Baby, baby, you’re out of time.

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  • 17/03/2022

    Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument

    Nature today revisits the publication fifty years ago of The Limits to Growth by the System Dynamics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The journal (then) referred to is as another whiff of doomsday.

    Zoologist Solly Zuckerman, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said: “Whatever computers may say about the future, there is nothing in the past which gives any credence whatever to the view that human ingenuity cannot in time circumvent material human difficulties.”

    Which is surely akin to saying, there is nothing in the past to suggest we are already extinct. As for computers, there are three branches of science: theory, experiment, and computation. The song goes:

    You’re obsolete, my baby

    My poor old fashioned baby

    I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

    Well, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

    I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

    Yes you are left out, out of there without a doubt

    ‘Cause baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

    (Rolling Stones)