> If we presume the latter figures stay the same (they won't) then in a mere 944 years the human population would be such that there's only one square meter of land per human alive.
not a problem - with the current energy consumption growth we'll boil off the oceans in half of that time.
Heck, at that biodensity just human body heat would probably boil off the oceans... if the people could feed themselves with nuclear greenhouses underground to avoid the limits of solar insolation.
But the point that economics assumes as a tenet a clearly nonphysical core assumption is a problem. It is weird to me how hard it is to find academic literature on this.
I guess they all figure it's either a problem that's so long term it's presumptuous to try to solve it so early on, that the definition of "growth" will just change to make it always true, or the math is just hard. My guess is the first two to be honest, they're plenty smart when it comes to math... just not always making realistic models.
I guess economists assume that economics is really a social discipline. When arguments about hard limits are made, they IME come from physicists. I particularly like a decade-old (time flies!) Do The Math series. The post which makes a prediction about the oceans in 400-ish years assuming 2.3% yoy growth in particular is here: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
I guess when I look for inspiration about exponential growth my goto would be Dyson from 1960. I did get a degree in physics and like the blog post though, so I'm with you there.
"The reader may well ask in what sense can anyone speak of the mass of Jupiter or the total radiation from the sun as being accessible to exploitation. The following argument is intended to show that an exploitation of this magnitude is not absurd. First of all, the time required for an expansion of population and industry by a factor of 10^12 is quite short, say 3000 years if an average growth rate of 1 percent per year is maintained. Second, the energy required to disassemble and rearrange a planet the size of Jupiter is about 10^44 ergs, equal to the energy radiated by the sun in 800 years. Third, the mass of Jupiter, if distributed in a spherical shell revolving around the sun at twice the Earth's distance from it, would have a thickness such that the mass is 200 grams per square centimeter of surface area (2 to 3 meters, depending on the density). A shell of this thickness could be made comfortably habitable, and could contain all the machinery required for exploiting the solar radiation falling onto it from the inside.
It is remarkable that the time scale of industrial expansion, the mass of Jupiter, the energy output of the sun, and the thickness of a habitable biosphere all have consistent orders of magnitude. It seems, then a reasonable expectation that, barring accidents, Malthusian pressures will ultimately drive an intelligent species to adopt some such efficient exploitation of its available resources. One should expect that, within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star."
> Heck, at that biodensity just human body heat would probably boil off the oceans...
...so if we could just harness all of that energy by turning the humans into a kind of battery...and then place them in a simulation of some sort so they don't go mad from having only one square meter of space to live in...and have the whole thing run supervised by the new super intelligent machines we are on the verge of creating...
not a problem - with the current energy consumption growth we'll boil off the oceans in half of that time.