Exponential Growth Forever… And Beyond

According to a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5.epdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">study</a> published in Nature in 2020 the weight of all human made stuff has surpassed the weight of all things living on this planet for the first time in human history. If you are well read, probably this is no news to you. What is most interesting here, however, is that half of this material was mined, transported and turned into civilization fairly recently: it simply wasn’t there two decades ago. Now close your eyes and imagine half of your house, half of the roads between buildings, half of your washing machine, car and computer disappear. Welcome to the year 2000. All this was due to exponential growth (a perfect fit for the past century), where we were doubling the amount of human made stuff every 20 years. In case you were wondering: this rate of growth is actually rather modest on an annual basis: equaling a mere 3.5% per annum. Despite these modest gains, the collective mass of materials covered with our fingerprints has gone from 3% of the world’s biomass in 1900 to surpassing 100% of it in a mere 120 years. This is the power of exponential growth. Yet, at least seemingly, we still occupy the same cities with roughly the same infrastructure. Where did all this stuff go then? Well, most of it (81%) has been turned into concrete and gravel. Roads. Bridges. Buildings. Most of it in China. Yes, in the meantime some of the old stuff was demolished, scrapped and buried underground as waste, but the net accumulation of human-made material did not stop for a minute. And this is just what we actually use: the untold amounts of mining waste and the fossil fuels required to move them is simply not accounted for. If you consider the weight of rocks extracted from a mining site and the mass of the actual ores mined, the picture changes considerably. Take a gold wedding band <a href="https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/fub188/32375/Leinfelder_2021_humanmade_refubium_doi.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">for example</a>: <a href="https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/exponential-growth-forever-and-beyond-3dbc2147eb42">Visit Now</a>