There’s a post about this at the blog DoTheMath, which calculates we boil ourselves with waste heat in ~400 years, assuming GDP doubles every 100 years and per capita energy consumption increases at the same rate it has been for the previous ~400 years.
The usual economic retort is that the economy could look very different from the one we are used to, and decouple from energy consumption. But the assumption about waste heat is what is doing the work here, and we have recently developed thermal transistors. These transistors have been designed out of quantum objects. And it turns out we might be able to beat the Planck limit in the far field. Which is to say, we can build heat computers, and then waste heat could be converted into computation.
That doesn’t solve the problem of too much energy use being bad, but if waste heat is computation then we can hit peak (safe) output, stay there, and still add value.
There’s a post about this at the blog DoTheMath, which calculates we boil ourselves with waste heat in ~400 years, assuming GDP doubles every 100 years and per capita energy consumption increases at the same rate it has been for the previous ~400 years.
The usual economic retort is that the economy could look very different from the one we are used to, and decouple from energy consumption. But the assumption about waste heat is what is doing the work here, and we have recently developed thermal transistors. These transistors have been designed out of quantum objects. And it turns out we might be able to beat the Planck limit in the far field. Which is to say, we can build heat computers, and then waste heat could be converted into computation.
That doesn’t solve the problem of too much energy use being bad, but if waste heat is computation then we can hit peak (safe) output, stay there, and still add value.