Or the speed of light when discussing train speeds?
They're real but aren't we miles away? Genuinely curious. Just seems to me that economic organisation hasn't come anywhere near what physics allows.
The significance of the argument is that once everyone accepts that a seemingly-unstoppable exponential growth trend can be halted by far-off limit A, you can start to have productive discussions about whether it can also be halted by more relevant limits B and C. Sometimes the hard part is just getting past the point that an exponential trend ever need stop for any reason.
The practical question is will our lives be recognizable to someone alive today when we do hit a ceiling? The average person 100 years ago could hardly imagine the way we live. If the limits come in some unimaginable future, what good does it do to worry about it now?
There are plenty of problems that we can foresee in the near to medium term. The finitude of the Earth is not yet an issue.
Serendipitously, Karel Capek's "R.U.R.", the book which popularised the concepts both of robots and of androids, was first published in 1921, 100 years ago this year.
I dunno. I think people from 100 years ago could likely imagine our current lifestyle just fine.
I mean, some of them are still alive, even, and many were involved in making our current lifestyle.
We're not going to run out of atoms. We're definitely on course to running out of stability in our current configuration.
Ask a Malthusian. They see war, famine, disaster. The utter hopelessness of being a Malthusian, or having to hope for a culling or something.
'640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' - Bill Gates (apocryphal, apparently he never said this)
When the Jones' are using their energy-sucking teleporter to travel instantly to work and taking summer vacations to the Moon, when their kitchen is fitted with exotic self-cleaning metamaterials and they tolerate no natural discomfort in their lives, I would think that their neighbors would not be caught dead one step behind them. You can achieve happiness with less - but you can achieve happiness today with much less than your number as well, and most people measure themselves against their neighbors, not some theoretical absolute level of energy usage.
Energy consumption in the developed world tends to increase.
According to OurWorldInData[0] the number is closer to 220 kWH/capita/day, although it does show the usage as stable or even declining over the last decade.
According to the US Energy Information Administration[1] total energy usage seems to have increased. That particular chart stops at 2009, but this tool[2] using their data shows 1. stable usage since ~2007 and 2. roughly 10% increase since 1995, and a 3-fold increase since the start of the data in 1950. By a long time, did you mean since 2007?
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10
[2]: http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/HTML5/climate_change_historical...
But there is a limit.
Current growth rates need an exponential increase in resources.
Even if we -after some technological singularity- could expand a sphere of influence that brings everything in the expanding bubble to complete subatomic level of control, this would mean at most sustainable cubic growth (available resources are growing cubically).
Not exponential growth.
World population is stabilizing, and, indeed, going to decrease. Now what.
I think his main most valuable point is that the status quo can't - and that stands.
Personally chasing constant growth doesn't sound like what we need to be aiming at anyway.
It would be saner to be engineering some long term stable state that we adjust as soon as new potentials become available.
Like aiming at a fixed upper limit maximum human population on earth with an acceptable minimal standard of life as opposed to letting blind growth search out the natural feedback loops instead.
This actually makes me lean towards saying that the economist is right, money is arbitrary anyway so if the argument is actually that the economy can increase forever I see no reason that can't happen physically. It's not real, it can't be real in the future and it's barely real now.
Our money system does need endless growth just to function properly but it only needs endless nominal growth. If inflation is high enough then real interest rates are negative. No need for real growth.
See also: 2000-watt society
I believe heat pollution would only become an issue once we start using several orders of magnitude more energy than we do now.
At least some of the proof of work crypto currency fanboys certainly have their greedy little eyes on it though.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/study-environmental-ben...
I think this is easy enough to find though... maybe they just don't know how to find this stuff.
This is not the issue.
The issue is does increasing economic output, require increasing energy use? The answer is no.
The value unlocked from increasing applied intelligence doesn't require commensurately more energy in all cases.
If we figure out a cure for cancer, it'll likely have nothing to do with increased energy usage.
Maybe we figure out how to control simply and cheaply store CO2 in pellets at the bottom of the ocean. Climate changed solved.
Economic output is just a number, it's how we value the stuff we trade among one another.
So essentially at some point the economy becomes unmanageable and unstable by pure lag. Earlier than that, by human reaction time and decision failures.
HFT is already riding on speed of light distance differences. If you grow the economy even more (in number of actors), the costs become exponentially higher.
And if you're talking real economy, then we're talking actual real resources which are even more finite and scarce than electricity and time lag.
It does not cost more in 'communication' to convey a better idea.
Moreover, communications cost is marginal, so even in an very theoretical scenario in which 'more economic activity requires more communication' - it's not applicable.
"And if you're talking real economy, then we're talking actual real resources which are even more finite and scarce "
Again this is completely false.
Education, Entertainment, Legal Services, Financial Services, R&D - i.e. 'Services' are the 'Real Economy'.
The 'Value Add' provided by applied intelligence is considerably greater than the raw, natural resources economy.
Well… yes, maybe we’ll figure out. But I hope you understand that’s a risky bet ? Climate change CAN be stopped rapidly. But it can’t be reversed (on centuries scale). So each catastrophe frequency increase, each heat record, each impact of the acidification of oceans that happen year after years is here to stay for centuries, at least.
I sincerely hope your CO2 pellets are for today, because if they are not, we will need another plan. And the only working one we have as of today is to stop burning fossil fuels.
The article addresses that by arguing that it would imply energy became arbitrarily cheap, while being scarce and finite. That means someone could buy the whole supply and wipe out their competitors. That contradicts it being arbitrarily cheap, so energy would be a limiting factor.
For example, let's choose something expensive sounding -- platinum. 170 tons per year of production, at $30 million per ton. $5B will let you corner the market for the year. Yet it doesn't happen, for a wide variety of reasons.
Perhaps a world where platinum jewelry is all that is bought and sold. Jewelers improve in skill and the jewelrt becomes ever more intricate and elaborate, such that its value grows ever higher than the raw platinum it's made from.
In such a world, there might be no limit on the jeweler's craft, but could the price of platinum really become arbitrarily small? As time goes on, first the world's greatest jeweler could afford the whole supply, but then even a second rate jeweler, and then eventually anybody could perhaps afford to buy all the raw platinum.
B: Platinum is much easier to corner than energy would be, since platinum mining is limited to a very few number of active minutes. Energy production is quite distributed.
“When the materials point at the sky, the infrared rays can pass straight through the atmosphere and into space. That effectively links the materials to an inexhaustible heat sink, into which they can keep dumping heat without it coming back.”
I agree with jbay808 on the impracticality, but note that in context, I am responding to the question of whether it would be harder to remove the heat than to generate it. Both obviously quickly become impracticable if we expect exponential increases.
The argument boils down to that all economic activity, whether material or just information, requires energy as an input, and at least on one planet, the ability to heat-sink that energy (let alone generate it) must set some finite growth limit.