[javcasas]

The initial part of an S-curve looks a lot like an exponential. The final part doesn't.

Finding the second and the third antibiotic for non resistant bacteria may be fast and easy, finding another three antibiotics for resistant bacteria decades later is now crazy hard, as bacteria evolved to resist everything that doesn't also kill humans.

[Legend2440]

Eh, sure, we'll hit limits eventually. We appear to be pretty far off from hard limits like thermodynamics though, and the world after we hit those limits could look very science-fiction.

For antibiotics specifically, we will probably find other ways to fight bacteria even if we never discover another chemical antibiotic. As one technology S-curves, another technology replaces it.

[rbanffy]

> As one technology S-curves, another technology replaces it

Even if for no other reason than us abandoning a diminishing returns approach looking for other alternatives.

We have been kind of at the end of the rope for silicon for quite some time now and we found increasingly heroic ways to protect our investment in silicon based semiconductors, but silicon is not the only option - it’s just the one we have a lot of supply chains already set up.