The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (part 1 of 8)

If you haven't previously seen Dr. Barrett's "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy", I strongly recommend it: [VIDEO] It doesn't address quite the same scale, but is very sobering.

Anyone really interested in this should watch Albert Bartlett's lecture "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy". It blew my mind when I first watched it two years ago: [VIDEO]

Not sure if you've seen this series: [VIDEO] (despite looking/sounding boring at the start, stick with it; it's really captivating and interesting), but it is amazing just how much 'small' growth (even 2-3% p/a) can cause things to double in much less time than you'd imagine. Or if you haven't got the time to watch the whole thing (is close to an hour all in all), this touches on a couple of the topics the video covers: [LINK] (naturally doubling every minute is on a much faster scale to the Human population!)

The bacteria are mentioned in Albert Bartlett's famous lecture here: [VIDEO] 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.

From Tom Murphy's excellent Do the Math blog[1]. Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes? When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food? Seriously, if you haven't read his take on things yet, at least the first few posts are a must-read. It's on par with the Arithmetic, Population, and Energy lecture at UC Boulder by Al Bartlett (popularly titled "The Most Important Video You'll Ever See", which is less hyperbole than you might think; the lecture is riveting)[2]. To very TL;DR things: solar and tidal energy (and their derivatives like wind) are essentially the only sources of energy we can rely on as our energy requirem

There's only one planet Earth, finite in size - and therefore a finite amount of natural resources exist within it. Once we've split all the uranium and washed all the phosphorus into the ocean, that's it - you can't think up more Zinc, Rubidium or Lithium - once it's gone, it's gone. I'm sure we could do vastly more recycling, use alternatives for some things, improve efficiency, develop magical new technologies, etc, etc... but almost no-one I've spoken to about this appreciates just how terrifyingly rapidly we're approaching these limits. If we run out of available mine-able Zinc & Copper in 30 years - which is quite possible - what then? Do we have enough time to switch to coping strategies? Will that be a smooth ride? It seems to me that the front of the train has already hit the buffers, but we've still got our foot on the gas pedal, back here in the cab. Most of the useful mineral resources on Earth are only available in vanishingly tiny quantities elsewhere in the solar system. We currently do almost no recycling of anything, compared to our consumption. The human population is huge, growing in number, affluence and resource usage per capita. We're on course to run out of the minerals required to run our economy & infrastructure within most of our lifetimes. Nice infographic with some estimated timescales for various resources: [LINK] The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our inability to understand the exponential function: [VIDEO] I'm not being alarmist - so

Great rule, should be the very first thing taught in high school when you get to exponents. Dr. Albert Bartlet of University of Colorado has an excellent lecture on its implications for population growth, environmental degradation, and other big picture problems: [VIDEO]

To temper this pessimism with some sobering reality, on another HN thread today I was pointed to this: [VIDEO] Well worth watching. Somehow, some time the population is going down. Way down.