Dezakin, based on your posts in another topic, I'd almost written you off as an "economic ideologue" (i.e. someone who believes in growth for its own sake, based on economics-as-ideology, but doesn't have a whole lot of knowledge of science & engineering).
Then I feel its only fair for me to clarify my political character in the whole debate: You can write me off as an economic ideologue if you want. I admit I do 'believe in growth for its own sake.' It just means that I have my own opinions on what humanity should strive for and what risks we should take.
It means that I feel that its preferable to wipe out all wildlife on earth and construct a vast banal civilization of glass and steel (with whatever actually is biologically necissary to support humanity, crops) in the quest for growth than to stagnate, where it seems many others are rather horrified at the concept of such a world without natural places, if they get beyond believing such an artificial world is impossible.
Sure, I suppose its not naturalistic, and a bit nihilistic, but it stems from my opinion that the earth is precariously lucky to be stable for so long and such stability may be very transitory, so its our obligation to survive by growing as fast as possible to escape the confines of a single planet before some asteroid smashes the entire biosphere back to proteins.
You can work from there, and add as many grains of salt as you want when you read my arguments. I see that such growth is possible, if you dismiss concepts like biological carrying capacity at least. (Which I do because it strikes me as comparing herds of antelope to sustainability of humans as apples to dump trucks) If you believe the more doomer crowd that we have actually exceeded carrying capacity somehow, then you can feel free to disregard this argument as well.
Running numbers with todays technology, assuming technology doesnt change at all we have enough nuclear to last us at least ten thousand years using light water reactors. (caveat: at constant power consumption, not with growth) though I honestly expect that technology will advance a little bit over the next several centuries. I see all limiting factors on growth as derivitives of energy, from water and crops to industrial metals.
But most of my projections here are far more conservative than what I actually expect will happen. I expect we'll develop strong AI sometime in the next century, and humanity will have an explosive growth throughout the galaxy over the next thousand years consuming most of the resourses of this end of the spiral arm as the whole of earth (and other planets) are converted to 'computronium' and machines. But I wont argue the plausibility of that (because its mostly intuition and trends along with some economic papers analyzing the effect of strong AI on economic growth.)
So I'm far more cornucopian than most here and at the same time far more nihilistic: my gut tells me civilization has a bright future, but humanity wont be part of it at all. This position is very unpopular apparently. Its certainly very unromantic.
So I take strange positions like: I am a booster for nukes even though I honestly expect that advanced reactor designs wont ever be competitive, because I expect something much more competitive will come along. I love molten salt reactors but I dont think they'll ever be comercialized because we'll have solar far too cheap, or somehow manage to pull off aneutronic fusion on the cheap, or one of those keelynet free energy loons actually manages to extract energy from the vacuum after all. I write about crop sustainability when I think the whole point is moot in a hundred and fifty years because large parts of humanity will either be downloaded or exterminated by the robot overlords, and/or because crops will be entirely synthesized by direct chemical processes rather than slow inefficient farming.
But I still like writing about it, nukes especially because they provide a ground floor to what is possible: Assuming technology doesnt change at all, the worst we have is ten thousand years of civilization.