Economic growth does not strictly require specific raw materials and natural resources. With ingenuity and time, it is almost always possible to utilize alterna

Economic growth does not strictly require specific raw materials and natural resources. With ingenuity and time, it is almost always possible to utilize alternative resources or recycle/reuse existing ones (e.g. seawater desalination). The constraints seem to be our intelligence and perhaps energy. Energy could probably be solved with sufficient intelligence as well--e.g. nuclear fusion. Negative externalities, such as anthropogenic climate change, are a real concern. We do not yet have good ways to neutralize all of those but it does not mean we never will. It is in some sense a race between consumption and invention. John McCarthy, a father of AI, wrote a mini-site on this with some strong arguments: Progress and its Sustainability: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html