We can not infinitely polute air, water, soil. We can not infinitely extract all crude materials from the Earth. We can not infinitely exploit most of the others.
What IS infinite is human imagination and ingenuity: We CAN innovate and (at least) greatly mitigate our impact on our Home. Thus the importance of education.
It boggles the mind how we don't seem to get this, and how the idea of economic growth seems to be directly opposed to sustainable living. This has been voiced for decades (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful ) - wonder how much time have left to get it.
Evolution selects for immediate survival. Because intelligence is expensive, competitive species evolve enough intelligence to compete with each other. But the extra intelligence needed to guarantee successful long-term management of an entire planetary ecosystem is at the far end of the bell curve, and most individuals won't be capable of it. Likewise for effective off-world colonisation.
So you get a race between the self-destructive effects of short-sighted individual intelligence pursuing the usual goals of fighting, fucking, and accumulating resources, and the amplification effects of whatever collective intelligence mechanisms a species can evolve.
At the moment we're not doing so well with the latter. It's going to take a phase change to move collective intelligence up to a level where the likely default is long term survival.
This is pushing the argument a bit, but it stands to reason that this pattern of information preserval could indicate the necessity even for an 'advanced' civilisation with forward thinking individuals to reinforce diffusion/acquisition of knowledge of little short term value but high absolute value to survival/evolution
> "A hundred billion is not infinite and it's getting less infinite all the time. Consider! Twenty thousand years ago, mankind first solved the problem of utilizing stellar energy, and a few centuries later, interstellar travel became possible. It took mankind a million years to fill one small world and then only fifteen thousand years to fill the rest of the Galaxy. Now the population doubles every ten years --"
[...]
> "Once this Galaxy is filled, we'll have another filled in ten years. Another ten years and we'll have filled two more. Another decade, four more. In a hundred years, we'll have filled a thousand Galaxies. In a thousand years, a million Galaxies. In ten thousand years, the entire known Universe. Then what?"