Is there anything else we could use a lithographic-like process to make massive numbers of very cheaply, yet still find buyers for?
Floors of a modern skyscraper are nearly that - they're made with moulds that get reused again and again on every floor. But to get decent scaling, you really need to make instances in at least 2, and preferably 3 dimensions in one go.
We've already done it with things like the printing press that can churn out books very cheaply - but it turns out that we've now reached the limit of the numbers of books people want.
Humans also reproduce exponentially - with a sufficiently high birth rate, numbers of people can rapidly grow. One needs enough space to support that growth, and we are sadly lacking in that... Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast-scaling of civilization?
Very few. The thing with litho is that materials inputs, and outputs are nearly the same, it's just the value coming defies conventional economics.
Thermodynamics limits all physical processes by entropy, but nothing limits the entropy itself.
For a few decades (assuming fixed rate), until the population doubles and we'll be overpopulating two planets. We need to either slow down on the exponent - not just population, but also markets - or figure out interstellar travel rather quickly.
By the time mankind would be able to populate Mars, we would've probably have no effort to just build cities in space.
The amount of steel, and aluminum you can make just from moon, and earth is enough for billions of space cities.
You'd have to pack nuclear reactors to provide power (though that's a given for any kind of serious activity in space anyway), and your scientific and operational capabilities would be limited/made difficult by the lack of sunlight.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...
We did this. Population growth is slowing rapidly.
Our use, or the growth rate of use? It's good when the latter goes down, but we're not out of the woods as long as it stays > 1.
> Actually it’s more likely to be the opposite - growth is more likely to be in services and moving to electricity, which is renewable.
Most services have consumables, and electrification of everything is very production-intensive. And while digital services may be growing faster than manufacturing these days, manufacturing is still growing.
Yes, in theory, we can have economic growth without commensurate manufacturing growth, but I think we're still couple abstraction layers short in our economy before we could think about running it completely on imaginary things.
With a sufficiently high birth rate, daycare, cheap real estate, schools with less than 100 pupils per class, free higher education, and solid, assured pensions, and state elderly care.
Human needs are not bespoke.
What’s actually happening in the US is houses are getting larger because city governments are run by old people who nitpick all apartment buildings (because they think they’re ugly) and approve unlimited expensive single-family houses, which have only gotten larger over time.
If we funded more local public education directly from non-property-tax sources (or made public education more efficient), a lot of the resistance to lower-cost housing would disappear.
Saying it being a half-success would be a complement.
If a Union's citizen could've choose in between Union's kindergarten, and an American one, he wouldn't need to choose, though some people say daycare wasn't as bad in Western countries of the bloc.
I would still admit, Union's secondary education was a rare somewhat half-success story, and it only looks so good if you compares it to USA, but not so much other Western bloc countries.
China tried mass housing along Union's model, and it failed miserably (though this failure could've probably been called a success by standard of places like California.) It took it to adopt capitalist real estate model to get where it is now, and even today, Beijing has no viable recipe how to house 60% of population that got to stay behind in the industrialisation drive.
The bling-bling Chinese 1st tier cities most Westerners get to see only represent how 5% of China population live, and even they get to house most of its citizens in rather gloomy "bedroom district" type suburbs which most outsiders lauding "Chinese housing model" never see.
The quality of housing in China drops with inverse square root of a distance from nearest 1st tier city, and from downtown to suburb.
> Why haven't we better stardized housing, education, and food to scale?
In other words, some most essential living needs are hardest one to scale, and mostly not for physical, but for social, and organisational reasons.
The issue with command economies has always been the producers have no incentive to succeed, hence productivity is atrocious.
But has anyone ever tried something like a fixed-price contract for standardized essentials, on a national scale?
Also plenty of monopolies do exactly that at enormous scales, Bell System/Western Electric is a good example.
See: 1/6/2021 events at the US Capitol, the number of children that die annually due to malnutrition, etc.
A TOPS500 computer is gonna set you back a few million $, so you're only going to have one of them and it's economic to employ a team of well qualified people to write software and interface relatively directly with the hardware.
Now that same computing power can be purchased by ~anyone and most of those people are not specialists and have essentially no ability to write software for the platform, so (from a design perspective) it's a waste of time designing an interface that allows them to do so.
If your goal is to have a small powerful platform aimed at people who want to run software on it directly that's completely doable. Just see the raspberry pi and the raft of similar devices now available.
... and it's incapable of doing anything useful without even bigger computers somewhere else.
Progress is so odd sometimes.