> Innovation has been able to outrun resource depletion for the last 300 years of industrialism.
It did over hundreds of years of EXTREMELY high growth (both in terms of number of people and wealth per person). If growth falls to a positive-but-very-low level, it will make it a lot easier for innovation to keep up.
Also, keep in mind that apart from Uranium, all the atoms on Earth remain here. We don't "use up" atoms at any significant rate. Apart from the atoms themselves, the main challenge is how they're put together. To rearrange how atoms are put together (to create fertilizer, recycle waste, etc), we primarily need energy. And before energy resoures run out, we should be able to produce suffient amounts of energy using either renewables or fusion.
Now fusion could cause us to face a situation where we run out of hydrogen atoms, but at the rate we currently consume energy, that would take practically forever.
In any event, in about a billion years, the sun will become a red giant.
It did over hundreds of years of EXTREMELY high growth (both in terms of number of people and wealth per person). If growth falls to a positive-but-very-low level, it will make it a lot easier for innovation to keep up.
Also, keep in mind that apart from Uranium, all the atoms on Earth remain here. We don't "use up" atoms at any significant rate. Apart from the atoms themselves, the main challenge is how they're put together. To rearrange how atoms are put together (to create fertilizer, recycle waste, etc), we primarily need energy. And before energy resoures run out, we should be able to produce suffient amounts of energy using either renewables or fusion.
Now fusion could cause us to face a situation where we run out of hydrogen atoms, but at the rate we currently consume energy, that would take practically forever.
In any event, in about a billion years, the sun will become a red giant.