment, thermodynamic limits don't apply.

[tzs]

Exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect. For instance if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years the total volume of all living people would be more than the total volume of all the space within 13000 light years of Earth.

So unless we get faster than light travel or we greatly reduce the amount of space into which you can physically cram a living human we are under 13000 years away from a pretty hard upper limit.

Make more realistic assumptions than speed of light expansion of humanity and that limit gets a lot shorter even with growth rates quite a bit lower than 1%.

[dane-pgp]

> if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years

And if we sustained a 0.03% annual population reduction rate (like South Korea recently experienced) there would be less than 100 people on Earth after just 600 years.

So I agree that exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect, but I also think that trying to predict cultural norms 13 millennia from now is likely to be counter-productive.

[FeepingCreature]

Uploading should allow us to vastly reduce the amount of space in which you can run a human mind.

[gnramires]

Per the article, actually about 100-1000 times beyond current capacities.

In a way I agree that the feasible limits, even on Earth, may be orders of magnitude larger (say, in terms of population, perhaps) than we currently have. But the current rate of growth in any case is probably unsustainable because of imbalances like co2 emissions. I do think it's feasible to change to renewable energy in the short term, if only political motivation was a bit higher (please, go out and vote focused on climate change, folks!). If I were to lay out a strategy for humankind, I'd say we should focus on climate change for the next few decades, and then we can resume growing (to avoid possible collapse).

Limits to technology are actually non-trivial due to the atomic nature of objects, limited number of chemical elements with limited range of properties, etc.. Intelligence itself isn't free and keeping the Great Self-sustaining Rube Goldberg contraption working is not trivial. It's very hard to predict what limitations we can overcome -- see Moore's law slowing down. Some limits we've almost reached such as luminous efficacy (LEDs in lm/W). Soon we'll be faced with the question of whether we want to make Earth into a Caves of Steel landscape (ending most natural life to create a hyper-efficient human/machine habitat) capable of sustaining more humans or a Solarpunk landscape (preserving natural ecosystems) with a more limited population. I think there's a large degree of arrogance to the first, because I don't feel competent enough to evaluate the true value of animal lives, supposing a large quantity of animals are sentient, and they have intrinsic scientific and cultural value. I think this requires an exercise in imagination from all of us. In any case, it's probably a great idea if we could at least keep the oceans, rainforests, and major national parks healthy.

One crazy dream I have is to colonize not Mars, but Mercury. In Mercury solar energy density is crazy high. There's even some thermal energy from the solar thermal gradient. You can dig to get to nice temperature ranges and be safe from radiation, all this works well since the planet is tidally locked and therefore doesn't rotate, there's no diurnal variation. You can build a crazy Cave-of-Steel there and live your life in a cramped cell playing video games (or [insert activity]), if that's what your vision of heaven is.

In any case: Hack the Planet!*

*: In a good way, of course :)

[adastra22]

Diamond-based molecular nanotechnology, combined with fusion and high efficiency solar as sources of power will make all of our technology and infrastructure carbon sinks. By the end of this century I expect we will be concerned about CO2 going too low and causing a glacial period.

PS Mercury is too far in-system to be that useful. It takes less energy to get to/from the outer planets than it does Mercury. The cold traps on the poles are interesting though--mercury potentially has all the raw material needed for a self-sufficient industrial colony.

[sidewndr46]

You have suggested in the same comment that somehow we will have nearly limitless carbon-negative energy but also that the amount of energy to get to Mercury is too high to make the trip worth it. This does not follow from the initial assumption.

[adastra22]

Why spend X/kg to get something from mercury when you could spend 1/4 or 1/8 as much to get it from the asteroid belt?

[Dylan16807]

We can just turn off the carbon sinks in that case, there's plenty of carbon around to grab off the ground. And release some methane if needed.

[ben_w]

Eh, if it's economical to have the sinks at that scale, we probably won't turn them off for the same reason we "could" turn the CO2 sources off but don't.

[OrvalWintermute]

> co2 emissions

The ironic thing is that some of the earth's most fertile periods were associated with high levels of co2.

Because co2 reduces plant need for water, reduces desertification, and massively increases the food supply.

Given that solar power beaming is technologically feasible and practical, it is likely that the future will not be power limited like we are today.

[adastra22]

The ideal setup is probably CO2 levels quite a bit higher than today’s, but with a sunshade filtering out UV-B wavelengths. All of earth would be habitable, but without major weather swings.

[ben_w]

Ideal for plants is bad for us.

[pdonis]

Of course if you assume continued exponential growth you will run into limits. The correct response to that is to not assume continued exponential growth indefinitely, since in the real world that never happens.

In actual real world systems, the growth curve is sigmoidal: it starts out with exponential growth, becomes linear, then asymptotically flattens as system constraints are approached. This is already happening with human population, and should be expected to start happening with other resource curves in the fairly near term. Any properly grounded analysis would look at the situation from this point of view.

[ben_w]

The exponential growth of neutron flux in a detonating nuke may be overwhelmed by a different function as the pieces fly apart, but I wouldn't want to be part of that even allowing for it being a metaphor.

[honkler]

wrong. As system constraints are reached, growth becomes negative. In other words, you need a steady supply of resources just to maintain existing stuff.

[pdonis]

No, you don't, because "resources" don't magically vanish once you've used them. They just become harder to extract (assuming they're not already being renewed--in the biosphere, "resources" are constantly being renewed by biological processes); but that's what technology is for. For example, it is said that we are using up fossil fuels; but combustion processes don't need "fossil fuels" specifically, they just need easily transportable liquid fuels with decent chemical energy content, and we can make those, because the atoms that the fuels are made of are still there; they didn't vanish when we burned the fuel. We don't do that now because it's cheaper to use fossil fuels while we have them; but of course that will change as fossil fuels run out.

Similar remarks apply to just about anything we currently call "waste"; sooner or later, if we need to, we will find ways to recycle all of that "waste" into something usable. The key limitation is population growth, but as I've already said, population growth is already into the "asymptotically flattening" phase.

It's possible, of course, that population growth will in fact go negative (many projections assume that); but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. The exact sigmoid curve is obviously an idealization; real world systems do oscillate about reasonable equilibrium points instead of just staying stuck at them.

[ch4s3]

I think the parent post means that resources are strictly speaking improved goods not raw materials. I’m that sense innovation and thermodynamics are the limitations, not what rocks we pull out of the ground.

[Bloating]

We're be long dead before then

[PKop]

> limits to the creativity of people

Yes, therefore limits. At least in the short and medium term (which could be 1000s of years). Look at the technological advancement of Roman empire, lost for a millennium before human ingenuity advanced past that level again.

Good video from Jonathan Blow on rise of complexity leading to collapse and lost knowledge [0]. Add in energy and resource constraints (for the given world popuplation numbers) and we may be in for a bad time for a while in the near future.

[0] https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk

[Bloating]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxsLrteNl0E