Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

Per the article, actually about 100-1000 times beyond current capacities.

In a way I agree that the feasible limits, even on Earth, may be orders of magnitude larger (say, in terms of population, perhaps) than we currently have. But the current rate of growth in any case is probably unsustainable because of imbalances like co2 emissions. I do think it's feasible to change to renewable energy in the short term, if only political motivation was a bit higher (please, go out and vote focused on climate change, folks!). If I were to lay out a strategy for humankind, I'd say we should focus on climate change for the next few decades, and then we can resume growing (to avoid possible collapse).

Limits to technology are actually non-trivial due to the atomic nature of objects, limited number of chemical elements with limited range of properties, etc.. Intelligence itself isn't free and keeping the Great Self-sustaining Rube Goldberg contraption working is not trivial. It's very hard to predict what limitations we can overcome -- see Moore's law slowing down. Some limits we've almost reached such as luminous efficacy (LEDs in lm/W). Soon we'll be faced with the question of whether we want to make Earth into a Caves of Steel landscape (ending most natural life to create a hyper-efficient human/machine habitat) capable of sustaining more humans or a Solarpunk landscape (preserving natural ecosystems) with a more limited population. I think there's a large degree of arrogance to the first, because I don't feel competent enough to evaluate the true value of animal lives, supposing a large quantity of animals are sentient, and they have intrinsic scientific and cultural value. I think this requires an exercise in imagination from all of us. In any case, it's probably a great idea if we could at least keep the oceans, rainforests, and major national parks healthy.

One crazy dream I have is to colonize not Mars, but Mercury. In Mercury solar energy density is crazy high. There's even some thermal energy from the solar thermal gradient. You can dig to get to nice temperature ranges and be safe from radiation, all this works well since the planet is tidally locked and therefore doesn't rotate, there's no diurnal variation. You can build a crazy Cave-of-Steel there and live your life in a cramped cell playing video games (or [insert activity]), if that's what your vision of heaven is.

In any case: Hack the Planet!*

*: In a good way, of course :)

I really recommend Tom Murphy's (one of the paper's authors) blog about energy and our possible future https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/

That's a problem with this article, and too many like it.

OK, we're going to run out of various natural resources over the next 100-200 years, let alone the next 1000-2000. We will have a mostly sustainable society, like it or not. But it need not be a low-tech one.

Energy probably won't be a problem. We have so many low-cost renewable sources now that the fossil fuel industry has trouble getting capital. The energy situation may look bad for another 10-20 years, but not for much longer than that.

What looks like a problem? The US Geological Survey has studies for all the major useful minerals.[1][2]

Some minerals are recycled easily because they're used in their elemental form. Copper and aluminum are good examples. Others get used up by being combined with other minerals in a way that's hard to undo. Manganese and vanadium are good examples, because they go into steelmaking. It's hard to un-make steel, although you can recycle it as steel. Something to expect is metal scrap sorting that does a quick spectrographic analysis on each item and routes it to the appropriate bin for re-melting. There's probably a startup opportunity there.

Expect lithium battery recycling to be a major industry. Lithium batteries are a far higher grade source of lithium than ores or brines.

Biologic systems are more recyclable. Biology is mostly C, H, O, and N, assembled in different ways. This doesn't necessarily mean "natural". We can expect to see a bigger role for semi-biological processes such as fermentation, synthetic enzymes, and such. The Impossible Burger uses a synthetic enzyme to produce the taste of blood people want in a burger.

This sort of thing is probably enough to get through the next 100-200 years. The next 1000-2000 years will be tougher. But more technology will be available.

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program

[2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022.pdf

Similar things were predicted in the 70s but new sources of energy and improvements in productivity invalidated those predictions. Obviously at some point limits will kick in (unless we can expand to other planets) but what to do about that is more of a political question than a scientific one. I personally think it is more appealing to attempt expanding the limits, as we've done in the past, than to pre-emptively adopt austerity measures to live within estimated limits.

The graph says it all and by the way similar graphs exist for lithium and all the rare earth elements to construct so called renewables.