Growth doesn’t mean that more physical resources changed hands. It just means that a greater exchange of value happened in transactions.

Sure. But then you have to define "value" as an economic concept. And the end result is the AI Bubble, wherein billions of gallons of potable water and gigawatts of flammable gas are valued below a series of incoherent digital images and text blather.

I agree that - in theory - we can create value through bureaucratic efficiency or infrastructure improvements or novel application of scientific discovery. But in practice we appear to fixate on advertising, entertainment, and market speculation. The pursuit of infinite growth is not capped by our access to material resources and the limits of our engineering expertise but by our access to martial force and the resources available to our weaker neighbors.

yeah strictly speaking you're right, but also it does indeed require physical resources to have qualitative development.

consider the following (somewhat abstract) argument:

You build software, and eventually you will have developed all software that can be encoded on a disk with 10^(10^15) bytes of storage space. At this point, you can't build new software because there's literally not more silicon on earth's crust to build more disks. Therefore, even something as purely qualitative as developing software will eventually reach physical boundaries. Thus there can be no infinite growth in a physical-finite system.

The only way to have infinite growth IMHO is human settlement of outer space; and upon closer examination (which i won't do here), it is even necessary for humans to settle outer space in the long run.

Thus i am all for Mars settlement.