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Limits On Growth of Energy Use and Economies
snoop.daub writes "Dr. Tom Murphy, professor of astrophysics at UCSD, has a new blog called 'Do The Math,' and the first few posts are doozies. In the first, he shows the impossibility of continued exponential growth in energy use. Even if a new, 'free' energy source is developed, thermodynamic limits on efficiency mean that the heat associated with converting this energy into useful work will increase the temperature of the earth to unbearable levels within 300 years. In the second, he extends the argument to economic growth. The timescales there are faster, only 50-100 years. Fascinating stuff. Time to stop breeding, folks, or to get our butts into space."
"strong, smart, "
I wouldn't make the assumption.
History is filed with angry stupid mobs killing smart people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Denial is a powerful instinct. You can tell them the ship went aground a long time ago, and they still won't believe it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You don't need a PHD or a complex study, just common sense.
Why do so many people in finance continue to insist on growth?
We should be focusing on steady state sustainability.
No, you're simply claiming perpetual technological growth to compensate for physical limits. At some point you hit diminishing returns - even with technology. Compare a Pentium III from 10 years ago to a Quad Core i7 from today. Yeah today's machines are faster and have more memory - but not stunningly so. In fact, there's not so much difference between the machines as a 1977 XT with 128k, a tape drive and a monochrome monitor and a 1987 80386 with megabytes of memory, megabytes of hard disk space, a VGA monitor, sound card, multitasking, etc. Now leap forwards to 1997 and your Pentium II... better but only incrementally so.
You could argue that this scenario is specific to computers but it's not. This is why you don't have your flying car. This is why life expectancy has shot up from 50-odd years to the seventies and is hovering there. This is why cancer patients live longer free of the symptoms of their disease, but the overall mortality of their disease hasn't changed much. There are hard limits to technology, too. It would be foolish to ignore them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The yeast in the bottle of grape juice said the same thing too.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
The difference is that his statement is based on natural laws, rather than assumptions about the source of the energy. Unless the fundamental laws of thermodynamics turn out to be wildly incorrect, his statement will stand.
Denying this by claiming that technology will always improve is like denying that there's an end to Moore's law. Yes, we've been able to find ways to keep it going so far. But by 2150, some quick math says that transistors would need to be smaller than the Planck length. It requires some serious magical thinking to believe that not only will we reach that target, but that we'll be able to keep making them even smaller than that!