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This does not have to mean that the general education level will have to fall at all. For one, new fields of study entirely might continue to be invented, to keep a couple generations of researchers busy, and marginalizing older fields. (How many Lamarckists, or alchemists, or Olympian theologists have you ever met?) For two, there’s always mathematics, which offers an inexhaustible variety of problems at almost every possible level of difficulty. I actually recall seeing a proof, based on something of Gödel’s if not his altogether, that it’s impossible to run out of human-researchable mathematics.

However: a weaker version of the main thesis can probably be made regardless of all this! Even if we assumed only a constant number of classicists — even just the bare minimum required to ensure that the traditions and the knowledge of the field remain alive (i.e. not just catalogued in cold storage on Omniwiki) — there will still be a strictly growing number of classicists across history as a whole. As t → ∞, this situation seems to admit a solution space with three extremes:
1) Research will slow down towards zero, and classicists settle to being ever increasingly keepers and curators of knowledge, rather than creators of it.
2) Classicists will end up conducting the same research indefinitely over and over again; perhaps because no one can keep up with the entirety of the research history.
3) We still get Nikias The Random Olive Farmer Studies, except the papers come out once in a millennium and every scholar in the field gets to be its uncontended master for the entirety of their career.

And these are not mutually exclusive solutions. It’s possible to have both #1 and #2 in effect, and regardless end up with NTROFS, just exponentially slowly. The second NTROFS paper might come out a mere century after the 1st; the 10th might come out seven million years after the 9th.

Lastly, we can incidentally note that in all of these cases, and perhaps even in Scott’s constant classicist proportion solution, most of the early NTROF research will presumably have been conducted due to nonstandard motivations — as laconic humor, out of extreme boredom, due to having pulled a research topic out of a random number generator…

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But I don’t think India was much of a home front.

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1. I find it somewhat pleasant (in a self-aggrandizing way) and at the same time somewhat horrifying (the reasons for which to be puzzled out later) to imagine the resources of a matrioshka brain devoted to a detailed simulation of the exact thought processes behind my choice of a tuna salad sandwich for lunch on May 23rd, 2010. And later the resources of multiple brains to the analysis of the researcher’s decision to simulate the exact thought processes behind my choice of a tuna salad sandwich for lunch on May 23rd, 2010. And then the resources of a cluster of brains on a meta-analysis of all studies using simulations of the exact thought processes behind my choice of a tuna salad sandwich for lunch on May 23rd, 2010. And then….

2. Somewhat following from the above, at any point should we be concerned that the actions we take on a daily basis are causing undue stress to future researchers or to the resources that may be required in their research? If I was less ambiguous in my review of the tuna salad sandwich on May 23rd, 2010, would it perhaps lead to a simpler understanding of my thought process, allowing the use of less resources in effecting a simulation, resources that could be put towards improving the lives of the researcher and others?

3. Following from #2, will every decision and action in my life eventually affects the suffering or happiness of billions or trillions of future entities, human or otherwise? Could my choice to be less vague in food reviews provide the future Galactic Emperor with enough available resources to prevent the K’th’rangan invasion? Is my action in leaving this comment at all the salvation or destruction of an incalculable (to me) amount of life? Am I either (or simultaneously) the greatest threat or benefit to the future of the universe?

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There is no limit to the number of people who can spend their free time studying a narrow or broad category, nor is there a reason to limit their choice. There is a negative feedback loop on who would be willing to pay for that expertise though.

To the extent people still get doctorates in Classical Greece, they are either planning on leveraging that into a socially useful skill which people will pay for, or getting a certificate of accomplishment for signaling puposes, or doing it for personal enrichment (or some combo of the above). As more study a given field, after a transition point, extra commitment to the field becomes increasingly personal rather than professional. Do I watch Buffy tonight or study Greek history? Hmmm, good question.

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Where is the retro Ten Forward where all the waitresses wear TOS-style miniskirts?

I think the Star Trek writers missed a trick here. Something like this would probably have been a hit with the fanbase, although you couldn’t introduce it too early in the series without confusing people.

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