“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function” https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_popula

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function” https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... “Growth” as the politicians and the lobbyists push it is simply not sustainable. But both “the left” and “the right” have their agendas not to let you discuss or act on that. "Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle. I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute. And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realise you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1?8th; then a 1?16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there’s a problem?" Note that the before that point in the talk he explains that for any "steady growth" you can find the period in which what you observe doubles, i.e. any "steady growth" has its "doubling time."