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> Can Earth sustain a population of 10+ billion humans, the majority of them working full time and for longer times, using up resources at a rapidly increasing

• freeflight 8y ago
  But that whole view is still based on perpetual growth ideas, which imho are quite risky. They have their place to drive expansion, and as you say innovation, but I fear we are giving it too much weight. It's a bit like the "super long-term view", we just assume that we will be constantly able to expand and grow. What lacks in this perspective are the resource restrictions of physical reality. By insisting on constant growth, with barely any considerations for sustainability, it's very likely that at some point in the future we will end up in a resource dead end with no escape. Case in point: Many of us realize Earth only has finite resources, the common counter-argument to that is that we need to innovate and expand into space, to get at these resources. By just assuming "We will get there anyway, so let's keep using up Earth resources at increasing rates" we are acting rather irresponsibly because there are no guarantees we will be able to be a sustainable space-faring species.