Economic growth, in our current paradigm, requires the production of ever more goods, which in turn requires ever more energy and natural resources. That is unsustainable, because nature is finite.
My personal theory is that any advanced civilization that is capable of interstellar travel must have conquered their animal instincts and realized that growth for the sake of growth is pointless.
An important point to think about, but ultimately wrong I think.
The reason that the software industry is so valuable today is not just that it's innovative, it's also that it can grow in a way that isn't strongly constrained by material.
The material required to provide one dollar of value in digital goods or services is very little.
This leads to a virtuous circle, since business unconstrained by material attracts more capital.
Basically, we can shift the physical economy to a circular cradle-to-cradle economy, and then continue getting growth from digital goods and services.
Note that this does not simply mean we'll all be living in VR - digital goods and services are growing across all industries.
For example, back in the day, drugs were discovered by massive wet lab experimentation programs. Today, increasingly components of a drug discovery program can be done in silico.
Is "sustainability" for the sake of "sustainability" pointful? For all we know, everything may just be reduced back to energy in a Big Crunch in the future, so the outcome is the same regardless. Is a civilization that languished in stagnancy for millions of years have any more paticular meaning than one that burned brightly but briefly?
Or escaped into a nested zeno's paradox of temporally-halved simulated existences to provide the internal illusion of continued growth while externally emitting signatures of decline.
These are only finite within Earth. Add even modest solar system travel capabilities and a lot more resources open up. Mining asteroids is just one idea there.
Space is huge, but space is also empty. Mining asteroids is really energetically expensive if you want to get the material back to Earth. It’s a very reasonable thing to do if you want to build stuff in space, though.
> a lot more resources open up. Mining asteroids is just one idea there
We should certainly explore and hope to discover rich deposits of varied resources that are worth expending the time and energy to find, extract, and use. However, to our knowledge, asteroids probably consist of clay and silicate rocks, some containing nickel-iron[1]
If we accept the hypotheses of an expanding universe then we find ourselves in a pickle as our potentially infinite resources race out of our light cone faster than we can chase them.
My personal theory is that any advanced civilization that is capable of interstellar travel must have conquered their animal instincts and realized that growth for the sake of growth is pointless.