On a finite planet, how is perpetual growth supposed to work indefinitely?
For all practical intents and purposes, the finite resources available on this planet and in the universe are more than sufficient, though.
How can we know this is true? Like immediately, sure. But can we keep growing and extracting resources like we do for another thousand years? Ten thousand years?
Like we're already pushing the limit on arable land. It doesn't seem plausible we'll be able to somehow increase crop yields even times to sustain the sort of growth we're projecting. At that point, the entire planet's land area would need to be farmland, even if it is currently desert or mountains or whatever.
And of course, growth may hop onto other planets.
As far as I've seen, there absolutely is broad agreement among scientists about the physical reality at play. But (as usual) soft-headed business and political people ignore what they can't face.
As recently as a few years ago, Ehrlich stated that a collapse of civilization is a "near certainty" in the coming decades; never mind the fact that had any of the predictions in his 1968 book come true, there might be only half as many humans now as there actually are.
Has humanity's scientific prowess improved so much since then that today's predictions are that much more accurate? Perhaps, but considering that we haven't put another man on the moon since then, maybe not. There's a growing problem in science of fake papers[0] due to the "publish or perish" nature of academia; it points to at least some level of incentive for there to be "a broad agreement among scientists" about the state of things, for career and funding purposes if nothing else.
In the meantime, the "physical reality at play" is such that the number of deaths worldwide from climate-related disasters today is about one-third that of 50 years ago. That's not one-third of the rate; that's one-third in absolute number of deaths, despite the human population having literally doubled over that time. We can attribute this to a higher capacity for developing countries to deal with disasters due to their growing material wealth.
As usual, high-minded visionaries never let a crisis go to waste. Remember that Al Gore's Nashville house uses about 200k kWh a year (about 20x the average American house); Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry routinely flies aboard his own private jet; and Martha's Vineyard, supposedly being literally eaten away today[2], is home to the Obamas' 30-acre, 11-and-three-quarter-million-dollar property.
[0]: https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-pape...
[1]: https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/weather-relate...
[2]: https://apnews.com/article/business-climate-environment-and-...
Not a single person (I mean that quite literally) familiar with the actual, hands-on, empirical work going on in the field by tens of thousands of real scientists in thousands of research institutions private and public alike in a couple of hundred nations covering every ecosystem on the planet is in doubt that the living world is in deep peril.
Neither is anyone who has ever lived for any period outside of a well-protected urban area. My region has been swept with an unprecedented sequence of floods and fires over the last few years. Two almost total destructions by flood in 2022 alone. We will never again have permanent road & telecoms infrastructure (it is routinely destroyed). And that's just the most obvious surface. Anyone familiar with the flora, fauna, and water systems here knows that the ecosystems are in an advanced state of collapse. That's repeated over almost the entirety of the globe.
Forget historical culture wars. Just survey contemporary, real-world, empirical science. I'm not going to cherry-pick a few irrelevant links from a google scurry like you have done. You need to do a bit of homework. You just look daft without it. Get over your fear and have a good, clear-sighted look at reality. You'll probably feel better.
You must be a communist that wants to destroy people's quality of life! You couldn't possibly just want the de-growth of wasteful production to a circular and more sustainable economy; you must just want to destroy the economy itself!! You hate poor countries maybe you should try living in one so I can keep burning 20 liters of gasoline to get to work every day. It can't be that you want to make the QoL more equal for everyone on the globe.
Plus we can just kill the majority of life on Earth, we'll just genetically modify replacements anyway, it can't be that hard, we're HUMANS and HISTORY shows us that we'll be fine from all the other times where we were at about >40% land use for agriculture and facing melting icecaps! My friend loves to ride their motorcycle without a helmet, it hasn't hurt them yet. (what do you mean "survivorship bias?") Besides everything that has spent million of years evolving into its niche will be able to adapt in the next ~100 years so as to not break the ecosystem it exists in.
/s if you couldn't tell
In some ways the physical-reality-averse 'realists' are even less solidaristic than your satire suggests. "Humans", you would think, rationally includes the vast numbers of climate refugees (millions now, hundreds of millions in decades to come) - yet somehow I suspect they will not be welcomed with open arms by techno-'realists' when their islands and lowlands go permanently under. When one-third of Pakistan was recently underwater I didn't hear loud assertions of human solidarity from them.
You're right, it's basically manifest destiny 2.0.
