The year is 2300. The iPhone 279 is released, which is better than the iPhone 278. It's also smaller, and both the 278 and 279 are perfectly recyclable. Even more importantly, the apps available for both have improved over the past year.

Voila, continuing exponential growth.

We can't have exponential population growth, but infinite exponential economic growth? Dollars are just numbers in a computer. Increased economic growth can mean better resource usage rather than more resource usage.

How did you arrive at the 'carrying capacity' of the planet?

"Earth Overshoot Day" [0] is as good a place to start as any if you're serious about answering the question.

They try to calculate, in some detail, at what point in the year the current civilization has used the earth's annual "ability to regenerate" across a range of areas, and convert it into a calendar date. So if we're using twice the earth's annual regeneration, overshoot day would be about July 1. Etc.

Spider off that and you can find some good resources on how it's calculated. Needless to say, it's not a pretty picture at the moment.

[0]: https://www.overshootday.org/

So, the Earth Overshoot Day people know exactly the model of the Universe that they can accurately measure (let alone predict) all these things?

Where is your 'scientific thinking' in questioning all these things?

Earth shoot day depends on the life style of people.

Thus, I don't think it can be used to describe a maximum capacity earth could sustain

That's like saying that the tendency of wolves to eat prey can't be used to describe a maximum capacity of wolves given an amount of prey. Maybe we could support more wolves if they starved a little? Or if they started eating pets in addition to wild prey? Or if they expanded their range?

Knowing the maximum capacity that our Earth seems to be capable of sustaining based on current utilization is an important number, and isn't worthy of such a short-sighted dismissal. If lifestyles do change such that the maximum capacity increases, that's a huge win to be able to track.

It's an important number. I am not dismissing it in general. We don't need to starve more than we have to starve now if we live less wasteful.

That said, when it comes to looking at the maximum capacity earth could sustain, it rather seems short sighted to not consider life style changes while even the article being commented is about shrinking consumption.

It's probably less than where infinite growth takes us.

Do you have a peer reviewed scientific paper that shows any of it?

Do you even know what Growth is?

Since you are in HN, I'm guessing you also know the 2nd law of Thermodynamics?

The same way doomsday preachers arrive at the date of Armageddon.

And you'd think people understood exponential growth after covid. But then I remembered that a sizeable part of the US electorate doesn't think it's real

Never before has humanity been planetary scale. This presents obvious new problems that could previously have been mitigated by migration. No longer, it's a global system operating under unified logic. The defects in that logic cannot be escaped.