C2 there is indeed sustainable growth, though not in the petri dish load of bacteria sense. Nor in a single economic aspect such as crude oil production or number of humans of the current variety. But there has been sustainable growth for 30,000 years since our ancestral Adam left Africa to get it all going [though that was almost certainly not his plan].
Shift thinking from simple growth in, for example, horse numbers increasing exponentially from the industrial revolution until now to paradigm shifts in the growth to bicycles, Model T, buses, trains, and then another paradigm shift to Boeing and A380 to really move people. That's transportation growth all the way and yet New York and the countryside are not covered in horse poop and grass is not eaten to a nubbin everywhere. We can afford to turn crops in fuel for cars [though it's a daft idea given current economics].
Beware of believing mathematical sounding ideas like "the exponential function says that growth can't continue". It actually can continue and it can go even go sustainably exponentially parabolic into hyperbolic functions, possibly leading eventually to asymptotic. There is no apparent limit to growth. The sky is not the limit because that's a minor bound, nor is consciousness limited because the current wet chemistry process is not the end stage of sentience development.
Having enjoyed 30,000 years of continuous [near enough] improvement, sustainably and exponentially, why should we expect a sudden glitch to develop now? If oil totally runs out, that doesn't preclude economic growth. Burning oil is so last-century. It's like thinking all the whales are gone so the wheels of industry [lubricated by sperm whale oil at one time] will grind to a halt when the unsustainable whaling is ended. The oil industry simply came up with other lubricants and metallurgists made better gears, including inductively coupled electrical drives instead of mechanical contact.
Not only is growth sustainably permanent, the rate of growth is currently pathetic, with economic entropy hindering the rate of growth. With eugenics continuing to improve human genes, the rate of sustainable growth can be accelerated parabolically. But that's just the beginning.
Mqurice |
