2025-03-29
37 分钟This is Planet Money from npr.
A few weeks ago we got this kind of mind bending question.
It was from our friends at Radiolab, which is a show about science and philosophy and,
you know, just the sheer joy of curiosity.
And in this case they were curious about growth, in particular economic growth.
How could it possibly go on forever?
And can, can too much growth destroy us?
And in trying to answer their big question, we ended up in some pretty heady and unexpected places.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
I'm Jeff Guo and today we're doing something a little bit different.
We've teamed up with Radiolab and we're going to try to answer one of the biggest questions that often goes unsaid in economics.
Here's Latif Nasser from Radiolab to get us started.
Hey, this is Radiolab, I'm Latif Nasser.
What got me thinking about economic growth was not all the stuff that's in the news,
the tariffs, the fear of the recession, all that stuff that everybody's talking about.
What started it was a lecture I heard a little while back by of all people, an astrophysicist.
So I'm going to sketch what we know about Earth's history, cosmically speaking.
Her name is Sandra Faber.
She goes by Sandy, brilliant scientist.
She co authored the standard model for thinking about how galaxies form.