The bacteria are mentioned in Albert Bartlett's famous lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY It

The bacteria are mentioned in Albert Bartlett's famous lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY It's clickbait titled and split into 8 parts, for who knows what reasons, but that quote is the tl;dr version of it. Exponential growth is unintuitive, and chasing endless growth is not going to work out well for us. Even if the bacteria find another entire jar of open space - as much space as has ever been known, as much space as they have used in their entire history - a fully terraformed Mars hanging out in the back yard previously unseen - it only lasts a single doubling-time.