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Re:When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed by ars on Thursday May 10, 2012 @10:29PM (#3957268)
The resources are created by the population. Metals are infinitely recyclable. So is water (distribution is the problem, not existence, and distribution can be solved if you have people who need it and are willing to do the work).

You don't need oil to make plastic - you can literally make it out of air (although it's harder, all the atoms necessary are in air).

All types of energy are more or less interchangeable, If one runs out, switch to a different one.

Animals use resources they find. Humans create those resources.

Re:When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed by meric on Thursday May 10, 2012 @11:27PM (#3957461)
Yes but at some point there will be a physical limit. Earth's energy income will always be limited by the Sun's energy output. So no, not infinitely. (I imagine making plastic out of air would take a lot of energy.)

Before you tell me how much energy the Earth gets compared to how much we use, I'm going to pre-emptively reply "Exponential growth".

Re:When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed by ars on Friday May 11, 2012 @01:19AM (#3957823)
> I imagine making plastic out of air would take a lot of energy.

Not much more than you are otherwise loosing by using the oil instead of burning it. The hard part is getting carbon - not a lot of CO2 in the air.

> I'm going to pre-emptively reply "Exponential growth".

But we are not having exponential population growth right now. And even if we were, the universe is big REALLY big, stupendously unimaginably big. Even just the Earth is enormous, and we are nowhere close to filling it up.

Re:When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed by meric on Friday May 11, 2012 @04:02AM (#3958204)
Yes I know the universe is REALLY BIG but infinity is INFINITELY bigger. I am saying population cannot grow, infinitely. There will be a limit.
Re:When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed by ars on Friday May 11, 2012 @06:03AM (#3958473)
How do you know? No one knows if the universe is infinite or not. And even exponential growth takes time - if it takes longer than the heat death of the universe (assuming a finite universe in both time and space) to fill it up, then it doesn't matter if it's exponential.

And to bring things back to this earth, this isn't going to be a problem for such a long time that predicting anything whatsoever about it is futile.

Re:When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed by meric on Friday May 11, 2012 @07:23AM (#3958677)
>> And to bring things back to this earth Let's end this with a Asimov short story. http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Re:When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed by alttag on Friday May 11, 2012 @08:29AM (#3958848)
> Earth's energy income will always be limited by the Sun's energy output.

This seems to discount tidal, wind, and geothermal energy sources. Wearable devices that capture kinetic movements are a possibility too. As technology progresses, efficiency increases.

While what you're saying seems theoretically possible, it also seems a long way off (perhaps several millennia).

Re:When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed by ams6110 on Friday May 11, 2012 @10:07AM (#3959220)
Wind energy is solar energy, indirectly.