>Life looks a lot like cancer. Cancer looks a lot like life. "Being cancer" isn't a bad thing, cancer is only bad when it is a disease in humans. Otherwise it is the way of the world. We are surrounded by patterns that propagate themselves quickly.

You lack holistic understanding of the science behind life and what cancer is. I will explain. And once I'm done, you should understand.

First off most energy on earth comes from the sun. Life feeds off the sun and energy that powers our infra all comes from the sun. Specifically most human energy comes from reservoirs of sun power stored in oil. So energy given to the world is limited in the rate it is delivered from the sun and the rate in which we can harvest that energy. In theory if we harvest energy at a rate slower or equal to the rate energy is given to us by the sun we can harvest energy indefinitely until the sun goes super nova.

That is the hard end. Once the sun goes super nova or runs out of energy, humanity is over. We are done. End of story. But that event is so far away that we don't have to consider it.

Second, cancer cells, are cells that are too efficient and too powerful in such a way that they consume resources too eagerly and commit a sort of suicide by consuming energy so quickly that the rates far exceed energy production.

Life in general DOES not FOLLOW this model. When you examine ecosystems throughout the world you will see that the multitudes of interacting internal systems within them that have evolved to be over-fitted to be extremely stable and operate at EQUILIBRIUM, completely different from cancer.

For example you may have deer keeping the population of grass in check and wolves keeping the population of deer in check in such a way that no population ever gets out of control.

Why does this occur? What black magic is making all ecosystems trend towards this perfect equilibrium? Natural selection. Natural selection happens on the genetic level, but it also happens at a more abstract level, the ecosystem level. Any ecosystem where some creature becomes too efficient overloads the entire ecosystem and it burns out that system. Thus the only thing you have remaining over eons of ecosystem evolution are systems that are in equilibrium because all the other systems overload and are naturally selected out.

You can actually see this happen when you introduce foreign species into a non-native ecosystem. The ecosystem will burn out, the foreign species was over-fitted for a harsher environment and was too efficient for the environment it was introduced to.

It is actually natural for ecosystems to burn out and die. Extinction is PART of natural selection. Suffering, death and destruction and famines are all part of the process of natural selection picking the ecosystem that is balanced, that works.

Humanity in this context is very different from life in general in the sense that we are definitely slowly overloading the system. Life cannot in general cannot be characterized as cancer, but humanity within the context of life CAN be characterized as cancer that's managed to survive for so long because we continuously find new energy reservoirs to exploit. Eventually we will run out given that the rate of energy coming from the sun is limited.

When you look at history at the scale of eons, it's normal. Humanity is suppose to overload. It's not all that bad when you view the situation from an even higher level of abstraction: Evolution and natural selection can happen at the cultural level of civilizations.

So in a sense you can say modern civilization is suppose to overload and humanity is suppose to regress to a more sustainable type of civilization. Hunter and gatherers or tribes that were more sustainable in the past.

Civilization regressing is better than humanity becoming extinct, but even that viewpoint is bleak. There is hope though. Humanity is different from all the overloading ecosystems and creatures that came before it. We are a bit unique in this sense. Humanity is like a cancer cell with a sort of meta awareness.

It's like if you had cancer and your cancer cells formed some sort of neural network and became aware that itself was a cancer. From this awareness we may be able to save ourselves. There is hope, but it's low probability it will pan out given our lack of self control.

>Nobody seems to have an argument for where the physical resources will come from, or how we deal with exponential population growth without just having regular famines (even worse than losing a job!).

This is what irks me. Truth and a solution to a problem are two different things. Just because something doesn't have a solution doesn't mean it's not the truth. Continuous unsustainable growth is bad, lowering entropy to produce technology at our current rate means consuming energy at unsustainable speed. There IS NO solution that will allow us to keep doing this, and you'll have to accept that because it's the bloody truth.