kip399
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2016–2024
1:14:16 · 191K views · Jan 26, 2012
Physicist Albert Bartlett's full-length lecture on how steady exponential growth in population and energy use collides with finite resources. It uses examples like bacteria in a bottle and covers peak oil.
HN repeatedly quotes its thesis that humanity's greatest shortcoming is failing to understand the exponential function.
12 comments from Hacker News
this video "the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" not a high tech talk, or particularly technically complex, but it shows a common blindspot in a way that is both clear, enlightening and frightening.
Your point reminds me of my favorite guest lecture I've ever seen: this video About 2/3rds through makes the same point you do.
> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [LINK] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith [LINK] Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett this video Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter [LINK] Revealing the Naked Emperor – Paris, 2° & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [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
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]