[yuhaa98]

And you are saying we are anywhere close to the maximal energy that humankind can harvest?

I'd say you have seen nothing yet. And history is on my side here.

Besides, creating smarter things doesn't necessarily need more energy. We are pretty wasteful with energy at the moment. What you are talking about, entropy in the sense of progressing anywhere, is a ridiculously small fraction of what we are currently using energy for. Most of it goes to waste. There are generations of better energy efficiency to come before energy availability that can't be compensated with higher efficiency even becomes an issue. By then, nuclear fusion will be paramount and/or our use of the energy that comes from the sun will be magnitudes improved from what we do today. Just look back 100 years.

If we haven't bombed ourselves back into the stone age before that. Quite a possible outcome too.

[kilgnad]

> And you are saying we are anywhere close to the maximal energy that humankind can harvest?

Nope. But any exponential growth in consumption of energy will hit the existing limit very quickly. Even if that limit was magically increased by 10x we'd still hit it very very quickly.

> higher efficiency even becomes an issue. By then, nuclear fusion will be paramount and/or our use of the energy that comes from the sun will be magnitudes improved from what we do today. Just look back 100 years

Technological gambles are speculative. The failure of fusion is unfortunately just as realistic of a possibility that must be considered in a logical analysis.

[yuhaa98]

Again.

1. "Progress" does not need to imply "exponential growth in consumption of energy".

2. Even if it does, we may be many thousand generations away from hitting a ceiling.

[kilgnad]

>1. "Progress" does not need to imply "exponential growth in consumption of energy".

It doesn't need to imply it. But from historical evidence it DOES imply it.

>2. Even if it does, we may be many thousand generations away from hitting a ceiling.

Not necessarily true. We don't fully know that. We're hitting ceilings with oil already. In the US peak oil already happened and we shifted to shale. We have about 5 more years of that. We're not sure what's left of middle eastern sources.

Other sources aren't ready yet, they're up and coming but we can't fully be sure technology will play out the way we want it to play out.