Old and fairly trivial insight is that most hockey-stick graphs end up being S-curves and that's already in sight for most of the ones given here. Population is

Old and fairly trivial insight is that most hockey-stick graphs end up being S-curves and that's already in sight for most of the ones given here. Population is on its way to a plateau, so is energy consumption in the rich world, and so on. Economic growth due to poor nations caching up will still keep going for a while but it's not that unlikely that we'll eventually end up in a fairly static situation at least for a time, which wasn't uncommon in human history. runaway scenarios without anything reigning them in are very rare or otherwise we wouldn't be here talking about them because we'd all have drowned in Tribbles already. There's a lot of psychology in these imagined scenarios and relatively little long-run empirical observation because complex systems tend to have a significant amount of constraints and regulatory mechanisms that kick in either voluntarily or involuntarily to impose some limits on growth. They tend to be more cyclical in nature rather than tending towards unlimited or even linear growth.