Nikiforuk On Our Deadly Pursuit of Exponential Growth

I am tired of writing about the perils and pitfalls of  perpetual exponential growth so obsessively pursued by our political leadership. It seems so obvious that it's tempting to think of our leaders, from all parties, as deeply malevolent. So, here's the Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk.  And Nikiforuk explores exponential growth in the context of Covid-19.

After China reported its first case in December of what was later identified as COVID-19, it took 67 days to reach the first 100,000 global cases. 

No big deal, we thought. 

It then took 11 days to make the next 100,000 cases. 

And just four more days for the third 100,000 cases. 

Now the world reports 250,000 cases every day and this pandemic has just gotten started.
When the numbers are small, we ignore them and underestimate the threat.

...Why this blindness? Humans have trouble imagining a small number becoming a tsunami. Our imaginations stop at the threshold of chaos and go blank. 

Years ago, Albert Bartlett, a gentle Colorado physicist with wild hair, tried to convince people that the greatest shortcoming of the human race was its “inability to understand the exponential function.”

...In 1999 Ray Kurzweil, a technology guru and computer scientist, invented a new expression: “The second half of the chessboard.” 

By the second half, he meant the point where exponential growth takes on a life of its own, and “its impacts become massive, things get crazy, and the acceleration starts to elude most humans’ imagination and grasp,” explained Bruno Giussani, the European director of TED, in a 2017 Edge article. 

He’s right about the exponential growth of technologies. It took the telephone 75 years to conquer 50 million people, and computers just 14 years to command the same number. But it only took Pokemon Go just 14 days to dominate the imaginations of 50 million consumers.

...About 300 years ago the human population went on an exponential ride thanks to the proliferation of fossil fuels, which allowed an increasing number of people to eat, drink and spend like kings. 

It took roughly 300 years for human population to double from 500 million to roughly one billion in 1804. It took 110 years to double to 1.8 billion. Then things went wild, taking only 60 years to hit 3.6 billion. And then just 45 years to hit 7.3 billion in 2017. 

The consumption patterns driven by nearly eight billion people have created an exponential assault on the Earth’s finite resources. 

In 1900, the globe dug up seven billion tonnes of coal, iron, fish, wood fertilizer and aluminum to keep the economy humming. By 2000, the economy consumed 49 billion tonnes of materials from the Earth. Now we carelessly extract 90-billion tonnes and plan to double that every 30 to 40 years. The global chessboard is groaning.

Exponential growth gives people two basic choices: act early or be overwhelmed. It then follows its own logic: things will initially get worse even when good actions are taken before they improve.

...In his wonderful novel on friends and marriage, Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner offers a more literate illustration of the power of the exponential function in our everyday lives. 

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.” 

Gradually, and then suddenly.