[Loquebantur]

No, it's not. The "virtualizable" part of the economy is limited. While it gets digitized, the remaining part continues to grow exponentially, rendering the former irrelevant.

The primary problem here is the generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based and all those material products have a very limited lifespan, ending as pollution.

What you need is complete recycling, which necessitates to incorporate that goal in the design phase already.

[cornholio]

> generation of energy and pollution in general. The entire economy is oil-based

The current system is unscalable, sure, but are these fundamental limits that preclude growth?

The total amount of recovereable uranium in the oceans is in the billions of tons. Orders of magnitude more U and Th in the crust. Fusion energy seems possible and the total solar irradiance is astronomical. Self replicating solar system probes, that would turn us into a Kardashev type 2 civilisation, are also conceptually possible, and could use only resources from other planets.

So we are many, many doublings away from hitting the physical limits on growth, and we can barely comprehend how our society would look like in such a scenario.

[tzs]

> The total amount of recovereable uranium in the oceans is in the billions of tons. Orders of magnitude more U and Th in the crust. Fusion energy seems possible and the total solar irradiance is astronomical. Self replicating solar system probes, that would turn us into a Kardashev type 2 civilisation, are also conceptually possible, and could use only resources from other planets.

You are greatly underestimating how fast exponential growth gets out of hand.

At 1% annual growth in human energy use starting from where we are now, in around 9300 years our annual energy use would equal all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I mean all the energy including the energy we'd get from converting all the mass into energy (E=mc^2).

12000 years from now, so a mere 2700 years after we are consuming an entire Milky Way per year, our annual consumption would equal all the energy in the entire observable universe.

There are similar limits if we look at population growth. At 1% annual population growth we would need the mass of the observable universe to make all the living humans in about 12300 years.

For population growth another limit 1% hits in 12000 years is space. Assuming no FTL, since every human is close to Earth now in 12000 years every human has to be within 12000 light years of Earth. The volume of a sphere of radius 12000 light years divided by the population after 12000 years of 1% growth gives a volume available per human that is about equal to the volume of one person.

One I've not calculated is what the limit is when you combine 1% energy growth and the speed of light limit on how fast we can expand human space. Long before the earlier limit of 12000 years to needing all the energy in the universe we'd reach a point where the energy density in human occupied space is enough to turn human space into a black hole.

If anyone wants to calculate that limit I'd love to see the results.

[fluoridation]

The question however, is a) whether what's conceptually possible is actually possible, and b) whether what's possible will become factual before we hit a hard limit. It's small consolation that having a Dyson sphere around the Sun would solve our energy problems if we've already run out of fossil fuels to run our logistics networks, and maybe we should have scaled back on the growth-seeking wasteful expenses and focused more on the bare essentials.