The Most Important Video You’ll Ever See?…

The title of this video is “The Most IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See“.
It’s a 80 minute lecture about the importance of understanding exponential growth, as it relates to population growth and resource consumption.

I’m usualy more than a little skeptical about these things. Over emphasized titles trying to alarm you and ridiculous conspiracy theories are not my thing, but I still watched it to make sure. Well, I have to say, the title is probably accurate: getting educated about the arithmetic Dr. Bartlett is detailing here is incredibly important, and I urge you all to watch it, bear with it, and make an effort to understand it.

Here’s the gist:

  • The doubling time for a growth rate of 1% per year is 70 years. The world population’s growth rate is ~1.15%. That sounds tiny, but if you’re under 20, you’ll probably live to see it reach *14 billion*. (Damn, we just reached 7 billion a few days ago!)
  • Optimistic estimates, which include all the oil *left to discover* (as in: that we have not found yet) put the peak oil production in ~2020. From there, we start having *less* oil every year. It’s a bell shaped curve and it keeps going down.

Put these two together, and you start getting the feeling we’re screwed. The best part: all this is fact, not belief or rhetoric. It is happening, there’s no way around it.

 

(Here is a link to the full playlist of all eight videos playing in sequence.)

 

The way we are living now will not go on forever. It actually won’t go on for more than a couple of decades. The only solutions are: stop population growth, and find alternative sources of energy. I’m confident we will do at least the second one, but we need to:
1) Understand how important all this is.
2) Hope to God it will be enough for everyone (it won’t).

Please do watch the lecture that goes into much more detail. It’s not some “hippie bullshit about saving mother earth”, as some people might see environmentalist movements. And it’s not some ridiculous conspiracy theory about the banks and secret societies controlling the future of the world either. I hope you know and trust me enough that you understand I wouldn’t serve you such nonsense.

It’s really about what is actually happening in the reality that we live in, and understanding where we are heading. And deciding for yourself whether you/we should do something about it. As the title says, mighty important stuff…

As usual, please let me know if there is something I’m missing here (which is always possible!)

PS: if you know how to embed the video so it plays the playlist, going automatically to the next video, please let me know.
November 13th, 2011

  • Jamie Burgoyne

    I probably will watch this at some point but my biggest issue with most of these types of theories, is basically the peak oil predictions. There have been more peak oil predictions than end of the world predictions. We just keep moving past those dates and it’s got to the point I’m always going to question exactly how people are making their estimations.

    Also, disregarding that, my biggest fear with population growth is the allocation of resources. We currently produce more than enough food for the entire world to be fed, yet over a billion people are starving. With many lobby groups trying to get us to go against genetically engineered farming, the wastefulness of a lot of western countries and more importantly the recent trend towards organic food (If the entire worlds farm land could only grow organic food, it’d only be able to grow a crop that would feed an average of 5 billion people, as it’s that inefficient); food is going to become an issue. Hell, food already IS an issue and we’re only at 7, I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like at 20.

    And then, back to my economics knowledge, growth rates (including population) are on cycles, it raises and falls. OK it does usually grow continually but the idea of exponential growth is something that doesn’t click with me. I mean how would we in England have a huge issue with an ageing population if we were constantly having more and more kids. Again, I need see the video and look at the calculations but often people going off on population growth try to look at it as if it was compound interest on a fixed savings rate, constantly building on the same rate. In the long run, sure, growth is upwards but in the short run it’s very erratic; we can have high growth, low growth or even negative growth. It’s because of this erratic nature we should have time to adapt to issues that seem immediate and it’s also this that makes me think all of these “In your lifetime” statements usually end up not happening. 

  • http://twitter.com/Bastux Sebastien LE DIGABEL

    Just finished watching it.

    I can’t help but having this feeling of hopelessness. His demonstration with the “What time is it?” was the perfect illustration on how ridiculous the world situation was. To quote his own words: at some point Nature will solve the problem for us.

    Scary.

    The Asimov’s quote “Democracy will not survive overpopulation. Human Dignity will not survive overpopulation” finished thursting me into depression :-)
    It’s scary how optimistic usually means not wanting to know.

    Thanks Patrick for sharing this.

  • http://benjaminazan.fr Benjamin Azan

    If you want to add the playlist.
    Try this URL http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6A1FD147A45EF50D

    Home it helps