There are many organizations today that claim that the growth must halt soon, or we will deplete important earth resources. Looking at it that way, it is obvious that, for example, the oil consumption can not continue to grow. And there are many other resources that simply can't be expanded on.
However, the thing is more complicated, and it is wrong to generalize. So let's have a look at some exponential behaviour. One of the more famous examples is Moore's law, which says that the number of transistors on a chip growths exponentially. A more interesting version of this law is the measurement of the number of CPU operations you get per dollar. This doubles approximately every year, and has been doing so for a long while. Actually, the trend is picking up speed. One reason for this trend may be that producers of processors knows where they will have to be in the future if they will be able to stay in the business. So every generation provides a measurable improvement compared to the previous generation, which means there is an exponential growth. This growth may not depend in depleting earth resources, at least not the way that energy from oil depends on oil resources.
Now on to the next type of exponential growth, and that is inventions in general. Sometimes, an invention builds on another. The invention wouldn't be possible until now. This is also a kind of exponential growth, as improvements build on other improvements. It can be argued, and it has been many times in history, that we now know most of what can be invented, and so this type of exponential growth will halt. Not because of lack of natural resources, but because of the end of scientific progress. This is harder to prove or disprove, but I am optimistic and believe we are no way near the end.
Finally, there is emerging another type of exponential growth because of inventions, and that is software. There is a constant stream of software inventions, where some of them build on the previous ones. This development is also fuelled by the exponential growth of CPU power. I am convinced this is where we will see an explosion of activities in the future. Until now, computers and software has just been seen as one component in our daily lives, in the list of cars, houses, phones, etc. But I think the software business will expand relatively to the other industrial areas. Economists that only look at GDP and other similar key figures will miss it out entirely.
