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You can have growth without using more material or more energy.
by konschubert 3y ago
You can have growth without using more material or more energy.
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoYeah, you can get more efficient up to a point. What does that buy you, maybe another factor of 10?
- rvbissell 3y agoUltimately, economic growth is driven by population growth.[0] And also, there is a feedback loop where population growth is encouraged by economic growth. Since people require material and energy input, and there is a limit to both on this planet,[1] economic growth is expected to flatten once the population outstrips the Earth's resources. [0] There is also the growth that comes in spurts from technological innovations. Those spurts should be amortized across the entire ranges of years that follow them when assessing the resultant growth. IMO, such technological innovations are akin to data compression, increasing entropy. Over the loooong haul, I'd expect such spurts to have diminishing returns (just like compressing a compressed file has diminishing returns.) [1] I guess expanding our reach beyond Earth would be one of those 'spurts'. EDIT: fixed a word
- andrewjl 3y ago> There is also the growth that comes in spurts from technological innovations. Those spurts should be amortized across the entire ranges of years that follow them when assessing the resultant growth. Technological spurts ultimately drive productivity and the latter in turn drives growth. Why do these spurts need to be amortized across longer periods of time? Especially when many have compounding effects?