I don't understand the logic of resigning ourselves to adapting to degrowth and scarcity when human civilization is on the cusp of being able to harvest extra-terrestial resources, which absolutely dwarf resources available on Earth.
Space mining faces not only distance and energy costs, but extreme environments, lack of ore formation, highly limited element availability in numerous cases, and the challenge of delivery for Earth use without leaving a literal smoking crater.
Space is for virtually all intents an informational domain. Not one of matter.
Keep in mind that even in the one field for which space-based methods were most widely and plausibly promoted, telecommunications, it is literally easier and more useful to wrap the globe in glass than to incur the round-trip time costs of Earth-to-orbit transmission.
Starlink overcomes some of the time delay but seems unlikely to match the sheer bandwidth of fibre-optic communications.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/asteroid-16-psyche...
And there are millions of these types of asteroids in the solar system.
Extra-terrestrial resources also include the sunlight that is currently being beamed into empty space all around the Earth, that could otherwise be harvested by massive solar farms. There is millions of times more sunlight missing the Earth than reaching the Earth.
Setting up an infrastructure for harnessing these resources would be a massive endeavor but once the infrastructure is set up, the amount of resources that come to be accessible to human civilization grows by orders of magnitude.
- Good planets are hard to find.
- That the available habitable planetary / surface area is only modestly larger than that of Earth alone, and vastly less hospitable (see: https://xkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1389 https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1389:_Surface_Are...).
- Costs of space travel in both financial and resource terms would be prohibitive for moving more than a vanishingly small fraction of the human population off-planet.
- Any space colonists would have to first create and then maintain a habitable ecosystem in whatever remote environment they chose to occupy (under conditions which make contemporary epithets of "eco-fascism" appear to descirbe a positively libertarian regime).
And ... given all that, the challenge of living sustainbly on this one small fragile beautiful blue-wite gem we happen to have lucked into coming to existence on will remain for any foreseable future.
Space isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.
You can still massively grow the Earth-based economy, without damaging its biosphere, by extracting the resources it needs from outside Earth.
This does not require moving people between planets, just energy and goods, which are much less costly to transport than people, and can become extremely affordable to transport as infrastructure is set up to facilitate it.
What are the limits, if any?
When are they met, presuming constant-rate (that is to say, exponential) growth?
How much is that time extended if you expand the limit by a factor of 10? 100? 1,000?
Do you honestly think that the Earth can support 80 billion, or 800 billion souls, or 8 trillion, at present G-7 nation levels of affluence?
A 4% annual growth rate corresponds to a doubling time of about 17.5 years.
2^3.3 ~= 10
2^6.6 ~= 100
2^9.9 ~= 1000
Keep in mind that your binding constraint isn't your most abundant resource / capable sink, it's the least.
On what do you base this assessment?
That said, broad-brushing epithets deserved or otherwise seems a poor foundation on which to base common cause and understanding, and I'd respectfully request you refain from doing so. In the spirit of HN's commenting guidelines if for no grander principle:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.