Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

Re:Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN f... by tzs on Wednesday September 21, 2022 @09:30PM (#32933843)

Exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect. For instance if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years the total volume of all living people would be more than the total volume of all the space within 13000 light years of Earth.

So unless we get faster than light travel or we greatly reduce the amount of space into which you can physically cram a living human we are under 13000 years away from a pretty hard upper limit.

Make more realistic assumptions than speed of light expansion of humanity and that limit gets a lot shorter even with growth rates quite a bit lower than 1%.

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Re:Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN f... by dane-pgp on Thursday September 22, 2022 @02:52PM (#32943065)

> if we sustained a 1% annual population growth for another 13000 years

And if we sustained a 0.03% annual population reduction rate (like South Korea recently experienced) there would be less than 100 people on Earth after just 600 years.

So I agree that exponentials can get away from you a lot faster than you might expect, but I also think that trying to predict cultural norms 13 millennia from now is likely to be counter-productive.

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Re:Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN f... by FeepingCreature on Thursday September 22, 2022 @06:28AM (#32937000)

Uploading should allow us to vastly reduce the amount of space in which you can run a human mind.

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