Comment by baq

Huh. Your statement was probably hyperbole? But just back of the napkin:

If we use about 20 TW today, in a thousand years of 5% growth we’d be at about 3x10^34. I think the sun is around 3.8x10^26 watts? That gives us about 8x10^7 suns worth of energy consumption in 1000 years.

If we figure 0.004 stars per cubic light-year, we end up in that ballpark in a thousand years of uniform spherical expansion at C.

But that assumes millions ( billions?) of probes traveling outward starting soon, and no acceleration or deceleration or development time… so I think your claim is likely true, in any practical sense of the idea.

Time to short the market lol.

If we extrapolated the rise in the standards of living of a Detroit Black blue-collar factory worker in Detroit from the early 60s to our current days, most of them should own 64ft yachts by now.

of course, but no need to look that far into the future - 400 years at 2.3% pa is enough to boil oceans.

AI capabilities are growing exponentially thanks to exponential compute/energy consumption, but also thanks to algorithmic improvements. we've got a proof that human-level intelligence can run at 20W of power, so we've got plenty of room to offset the currently-missing compute.

Economic growth is not directly proportional to energy consumption. A major feature of any useful tool is that it (often dramatically) reduces energy consumption.