AndyH said:
Actually, exponential growth is happening all over the planet.
Yeah, like the stock or housing market....wait that was 2005....
In a closed system (like unfortunately our earth at the moment), growth will always be limited.
And in fact, population IS leveling off (see the previous posts). We have 7 Gpeople on the planet right now, but if current trends continue, it will not go above 9 Gpeople.
That is a lot, but manageable.
Technology will save us, through breakthrough innovations (e.g. such as fertilizer in the past 150 years) AND efficiency
increase. Compare average energy consumption of appliances,cars, electronics now and e.g. 1970.....
Yes, on total its going up, because more people want to live our lifestyle, but then we can, over time, safely provide energy for all. The sun provides 3 MWh/year/m^2 (that is m^2 on the surface) and will do so for maybe the next 3-5 billion years... The total would be 1.7 10^15 MWh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false
per year or 170 GWh per person, assuming 10 Billion people.
Since we really only need maybe 20 MWh per person to live comfortable, we just need to harvest 0.012% of that.
That should be doable in the near future I think.
With clean energy aplenty, food and water will be an afterthought.