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This is almost entirely a definitional issue, and those are typically somewhat less interesting than the heat generated by the participants who don't realize th

• vimy 5y ago
  > If economic growth is defined simply in terms of tons of refined resources pulled out of the ground, then yes, of course economic growth has a limit. Trivially so. Once we master mining in space we will have limitless resources. I think this decade we’ll see the first attempts.
  • gameswithgo 5y ago
    There is no known engineering path to get there, where you come back with more resources than you spent. Not even if SpaceX Starship works as well as we hope.
    • njarboe 5y ago
      Maybe not with Starship, but with the invention of fusion powered rockets you will be able to. Once fusion powered rockets seem possible and huge profits are able to be foretasted, lots of capital and people will be thrown at fusion tech. This is already starting to happen.
    • mcculley 5y ago
      Why would the resources need to come back here? Once humanity is able to get out onto large space stations, the economy will be there as well.
  • scottiebarnes 5y ago
    We're still limited by the constraints of our capabilities.
  • ben_w 5y ago
    Space isn’t limitless, it’s just very big. While it currently looks like the human population will plateau, there is no guarantee of this; if it returns to exponential growth, and if we are limited to the speed of light, then we get exponential demand increasing with polynomial supply. How much this matters to you depends on if you prefer Total Human Product or Product Per Capita. But if you care about GDP (i.e. of a nation not of humanity as a whole or average per person), the maximum size of any plausible zone of control for any government is likely to be in the order of a solar system or less, based on the historical precedents of communication lag between empire capitals and outer colonies — exponential growth makes this happen faster than you might otherwise expect.
    • andai 5y ago
      Mostly void, partially stars...
  • tremon 5y ago
    Limitless resources in theory, but in practice the limits will be set by logistics and therefore planning. It is of little comfort knowing there's a wheat shipment 5 light-minutes out when there's a famine right now.
  • Arrath 5y ago
    Near limitless chances to really badly screw up, too. If all it takes is one rock hopper to miss the orbital refineries and foundries with a nice hunk of nickel and iron, with an inhabited planet as the backstop..
  • stonemetal12 5y ago
    There are still limits, they are crazy high limits, but still limits. Add enough Mass to the planet and you break the rocket equation (by break I mean fuel required to achieve orbit is grater than the mass of the planet), or we get crushed by the added gravity.
• bannedbybros 5y ago
• croes 5y ago
  >There's no obvious upper limit to how many desires could be satiated, Of course there is: 100% If all desires are satisfied, there is no growth.
  • 7373737373 5y ago
    Is there an upper limit to bliss?
    • slothtrop 5y ago
      It's certainly not limitless, lets say that.
    • tux3 5y ago
      If you assume bliss is something neurons in the brain need to tell keep telling each other about so that it doesn't naturally fade, you can saturate the physical medium that transports the signal, and there comes a point where being too vigorous breaks the wires Intuitively, there's a much lower limit to how much bliss I desire. Too much of a good thing sounds like a bad thing, I do not want that :)
    • klyrs 5y ago
      Kerfentanyl, apparently...
  • scatters 5y ago
    That's the beauty of consumerism; capitalism constantly invents new desires to be satisfied.
    • dasil003 5y ago
      It's deeper than that. How long do people tend to stay happy after they get what they long desired (material or otherwise)?
      • steveylang 5y ago
        Especially if their neighbor/co-worker/social peer just got the bigger and better version?
• gadders 5y ago
  >> If economic growth is defined simply in terms of tons of refined resources pulled out of the ground, then yes, of course economic growth has a limit. Trivially so. Yes, this is obviously the case, but I think people over-estimate how close we are to hitting this limit. It won't happen for thousands of years. We haven't even properly mined the seafloor or the sea itself yet.
  • chii 5y ago
    But by the time we strip mine the sea floor, or extract from the sea itself, we would've killed every wild living thing out there. I hope we don't really reach that point, and just reuse and recycle what has already been extracted.
    • gadders 5y ago
      Well re-use and re-cycle are always good, but you would also hope that technology advanced enough to mine the floor of the pacific would be able to do it in an ecologically sensitive way.
    • jerf 5y ago
      It isn't necessarily the case that all resource extraction necessitates pollution. We often end up with pollution because we don't have enough energy to implement approaches that are more energy-expensive, but pollute less. If we had more energy, perhaps due to cheap fusion, we could extract a lot more resources without necessarily polluting everything. For instance, if we could afford to heat all discarded outputs up to plasma temperatures, we'd never have to chemically pollute anything. We could easily break the chemicals down to safer variants. Most of the elements are either fairly safe or easy to turn into something safe. But by modern standards that's an insane amount of energy. Possible much more sophisticated nano-/bio-tech could do much better. If we had more energy and robotics, we could also do things like backfill our strip mines and put the topsoil back on top. We don't do that because it's absurdly expensive, not because mining intrinsically requires that we tear the landscape apart. But I am aware that I'm talking about making things literally orders of magnitude more expensive than they are now. We couldn't do it now. I'm just saying that the destruction isn't intrinsic to the resource extraction. Even "fossil fuels" would be no big deal if we had tons more energy. We know how to take CO2 out of the air and turn it back into solid forms for long-term storage right now. We just don't have the energy to do it cost-effectively for any current known technique, and we especially can't do it for thermodynamic reasons by trying to use the energy from burned fossil fuels in the first place.
