Re:Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
by mozumder on Saturday March 26, 2016 @08:04PM
(#11368125)
There is no limit to consumption or available resources.
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Re:Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
by majewsky on Saturday March 26, 2016 @09:41PM
(#11368432)
There may be no upper bound on the absolute amount of available resources, but there is still a limit on how fast you can expand.
Consider the following maximal example: If all of Earth's resources are exhausted (whatever that means, I don't rely on any exact definition), we need to head outwards into space. Because our expansion is limited by the speed of light, we can at most cover a distance
r(t) = c * t
and thus a volume of space V(t) = (c * t)^3
where t is the time spent travelling through space. The amount of available resources (assuming an even distribution of resources on the scale of the universe) is proportional to V, and thus to t^3.Cubic growth is much much much much less than exponential growth. In fact, the exponential function can be shown to grow faster than any power function.