The earth is in one way a closed in biosphere, not that different from the biospheres in a bottle that you create in science class. Unless we get hit by a huge meteor or we refine the space mining as depicted in the 1981 movie Outland where mining is done on a Jupiter moon “sometime in the 21th century”, we are pretty much stuck with the resources that we have here on earth.
That is the base of the 1972 report The Limits to Growth, where a team of 17 researchers set out to explain why we can’t expand beyond the limits of our current resources. The key objective was to influence economic and industrial policies toward a more sustainable lifestyle.
