Hacker News Reader

Comment by willsmith72 | Hacker News Reader

I was reading this carefully looking for the reason of "why this can't go on", and seemingly this is the reason

> if the economy were 3*1070 times as big as today's, and could only make use of 1070 (or fewer) atoms, we'd need to be sustaining multiple economies as big as today's entire world economy per atom

What kind of argument is that? Sounds like someone had an idea and went looking for evidence to support it.

> mathematically we can prove that it must happen eventually

Please explain, and not using a reasoning comparing dollars to atoms

View on HN

The math for increasing 10% per year over any long length of time gets so crazy that you have to use how many atoms exist as an absurd placeholder. Dollars don't work anymore.

The rule of 72 says at 10% per year (historical returns in the stock market for the past 100 years) means you are doubling the value of the stock market every 7.2 years. Things like economies can't grow like that and if you are questioning why it's because you and I grew up in this era where they could for a brief blinking in time. Human reproduction is slowing, we've harvested all the low hanging fruit, "free" land is all taken. I feel like we are probably at the part of the 100m dash curve talked about here.

https://condellpark.com/kd/sprintlogistic.htm

At our current rate, the record of 9.48s will be reached in 500 years if you plot it. But I don't think people are going to maintain interest for 500 years to get there from 9.58 seconds.

> Things like economies can't grow like that

says who?

if i were born and living in the 1500s, how could i predict the economy would soon grow 10%/year for over a century?

you're just stating things like facts which have never been predictable. nothing about our current growth was inevitable, neither is a gigantic slowdown.

i think these kinds of predictions are:

1. far more difficult than we realise

2. so difficult that there is almost no value in making them.

The Church of Infinite Growth has been riled.

\_(ツ)_/¯

the writer of the article could have just as easily predicted an epic slowdown as infinite growth. that's how much evidence and reasoning they provided. it's the monkey throwing darts

Reply on news.ycombinator.com