Me:
Current growth rates simply cannot continue at familiar levels for ten thousand more years. We’ll eventually learn everything worth knowing about how to arrange atoms, and growth in available atoms will be limited by the speed of light.
I’m baffled. You don’t have to be a sci-fi guy to think that in the next century we’ll get working virtual reality. And once we have that, why couldn’t economic growth of 1% (or 10%) continue forever in simulations? In the real world, we can’t all be emperor of an infinite universe. But I don’t see why every one of us couldn’t preside over our own simulated utopias?
As for all this talk of atoms: Economics is about value, not matter. As long as people regard vivid virtual goods as acceptable substitutes for actual goods, how can the scarcity of atoms stop everyone from having everything he desires? Robin might respond that computing power will be too scarce to simulate a big virtual world in great detail. But who really cares if the simulation is accurate down to the microscopic level anyway?
Let’s try some numbers. Today we have about ten billion people with an average income about twenty times subsistence level, and the world economy doubles roughly every fifteen years. If that growth rate continued for ten thousand years the total growth factor would be 10200.
There are roughly 1057 atoms in our solar system, and about 1070 atoms in our galaxy, which holds most of the mass within a million light years. So even if we had access to all the matter within a million light years, to grow by a factor of 10200, each atom would on average have to support an economy equivalent to 10140 people at today’s standard of living, or one person with a standard of living 10140 times higher, or some mix of these. Continue reading "Limits To Growth" »
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