Everything is limited by physics. But I think the limit is not close to where we are right now. Consider a smart phone. Physically, what is it? Some silicon, glass, a lithium-ion battery, and some other trace metals. If you were to have the raw inputs in front of you, it would be a small pile of dust. Yet, with just that small amount of material, a person can get access to a near infinite amount of information and entertainment. And smartphones can run software, which allows the phone to be updated for near-zero marginal cost. And this is only something invented in the last few decades. There are so many amazing things being created around us all the time. I don't know how you can look at this situation and think "yup, we've reached the end of human ingenuity."
If you look at the weight of the tech product (phone) in isolation, you are correct although not in a very meaningful way. If you look at the amount of physical material that went into the process leading up to producing that product, the quantity would amount to many tonnes of material in terms of crushed ore, fossil fuels, water consumption, chemicals, packaging and so on. A phone does not only represent its own grammes material, but an enormous tail of environmental impact in form of waste, emissions and extraction remains. (This is not to mention the human labor cost involved in obtaining some of the rare earths used, from countries with, ehrm, lax labor laws).
I don't think at all that we're near the limit of human ingenuity.
The quibble I had was with the "sustainable", which in that context, I read as indefinitely/infinitely sustainable (and it seems other responders have similar issues).
I agree that there should be a lot more human ingenuity ahead of us than behind us (assuming that those seeking power over others, e.g., megalomaniacs and autocrats, don't first destroy us).
That said, productivity of any one thing is certainly never an x^y sort of curve but eventually flattens and becomes asymptotic, if not declining.
Sustained innovation is finding a series of technologies with S-curve growth that can be transitioned away from as they approach their asymptotic limit. Then, society can stay in exponential phase until it hits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_III
Some would argue everything fundamentally is physics, including mathematical models of chemistry. I can’t say they are wrong.
Physics being math doesn’t quite make sense to me yet, if for no other reason than a large body of physics laws are ‘because that is what happens in real life’ when you get down to it.
It’s clear the math is a tool to try to reason about the reality, not the other way around.
Hard disagree there. Physics is experimental exploration of fundamental physical rules in the universe, which requires maths to model and further explore. But the reality came first.
Chemistry is ‘higher level’ physics, and similarly the discipline grew out of observed reality far before the maths were used.
Maths were useful tools, and continue to be more and more useful as they are developed
and have useful predictive power. But the predictive power (and falsifiability of their predictions) against reality is key.
