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</php $base = 0.001;$compound = 1.03;for ($year = 0; $year < 10000; $year++){ $base = $base * $compound; echo $base; echo "% global resource usage after year: "; echo $year; echo "</br>";}?> How it works. $base is the amount of resources the global society uses in year 0(zero), represented by a percentage of the total available amount of resources on the planet or the total amount of resources the planet can supply each year. $compound, is the compound rate of growth capitalism "requires" to work (3 percent). $year is the current year in the for loop and this for loop will run for 10.000 (ten thousand) loops (years). Even though the initial amount is only 0.001%, we are already over 100% after 389 years (101.51205858519% to be exact and 101.5% rounded). After 1323 years, the percentage can not even be represented by a 32 bit number anymore, at this point the value of $base is 99194024233445% (ninety-nine-thousand-billion percent roughly). Now, we could of course factor in a recession here and there, make some "market-corrections" here and there and do all sorts of small things, but overall growth will be sustained. Perhaps by doing these small adjustments, we could get it to last a little bit longer, but it would still run over 100% eventually. Now... there are some arguments that this does not matter, cause the market will come up with ways to live on more than one planet (just an example), but even if we do this the rate of growth will still continue and we will eventually need 2 whole galaxies to sustain it, so the big question is, when is it gonna be enough? You can argue with every little detail in this post, I don't mind at all, but know this, any% compound rate of growth forever, is mathematically IMPOSSIBLE.