Natural resources are virtually unlimited, at least for the current size of the human race. We're only just scratching the surface of the resources available on Earth, and there's a whole solar system we have access to. The only issue is the technology required to transform these resources into something useful, and the "permission" to create and deploy such technology.
The assumption of 'unlimited natural resources' is now at odds with modern economic theory.
By seeing natural resources as limitless and by extension free at source undervalues their net economic contribution.
Take the example of massive ocean trawlers that cast kilometer wide nets then bring back all the catch to sell at market. The trawler is not creating the value of the fish just facilitating an arbitrage for the cost of delivery.
Companies are now looking at ways they can put a financial value on the value of their natural resource inputs.
A failure in quantifying and pricing resources creates a mindset problem when resources turn out not to be limitless or indescuctuble.
The World Bank, in it's 2011 report 'The Changing Wealth of Nations', set the estimates for all the planets natural resources - its forests, rivers, wetlands, wild lands, farm and grazing lands, minerals, oil and coal, oceans, biodiversity of speciecs - at about $44 trillion dollars, with $29 trillion belonging to developing nations.
Those figures by "economists" are woefully, comically limited, they only consider natural resources as determined by current limits of politics and technology, but in fact the whole solar system is rich with natural resources, just waiting for people who actually have imagination (and liberty from the punks who listen to those economists) to begin to capture.
>> Natural resources are virtually unlimited at least for the current size of the human race
I was sort of nodding in agreement at another comment you left elsewhere but this one is just not on. This belief is definitely at odds with mine (specially going in with Club of Rome studies on this topic, for e.g.).
It's not useful to just say you disagree. You ought to say why.
The fact is that matter is virtually unlimited, and it is not against the laws of physics that we can transform matter into more useful kinds, that we can deploy various means of collecting energy from the sun (even extraterrestrial), that we can learn how to fuse hydrogen, etc.
Edit: I guess you sort of did indicate why you disagreed, but referring to "Club of Rome" is just argument from authority, and anyway their study flies in the face of common sense. We know the Earth is brimming over with energy and resources, that the main difficulty is collecting and transforming them. This is a technological problem not a fundamentally unresolvable problem.
