> There is a blog called, 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. The idea was to take our current energy requires of Earth and extrapolate it at the current 3% year over year growth. I believe it is by the year 3,400 we would use all the energy of the Milky way. The idea was to prove that we cannot grow forever, because in 1,400 years we would somehow use all the energy of a space 100,000 light years across. Good luck with that.
We are still talking about stupidly ridiculously humongous amounts of energy, but the universe itself is a hard limit on energy input. It was real hard punch against my assumptions in life.
From one of my favorite all-time comments on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34349582):
> There is a blog called, 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. The idea was to take our current energy requires of Earth and extrapolate it at the current 3% year over year growth. I believe it is by the year 3,400 we would use all the energy of the Milky way. The idea was to prove that we cannot grow forever, because in 1,400 years we would somehow use all the energy of a space 100,000 light years across. Good luck with that.
We are still talking about stupidly ridiculously humongous amounts of energy, but the universe itself is a hard limit on energy input. It was real hard punch against my assumptions in life.