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Comment by gtrubetskoy | Hacker News Reader

Simple arithmetic shows that nothing can grow exponentially forever, just google for a lecture on exponential growth by the late Dr. Albert Bartlett of CU.

What bewilders me is the mass denial. Sooner or later inflation and GDP growth have to stop, and reverse, even.

And the world will not end - there will still be startups and investment opportunities, stocks and commodity prices will go up and down, the only difference being that overall we will see the major indexes flat or declining, and that will be just fine.

The sooner the population at large recognizes that this is the future, the smoother will the transition to this new state of affairs be. The longer we hang on to this naive notion of perpetual growth, the more devastating will be the day it ends.

Edit: Link to find the Bartlett video: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=albert+bartlett+exponen...

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Except the universe seems to be infinite, so yes, the economy can grow exponentially forever. Even within current physics, it's possible to put billions of habitable Earths in our solar system, by importing mass and energy from other systems. There's A LOT of empty space.

Given interstellar distances, the annual rate of growth would be small, but still positive.

Even if the universe is infinite, it's impossible to interact or even perceive anything beyond our lightcone. Within that finite (albeit vast) region of space is a finite amount of matter and energy which is constantly and irrevocably subject to entropy, and will eventually be torn apart and decohere with the heat death of the universe.

So... no. In literally no way known to physics can anything other than spacetime itself grow exponentially forever, and even that may not necessarily be the case.

That's not proven physics, just speculation. There are no answers at this point, especially regarding end of the universe.

Also, infinite universe is not necessarily the same thing as a growing one.

For all we know all we see could be some local quirk of spacetime or whatever that creates a weird projection. I would at least wait for a return data from a probe in nearby star system's before accepting that yes, that's probably how it actually is, at least in our larger neighborhood.

Unless the laws of thermodynamics and the speed of light are wrong, there is only a finite region of spacetime with a finite amount of energy that we will ever be able to interact with. Infinite expansion would require expending infinite energy, and that's just not possible. Not even "proven physics" supports an argument that an economy can "grow exponentially, forever."

There could still be gains in productivity.

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