Are we inching up on the absolute carrying capacity of Earth? Perhaps. But what about the carrying capacity of the Sun?
We are barely capturing a fraction of the energy the Sun sends our way. Think about what we could do if our ability to harvest renewable energy in the next two decades increased not tenfold or even a hundredfold, but a thousandfold.
The smartphones in our pockets are almost unfathomably more powerful than those of a few decades ago, yet we still power them by burning rocks we found in the ground, eking out barely a day of usage before plugging them back into the grid. There is so much about our digital world that is limited by energy in ways we don't fully appreciate.
Imagine a miniaturized particle accelerator [1] that could actually turn lead into gold [2]. Imagine this done at a scale powered by energy production several orders of magnitude greater than what we have today. Obviously, this is an implausible scenario, but the fact that it could even brush up against the possible makes me wonder. How would such a system affect the value of gold? Our perception of what gold is? How would such a system applied to any resource, design, good, or service fundamentally change the way we interact with our world?
The digital revolution we have seen is something to behold, but perhaps it is only a stepping stone to something larger.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/devices/n...
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...