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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

How long can we continue to believe our energy needs can rise at the level we've become accustomed too?

This is scary: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

No one with even a rudimentary understanding of exponential growth believes energy consumption can grow exponentially forever. But the problem is self-fixing; one day, the supply of energy will stop growing as fast as demand. The day will come, the day will pass, and the world will adjust.

In particular, prices will rise gradually over time, which will encourage investment in cost-lowering research and development, as well as into energy generation.

The market is what helps the world adjust. Unless a dramatic event causes a significant change in prices in a short time, things will carry on just like they always have.

How can an economy grow significantly if energy is capped?

Also, this idea that we don't have to worry about stuff because the market with help us adjust is idealistic wishful thinking at best.

What are you proposing is the problem? That we will foolishly bull forwards, and accidentally violate the laws of physics and consume more energy than there is?

the fear is that we would consume too much now, and not leave enough behind to facilitate the research/development needed to find/create better sources of energy.

E.g., you used up the fuel in the car too fast, and can't reach the next gas station.

How painful will the adjustment be? Potentially very painful.

I'm sure in 2400 years we'll have a Mr Fusion™ that we can chuck galaxies into for our home energy needs, so there's really no need for this kind of cynical hysteria.

That is a really silly article. The author extrapolates hundreds and then thousands of years into the future.

This is probably rather pointless - first normalize the energy consumption by the population. Because population growth was exponential for a long time, the energy consumption per capita was probably more or less constant. It will get very crowded way before our energy consumption starts to melt the earth.

I think the global energy consumption per capita is rising rather quickly as other countries adopt American levels of consumption.

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