This Can’t Go On
This is silly. For one, large portions of the economy are not built on actual material. For example, take software, an evergrowing segment of the economy.The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is already enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's true.Take for example another growing part of the economy: AI. AI models like GPT-3 contain billions of floating point parameters. The number of potential configurations of the weights (which is what ultimately holds the value when models like GPT are productized) is orders of magnitude larger than the universe.The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material goods. Many economic goods are not material.Moreover, many material goods hold no value due to the material, but rather to the placement or arrangement of the material. In this sense, the same 'stuff' can be part of multiple goods and each of those goods can be more expensive than the previous good. For example, if I paid a laborer $10 to mine aluminum, the refinery $2 to refine it, the sheet metal factory $3 to make a sheet, the sheet metal worker $10 to make a good of it, and then the installer $20 to install it. I've made ever more money off the same 'stuff'. As industries like recycling take off, there is yet more opportunity to be had in the same amount of stuff.And this doesn't even begin to touch on services and such, which do not even require material goods proportional with the economic value added.In other words, there is no reason to believe we will hit up against an atomic wall after which we will be unable to expand the economy due to a shortage of atoms.