On the contrary, the only reason to believe that the growth of technology and the human population is unlimited rests in making a single, unprovable assumption that because a relatively short period of human history has exhibited exponential growth, this must continue indefinitely into the future. This is a typical error of extrapolation, and something that any halfway decent course that covers even basic linear regression (you know, an actual tool used by actual scientists for genuine scientific discovery) will warn you against in very strong terms.
And there's very good reason to believe that the exponential extrapolation is wrong. It's well understood that organisms, when sufficient resources are available, will grow exponentially (or even super-exponentially) over a brief period of time. They will not continue to do so indefinitely however, because the available resources are finite. Instead their longterm growth will follow a logistic curve, which asymptotes out at the carrying capacity of the system, baring more complex interactions that cause a subsequent population crash. These are often seen in predator/prey dynamics, or any other case where over-use depletes a necessary resource at well above its replacement rate.
Now interestingly enough, an exponential and a logistic curve are essentially indistinguishable early on. This means that there's absolutely no way to tell whether the logistic or the exponential curve dictates your future growth based on past observation. Here's a simple example of the two curves showing how closely they can match:
And here's how they differ in longterm behavior:
If you only have data up until Time = 4 (time unit is arbitrary in this example), it's difficult to impossible to tell them apart. And there's other curves that could also fit our observed data extremely well. Here for instance is a piecewise polynomial curve that matches about as well, and goes into immediate decline after time = 4.
A smoother function would be more plausible, but there's a limit to how much time I want to spend monkeying around with these curves, and this communicates the point fairly well.
So we can't tell much about which curve we're on, simply by looking at the past. Again, it's bad science to extrapolate very far into the future based solely on the fitted curve. Next year will probably exhibit similar traits to this year, sure, but that does not extend well to even 100 years into the future, let alone thousands or millions.
What then can we tell? The human population has grown very fast in the last few hundred years, thanks mostly to harnessing stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels. This is not surprising, since we have basically gained access to a new source of calories, albeit ones we don't eat directly but instead use for agriculture and other purposes. There's nothing about this that suggests we aren't following a logistic curve, any more than we should expect a drop of bacteria put in a petri dish to grow to be the size of the world by next Wednesday because it exhibits exponential growth for the next 24 hours. Our timeframe is simply longer, and our petri dish isn't growth medium but hydrocarbon bonds formed by plants millions of years ago.
The situation is probably worse for us than for the bacteria however. A bacteria formed late in the logistic growth curve will need about the same caloric inputs as a bacteria formed early on. Humans however have exhibited a substantially less efficient growth curve; we seem to require more and more energy inputs for correspondingly smaller increases in population growth. Energy consumption might rise exponentially, but the population does not. So the future population looks basically like the current population, it just consumes vastly more.
Which is sustainable if the world can meet an exponentially expanding need for energy. It almost certainly cannot; and the side effects of pollution and ecosystem damage have a very good chance of lowering the effective carrying capacity of the planet substantially. Put differently, we're in the indistinguishable-from-exponential phase of a growth-crash curve, because we're 'preying' on millions of years of accumulated environmental production and durability. Eventually our consumption will burn through both the existing stores and the replacement rate, and we'll look like the coyote population right after eating all the rabbits. Starving and dying of diseases in vast numbers. Or, if we manage to raise global temperatures enough to kill off enough phytoplankton in the oceans, suffocating.
Now if we actually have free will, and can buck the evolutionary drive to consume as much as possible, we can get to choose which curve we follow. The logistic, or the one that crashes. So far as I can tell, we seem to be defaulting for the crash-curve. The most substantial proof I can think of that we are truly different from an animal following a predator-prey cycle is if we stopped increasing our consumption, instead of idiotically assuming the rules we can clearly see don't apply to us because we're all special'n'crap.
Originally Posted by warty goblin
On the contrary, the only reason to believe that the growth of technology and the human population is unlimited rests in making a single, unprovable assumption that because a relatively short period of human history has exhibited exponential growth, this must continue indefinitely into the future. This is a typical error of extrapolation, and something that any halfway decent course that covers even basic linear regression (you know, an actual tool used by actual scientists for genuine scientific discovery) will warn you against in very strong terms.
Re: Why are people afraid of death?
