From: Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Nov 07 1996 - 03:23:02 MST
On Wed, 6 Nov 1996 paul_tweedy@polk.com wrote:
> On Nov. 6 'gene writes:
> >But that's what physics and extrapolation says. You can't lick Malthus,
> >nor exponential growth in a limited universe, not on the really long
> >run.
>
> 'gene, what the hell are you talking about? Since when is Malthus one
> of the prophets of the future?
Even if Malthus was an entropic bastard, his argument is valid. We cannot
expand faster than light, and inside a bounded volume (like spacelike
slices of our future lightcone) the Bekenstein Bound seems to hold. This
implies that exponential growth of *anything* only is possible in the
"short" term (which could be *very* long), then it has to grow as t^3 or
slower (assuming a Minkovsky spacetime).
[To circumvent this we need either a way to expand FTL, build interlinked
wormhole empires or break the Bekenstein Bound. None of these are known to
be possible (although the wormholes might be less unlikely than the
others)]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
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