It's actually quite sad how techbros ruin the perception of legitimately useful technology because they're too dumb to try and figure out how to use it beyond a "How can I make a quick buck with this and be the next FAANG, I'm going to be the next Elon Musk brooooooooooo." Then when their half baked attempt at monetization flops they burn the public's perception and make it harder to fund other things. They also seem to think they "understand the science" and that anything can be managed with it while refusing to acknowledge that the body of unknown knowledge exceeds what we do know, and even what we do know is mostly rough approximations that fall apart when you try and stretch them beyond their narrow scope.
(And there's no way there could be things we haven't accounted for that would accelerate issues... https://phys.org/news/2023-05-rapid-ice-greenland.html) (And millions of people being displaced won't lead to billions of people being disrupted or any wars over the remaining viable land and affect the economy, right? Wait war is usually good for the economy, maybe we can spin this climate catastrophe as a positive thing!)
The sickening part is that if this experiment in egotistical anthropocentrism goes horrifically sideways I know we're just going to be stuck listening to "How could we have known this would happen?! Why are you even focused on that, you should be worried about your survival!" from those in their yachts and those still deluded to believe it was a good idea, over and over again until you die from a marauder, hunger, thirst, or a brain aneurysm from listening to them.
Well said - that really is key. Fortunately or not (depending on your values), it's just a given that if there's a means out of the crisis (who knows?), tech just is going to be a major part of the plan.
I don't think this was necessarily true, say, 40 years or so ago. It might have been possible then to put economies on slower burns (pun intended), and concentrate on social/political/ethical adjustments, wealth redistribution, urban redesign etc.
But there's isn't time for long-term solutions now. Short/medium-term emergency survival is going to require massive tech deployments. But if they're going to work, the direction needs to be determined by rational considerations, not neurotic and childish billionaire egos.
Having said that, I don't think it's going to happen. A crash is more likely at this late stage.
You are underestimating how quickly exponential growth gets out of hand. Take population for example. If we wanted to have 1% annual population growth, in ~12 100 years the volume of humans would be 9 x 10^60 m^3.
If we started expanding into space right now, and we expanded at the speed of light, in 12 100 years we'd have access to 6 x 10^60 m^3, which is not big enough.
Of course by then we may have bioengineered smaller humans. That doesn't help much. It just changes that 12 100 to 12 800.
Or how about energy? If human energy use grows by 1% a year in ~9300 years we will be using 5.3 x 10^59 Joules per year. That's about the same as the amount of energy you would get if the entire mass of the Milky Way galaxy were converted to energy (E=mc^2).
Forget the Milky Way. Let's think big. What if we converted the entire freaking universe--all the observable mass, and all the dark matter, and all the dark energy--into energy for humanity. At 1% annual growth from now we'd be using that much per year in 12 000 years.
When agriculture was invented around 12000 years ago growth picked up, with the population doubling around every 1000 years. That lasted until around 5000 years ago, when the population was around 100 million. There wasn't much grown for the next couple thousand years.
Around 3000 years ago growth picked up and the population tripled by 2000 years ago. It slowed again until around the industrial revolution and then picked up quite a bit. The world population growth rate went from around 0.1% per year before the industrial revolution to around 0.6%.
The 20th century brought many developments that allowed for even more growth. That allowed the growth rate to hit around 2.24% in 1964. It's been declining since then, dropping to a little below 1% a couple years ago.
It's been pretty much the same pattern since we became Homo sapiens. When there is an increase in available resources or we get new technology that lets us better utilize resources we can have a relatively short period of exponential growth until we reach the limits of those resources and then growth slows or stops.
With the industrial revolution and then the developments in the 20th century we were able to have about a century of sustained high growth, but we're reaching the end of that expansion and the growth rate is declining.
We'll almost surely have more breakthroughs that allow for growth increases, but some people want to plan based on the assumption that we'll have such breakthroughs often enough that we can count on high growth indefinitely.
The point of the galaxy-straining limit calculation is that the past pattern of periods of exponential growth being followed by declining growth is something inherent in exponential growth. It's not something that can be escaped by finding new places to settle or more efficient ways to use existing resources. Thus, we should be planning on the recent period of exponential growth ending rather than becoming depending on exponential growth continuing indefinitely.
I think you will have difficulty coming up for a definition of "growth" in humanity such that it makes sense for the argument you are trying to make. At least, I hav been searching for somebody to define what they mean by "growth" and have only gotten very vague platitudes such that the definition is y useful for basing further reasoning.