Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 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 bacterium into an empty bottle at eleven in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at twelve noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth, it has a doubling time of one minuet, and it's in the finite environment of one bottle. I want to ask you three questions.
Number one; at which time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59,one minuet before 12, because they double in number every minute.
Second Question; if you were an average bacterium in that bottle at what time would you first realise that you were running of space? Well let's just look at the last minute in the bottle. At 12 noon its full, one minute before its half full, 2 minutes before its ¼ full than 1/8th than a 1/16th . Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12 when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there's a problem?
Now in the ongoing controversy over growth in Bolder, someone wrote to the newspaper some years ago and said look, there's no problem with population growth in Boulder, because the writer said, we have fifteen times as much open space as we've already used. So let me ask you what time was it in Boulder when the open space was fifteen times the amount of space we had already used? And the answer is, it was four minutes before 12 in Boulder valley. Well suppose that at 2 minutes before 12, some of the bacterium realised they were running out of space, so they launch a great search for new bottles. They searched offshore and on the outer continental shelf and the overthrust belt and the Artic, and they find three new bottles. Now that's an incredible discovery, that's three times the total amount of resource they ever new about before, they now have four bottles, before their discovery they had one. Now surely this will give them a sustainable society, wont' it?
You know what the third question is? How long can the growth continue as a result of this magnificent discovery? Well look at the score, at 12 noon, one bottles filled, there are three to go, 12:01 two bottles are filled, there's two to go and at 12:02 all four are filled and that's the end of the line. Now you don't need any more arithmetic than this to evaluate the absolutely contradictory statements that we've all heard and read from experts who tell us in one breath we can go on increasing our rates of consumption of fossil fuels and then in the next breath don't worry, we will always be able to make the discoveries of new resources that we need to meet the requirement of that growth.
