Help me understand Upper Limit to Hashrate or can Difficulity grow to infinite \ stacker news ~tech

Hi, I obv have some difficulties with the cryptographic foundations, but bare with me and please do help me understand, despite some questions being silly.

Scenario

What does happen when the Hashrate keeps growing immensely, and the difficulty continues to go up? The difficulity is determined by the number of leading zeros in a hash and the target (remaining digits in the hash), correct?

Questions:

1. Difficulty has an upper bound

Is it correct that the difficulty per definition is bound somewhere and can't continue to grow indefinitely?

2. Likelyhood of Collision

Should it not be more likely to come to Collisions when there are less degrees of freedom, i.e., digits that can be different from 0?

3. Scenario where a block is impossible

In the scenario described above, imagine the difficulity is as high that there needs to be 63 of the 64 digits of SHA to be 0. What happens when a block is virtually impossible to be found would the Blockchain stop / fail. (63/64 is exaggerated but you get the drift)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Stacktoshi42 OP 12 Oct 2023

4. Risk of bound vs. Unbound

While the Difficulty is bound, the theoretical energy is not as it can not be consumed. Could it not come to a scenario where we can not change the difficulty anymore but the hashrate still continues to grow?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @quark 12 Oct 2023

is this limit realistically reachable? Or not? We probably don't need to worry about it. Satoshi is not worried. ;) Also, there can be an easy soft fork when there is something needed to fix at some point. For now it is all good.