• slothtrop 5y ago
  On desires - I would disagree on two fronts. In the first place our capacity to fulfill desires is limited by time and money. In the second, core desires are ultimately few in number, whereas creative abstractions to satisfy them are effectively limitless, but there are diminishing returns. Think overconsumption or addiction. I think where this leaves us is having a large variety of means to satisfy desire, but consumption per individual (not in terms of dollars but stimulation) falls within a range. As for growth, I think the pandora's box that has been opened is that population (either domestic or abroad) is a necessary component, and natural resources make that possible. On the other hand, a stagnant GDP seems more a crisis for the wealthy than everyone else. The global population is projected to level off in the next 100 years; there will come a point we will have to plan for that. The valid fear is that unlike many historical periods of stagnation and high inequality, this may not be broken up (as it was by war), and ruling classes will have better tools to hold on to wealth and power.
• mbostleman 5y ago
  I came to make this point, but you said it better. The only other thing I was going to mention is that it's a somewhat predictable miss when Nature takes on economics.
• kube-system 5y ago
  Yes, I like to think about something simple like sand: You can build a sand castle with it, a glass bowl, semiconductors, a fiber optic network, or a lot of other things. What we do with resources matters a lot more than the raw materials themselves. We have made tons of improvements, but our utilization of resources is still quite wasteful, and we still have quite a bit to gain.
• TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Focusing on energy inputs instead of resource consumption allows for more generalized approach to the idea of "limits". A material shovel produced requires energy in form of human operator. A Simpsons SD requires energy to play from the electric grid. All energy is traced back to resource consumption it's just a matter of steps involved. The laws of thermodynamics are inescapable. Energy is the value added that ultimately creates what we refer to as the economy. In summary: The "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption. That's that hard wall of the limits on growth.
  • lubesGordi 5y ago
    Exactly. Whenever I see an article like this I think about what the world might be like with ubiquitous nuclear power. How long does the oil in the ground suddenly last you if you're not using it in cars, burning it, etc? How much easier is recycling anything when the power to do so is cheap? And so on and so forth.
    • TrispusAttucks 5y ago
      Nuclear seems like the only way forward.
  • nostrademons 5y ago
    But even within those examples, the energy use per dollar of value generated varies by large orders of magnitude. A Simpsons SD card uses a tiny fraction of a watt hour for a half hour of entertainment (valued, in theaters and DVD rentals, at maybe $3-5). Watch the same episode on an old-style CRT TV and you're looking at 50 or so watt-hours. A Google Search uses about 0.3 watt hours to get you the answer you want. The economic value of it varies based on topic, but if you divide estimated total yearly searches (a couple trillion) by Google's revenue ($257B), you get about $0.12. (Note that at average annual U.S. electricity prices, this electricity costs about 1/300th of a cent, showing the profit involved in turning energy into information retrieval.) A car commuting to work for an hour consumes about 4 kWh (about 200x a laptop watching the Simpsons, and 12,000x a Google Search), but what's the economic value added? Arguably it's economic value destroyed, compared to if we could just live closer to work, because of the lost time and productivity. That's why it doesn't really make sense to say that 'the "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption'. There are many things that generate large amounts of dollars and use very little energy, or even save energy. There are also things that destroy dollars and use lots of energy. By equating the two, you gloss over any distinction or ability to make things more efficient.
• luis_cho 5y ago
  What you are talking its called environmental decoupling. Studies suggest that is not possible to have absolute environmental decoupling globally. Absolute decoupling is when emissions going down while we have economic growth, relative decoupling is when emissions diverge from economic growth. The last one os insufficient for mitigate climate change. https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ Another good resource is Tim Jackson "Prosperity without Growth".
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  The article defines its terms: Economic growth is typically measured by gross domestic product (GDP). This composite index uses consumer spending, as well as business and government investment, to arrive at a figure for a country’s economic output. Governments have entire departments devoted to ensuring that GDP always points upwards. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00723-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00723-1 You're asserting lack of a definition where one does in fact exist. Your assertion is false.
  • vslira 5y ago
    This is not a definition of economic growth, this is a description of how economists derive an indicator to measure it. It’s like saying that space is defined because you can define hot to get a meter Parent is right, when you add subjective considerations to what growth is the answer is not obviously “yes”. Or rather, it still is because eventually the universe will be devoid of subjective experience, but that’s a later point and higher bar than the physical limits of our current ecosystem
    • dredmorbius 5y ago
      No, really, it is the definition, it is the target, and it is what drives policy and practices. I'm not arguing that GDP is perfect, that there aren't other options, and that it captures whatever it is that we mean when we speak of overall true macroeconomic wealth. It is, however, what is meant in economic discussion. The measurement here is the reality so far as policy and theory are concerned.