📰 Source: upgoat.net | Upgoat

✍️ Original author: Indoctrinated_USA

⬆️ score: 15

v/politics · by u/Indoctrinated_USA

📝 Original content:

Because humans do not inherently understand exponential growth, or how to respond to it in time to prevent it’s devastation.

That’s the answer.

I’ve excerpted, and linked, a thought experiment illustrating this below.

"Suppose I had a magic eye dropper and I placed a single drop of water in the middle of your left hand. The magic part is that this drop of water will double in size every minute. At first nothing seems to be happening, but by the end of a minute, that tiny drop is now the size of two tiny drops. After another minute, you now have a little pool of water sitting in your hand that is slightly smaller in diameter than a dime. After six minutes, you have a blob of water that would fill a thimble.

Now imagine that you’re in the largest stadium you’ve ever seen or been in—perhaps Fenway Park, the Astrodome, or Wembley Stadium. Suppose we take our magic eye dropper to that enormous structure, and right at 12:00 pm in the afternoon, we place a magic drop way down in the middle of the field. To make this even more interesting, suppose that the park is watertightand that you’re handcuffed to one of the very highest bleacher seats. My question to you is this:

How long do you have to escape from the handcuffs? When would the park be completely filled? Do you have days? Weeks? Months? Years? How long before the park is overflowing?

The answer is this: You have until exactly 12:50 pm on that same day - just 50 minutes—to figure out how you’re going to escape from your handcuffs. In only 50 minutes, our modest little drop of water has managed to completely fill the stadium. But wait, you say, how can I be sure which stadium you picked? Perhaps the one you picked is 100 percent larger than the one I used to calculate this example (Fenway Park). Wouldn’t that completely change the answer? Yes, it would - by one minute. Every minute, our magic water doubles, so even if your selected stadium happens to be 100 percent larger or 50 percent smaller than the one I used

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