The exponential function, fact filled video

[Il_Mostro]

A little something for the growth-forever crowd. This is what you are dealing with, this is what is needed.

The video is a 60 minute lecture by Albert Bartlett [Professor Emeritus, Physics Department, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO] concerning the exponential function, the math that govern our current growth-based society. I urge everyone to see it, it's 60 very informative, fact-filled minutes. And very disturbing at times.
It may be a bit tricky to get it to run, I had to lower the bandwidth to 56kbit/s in realplayer, might do the trick if you have problems.

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

Bartlett video

And below is more info on Bartlett, and papers by him.
Bartlett papers

[adios]

Out of curiosity when does he predict human population growth will abate?

[El Barto]

I went to his paper called The World's Worst Population Problem

a quote from this article:
[ QUOTE ]
The world population growth rate was close to zero through most of human history, and it started to increase significantly a few centuries ago. Around 1970 it reached a high of about 2 % per year, from which it has recently declined to the estimated 1.6 % per year.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just as in poker, comparing the short term results (the 1970's or recent centuries) to the long term results (human history) is folly. You can double the population one decade and halve it due to an epidemic and wars the next.

There are insufficient "hands played" in the most recent trends cited to draw any worthwhile conclusions.

[Il_Mostro]

He doesn't make any own predictions. But he cites various, such as about double of today, about 50% more than today he says is the most conservative number anyone predicts. He also says that since already today some 3/4 of the populations lives on the brink of starvation (not sure about the number, but somewhere in that area) a mere doubling of population is not very comfortable. See the video, it's worth it.

[Il_Mostro]

Not sure what you are saying here. If you are saying that somehow nature will take care of the population problem you are of course correct. But it's also true that if we let nature do it it will be to a very very high price. It's a lot better to take measures ourselves and reduce population in an ordered fashion, instead of having nature do it due to resource depletion, war and disease. Current population is not sustainable. Couple that with the peak in oil extraction, and there's a fair chanse it'll be ugly.