Comments on: Limits To Growth

By: Overcoming Bias : This is the Dream Time

Overcoming Bias : This is the Dream Time — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:50:05 +0000

[...] But if income only doubled every century, in a million years that would be a factor of 10^3000, which seems impossible to achieve with only the 10^70 atoms of our galaxy available by then. Yes we have seen [...]

By: The Stationary State « Rick Weber's Blog

The Stationary State « Rick Weber's Blog — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:32:46 +0000

[...] Stationary State Posted on September 27, 2009 by rickweber This post is a response to this post on Overcoming [...]

By: Overcoming Bias : Poor Folks Do Smile

Overcoming Bias : Poor Folks Do Smile — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:49:54 +0000

[...] I don’t see our far future as a repugnant doom. Yes, I doubt we can maintain current growth rates to have 103000 descendants in a million years, since only 1070 [...]

By: Marcio Rocha Pereira

Marcio Rocha Pereira — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 03:44:59 +0000

Human beings are not driven to maximize pleasure. Instead, pleasure is a tool to drive human beings to maximize other things (i seem to think we are currently unsure exactly what, though). Bryan seems to imply that improve must mean have more pleasure, but we are much more complicated than that…

By: fenn

fenn — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:06:13 +0000

sounds like warfare’s not going anywhere

By: nick

nick — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:33:23 +0000

If it turns out that baryon number is not conserved, with the result that we can convert neutrons and protons into photons, we should count photons instead of atoms. Given that there are over 20 orders of magnitude worth of frequency to work with, we may be able to store 10^30 bits per photon, with the result that the neutrons and protons in our Sun, converted into photons of average energy blue, could store about 10^97 bits. Of course, we will need at least a few leptons around to actually process that information and recycle photons. That’s classical data storage — entangled photons may be far better still, at least in terms of raw information capacity.

That gives us some more room at the bottom, but still sub-exponential unless, as mentioned, we rarely collapse qubit superpositions (i.e. if qubit-minds rarely actually think about anything but just keep storing more memories).

By: Mark Bahner

Mark Bahner — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:05:54 +0000

If world population growth continued at today’s rate, in only 1100 years every drop of water on earth (including oceans) would be locked up in the makeup of human flesh.

The world is growing at about 78 million people per year. If growth continued at that rate for 1100 years, the world population would be about 90 billion.

I think you think world population is growing exponentially, but it’s not. It hasn’t been been growing exponentially for several decades.

The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.

Computers have been improving in space utilization more than just about any industry for many decades. Not only is our consumption of computers not slowing down, it’s increasing. This is leading to more employment and less poverty (ask the employees of Microsoft…especially those who bought MS stock).

By: Anders Sandberg

Anders Sandberg — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:19:41 +0000

As a spin-off, I did a calculation of the inevitable thermodynamic costs of expanding a civilization: http://tinyurl.com/l55d8b

It turns out that a “classical” civilization that just converts matter into information storage has no real limit to its expansion speed. However, a civilization close to the Bekenstein bound in terms of information storage has such an enormous entropy cost in converting matter that its expansion is actually heat dissipation limited!

Still, dealing with the entropy output of an advanced civilization is going to be challenging. Good waste management will just grow in value.

By: Forrest Bennett

Forrest Bennett — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:06:28 +0000

Tim: The Beckenstein bound puts hard limits on the available room at the bottom.

By: Overcoming Bias : Future Fertility

Overcoming Bias : Future Fertility — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:42:20 +0000

[...] at least every century. So if overall economic growth doubles less than every century, as I’ve argued it simply must in the long run, income per capital must fall over the long run, eventually to near [...]