I don't think it's impossible for energy consumption to scale to those levels, but presumably it can only happen in conjunction with massive changes (maybe orbi

I don't think it's impossible for energy consumption to scale to those levels, but presumably it can only happen in conjunction with massive changes (maybe orbital manufacturing? maybe we run server farms on Mars and do our futuristic energy-intensive computing there?) that invalidate the entire frame of the argument. Maybe in 1950 people would have argued that soldering all those vacuum tubes would be too difficult, and they'd have been correct, but transistors and CAD changed the entire reference frame.