The largest container ships can hold about 11,000-15000 shipping containers. The ships weigh 170,000 tons. Each container can hold a maximum of 14 tons. The space shuttle could take less than two full containers into space. The Super-Orion nuclear external pulse propulsion rocket had an 8 million ton size and could have taken 3 million …
New Scientists has an article about revisiting the prophecies of Boom and Doom from the book Limits to Growth Limits to Growth used the MIT World3 computer model to predict that boom would be followed by bust: a sharp decline in industrial output, food production and population. In other words, the collapse of global civilisation. …
Alex Knapp at Forbes talks about the example of the limits of airplane speed as an example of real world limits to exponential progress. The speed of rockets continue the speed curve slightly. What made us really fall of the speed of vehicle improvement curve was abandoning the development of nuclear pulse propulsion. Nuclear bombs …
Collapsitarians are described the Technium. Former President Reagan defined a recession as when your friend lost his job and a depression as when you lost your job. Collapse is when no one has a job; in fact, there are no longer any such things as jobs to be had. Various types of doomers/collapsitarians/dystopians: * Luddites, …
