Arithmetic, Population and Energy - FULL LENGTH

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" this video

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett That's the thesis of Dr. Bartlett's famous lecture "Arithmetic, Population and Energy": this video Calculus is foundational for understanding our rapidly changing, data-driven world. It gives us the ability to see. You can apply calculus anytime you have a quantity that's changing over time, and you want to see where things are going, how things are changing, and when something is going to happen based on its rate of change -- e.g. stocks, startup growth metrics, how an idea is spreading, mass-market adoption, etc -- anytime you have time-series data and you want to see what it means -- make sense out of it, and understand its implications. See link And Calculus gives you the ability to calculate how lifelong learning can impact your growth over time -- the significance it can have throughout your life/career -- and realize it's never too late to learn anything ;-) In the words of Prof John Ousterhout: "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." link

All the fears around growth is from people not understanding the difference between absolute growth and relative growth. Which is better growth of 1000 or 3% ? the developed world cannot grow at high percentage points because they're so large. This video more or less shows the insanity of trying to grow at a fixed rate (say being an "emerging market" at 6% per year) for an indefinite timespan. this video

But this is the problem of exponential growth - you can sustain it without even noticing the detrimental effects, until suddenly you can't. The resource usage of all the doubling time periods until the last one would have used up only 50% of the resources available(this could be millions of years, depending on the exponent), and then suddenly the last one would use up all the resources left. This is repeatedly exemplified in Professor Allen Bartlett's talk "Arithmetic, Population and Energy"(video link at specific point: this video transcript: link )

I'd like to quote Al Bartlett: His thesis: " The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function " An example from the rest of the talk: "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 realize 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 realize there’s a problem? " this video link

Also about that Asimov's article: link Also, Al Bartlett's thesis: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" this video The transcript: link

Specifically: "In 2016, a report published by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth concluded that "there is unsettling evidence that society is still following the 'standard run' of the original study – in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards".[45] The report also points out that some issues not fully addressed in the original 1972 report, such as climate change, present additional challenges for human development." Also Al Bartlett: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." Transcript: link Video: this video Previously mentioned: link

See this video from about 1999 - Arithmetic, Population and Energy by Dr Albert Bartlett, about this timestamp[1] for one example. It's mostly about oil, but he cites the work of M Hubbert which was from ~1956 and predicting peak oil production in the USA around 1980 and running out maybe in 2100. Not the "running out soon" that you claim. He also suggests the drops in production which delay the Hubbert peak correspond to OPEC oil price rises. Then see his updated talk from 2011 link[2] which includes " what we're taking out each year is something like three times what we're discovering each year ". Wikipedia critiques the Hubbert curve[4] saying " new extraction methods began reversing this trend beginning in the mid-2000s decade, with production reaching 10.07 million b/d in November 2017 – the highest monthly level of crude oil production in U.S. history ". The US Energy Information Authority (EIA) explains[3] " much of the increase in 2009 was associated with deepwater developments in the Federal Gulf of Mexico " and " Operators drilling at the Bakken and other shale formations are combining horizontal wells and hydraulic fracturing ". That is, turning to resources which are harder and more expensive to extract, resources which return fewer barrels of usble oil per barrel of oil of energy put in to extract them than easier to access resources. In the first talk he says " We have very good ways now of estimating how much oil remains undiscovered. Now every so often someone

Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun? The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same. See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett link Full length video: this video