>>487303>Technological advancement doesn't require overall economic growth. You're just assuming it does, when it doesn't.There are incremental technological advances that require nothing more than brain effort.
But all the big tech advances only happened once the economy grew large enough to support it. Like for example a lot of tech was made possible by experimental research. There are a lot of scientific experiments that require a lot of energy and exotic materials, it would not have been possible to do these without a big and sophisticated industrial base.
But it's not just research. There is a very strong trend where more advanced materials cost more energy to make. Arranging molecules in more complex ways usually comes with more energy costs and a larger number of resource-inputs, that's the direction of a growing economy. If you are looking at synthesis of fancy super-materials like graphene, there actually are physical barriers that make it impossible to do this at low energy levels.
Microchip fabs that produce smaller chip-structures consume more energy, even bio-tech consumers a lot of embodied energy. Meaning going smaller equals using more energy/resources.
In general
bigger economy equals better tech.
growing economy equals improving tech.
Some technologies aren't doable on earth at all, and you need to establish a large industrial base in space to make it happen. I'm thinking about micro black holes, those have a few interesting applications, but if you produce a micro black hole on earth it'll just fall towards the center of the earth, and then pass through it, and then oscillate through the planet back and forth. Yes i said through, micro black holes are so small that they're not likely to interact even if they pass through a planet. To use something like that you need to be able to put a very large machine into planetary orbit. The economic power of humanity currently is probably 100 times to small to make something like this happen.
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