I'll just add to my own comment that 3% economic growth for 480 years would mean the economy in 2500 would be 1,500,000 times its current size today and in the year 3000 almost 3.8 trillion times its current size. So obviously, exponential growth is going to come to an end, probably slowing down this century and we will absolutely have to reach sustainability on Earth.
We're literally just hitting the part of economic development where the highest impacts to output are not resource intensive but rather intellectual property intensive, and also difficult to measure by a traditional measure like GDP. How do you measure the economic impact of say, wikipedia, in terms of GDP? Its free, it raises funds only through donations, and it has immense value. We're just getting started with exponential growth, and we're just getting started because we're finally decoupling growth from physical resources
Just in time for folks to invent mechanisms to convert IP intensity to physical resource intensity via e.g. blockchains.
I hope they issue patents on good edible paper then, because if the climate changes as much as this study proposes, all this intellectual property won’t matter much.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-growth-r...
Obviously annual real GDP growth cannot be 3% forever, but the data show that we're slowing down gradually rather than rushing toward some kind of wall. The question is what to do about the real present slowdown, not some hypothetical future catastrophe[1].
1: (climate change is not hypothetical)