If you've done a calculation like his I'm interested in reading it. It is hard to evaluate your argument against his since you've made no quantifiable claims.
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My point is the same as the original article. Calculations like this, of single routes, are pointless and mislead rather than inform. But it's an intellectual honeypot, because it seems interesting.
The paths of possible technology are a huge high dimensional space, but let's think of simplify it to a map of geographic space. He's taking out a telescope, pointing in a single direction, and sees a Cliff really really far off, and says "well I guess there are physical limits!" Which of course. But that's not interesting, what's interesting are which path are out there, and to explore that you have to point the telescope in lots of directions, or even better yet, start exploring territory by moving around. It might be that there's a hikable path right next to the cliff that you didn't see because of the narrow view of the telescope.
And those alternate paths are what the original article is all about. We didn't run out of food. Technology changes, and we become far more efficient and productive. And pretending that there's a physical limit somewhere without bothering to peak around is a classic way that we trick ourselves about the future.
> My point is the same as the original article. Calculations like this, of single routes, are pointless and mislead rather than inform. But it's an intellectual honeypot, because it seems interesting.
He doesn't calculate single narrow routes. In fact that's almost entirely opposite the purpose of his articles, which is to take a step back and look at things from a very broad perspective: what's the scale of our energy use, what's the scale needed to replace it with something else, and what are some back-of-the-envelope calculations we can do to get an intuitive grasp of the problem?
It's essentially applying fermi estimation to the problem, which I think most people would agree is far from what you're accusing.
> We didn't run out of food.
This was never claimed?
> Technology changes, and we become far more efficient and productive.
This is addressed, particularly in the second article linked, which itself is a highly-summarized form of his entire position.
> And pretending that there's a physical limit somewhere without bothering to peak around is a classic way that we trick ourselves about the future.
There's no pretending. There are real physical and thermodynamic limits that physicists currently know no way to circumvent, and that we have increasingly convincing reasons to believe are fundamental. Pretending these don't exist is a classic way that we trick ourselves about the future.
> There are real physical and thermodynamic limits that physicists currently know no way to circumvent, and that we have increasingly convincing reasons to believe are fundamental
Name one of these physical limits that pertains to the problem at hand.
Of course there are limits. That's not interesting. What would be interesting is a limit that imposes a course on our technological transformation. Lead ain't it.