Humanity is facing many problems, immediately there’s COVID, longer (but not that long) term there’s Climate Change.
“Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.”
Probably not Einstein, but it sounds smarter if I say it’s Einstein
Ontario has decided to reopen, even if the projections are bad. It seems we keep closing and reopening and hoping that we can keep things under control. It’s easy to shit on the the people making these decisions, but regardless I plan on doing it here.
The challenge we have with COVID is the same as climate change. It’s that our linear thinking, that if we close down X or we lower Y doesn’t match up to the exponential world.
An easy way to visualize this is with regards to speed in relation to deaths in car accidents. Kinetic energy is equal to ½mv² with the v² being the important part here. So take a look at the chart below.
Basically, a small change in speed, causes a huge fucken change in probability of death. Now before you think this is just because of some correlation between humans dying and some magic speed. Spoiler it’s basically the same as just x²
By now you’ve probably surmised that COVID and climate change are exponential problems.
And while I’d love to try my best to surmise why humans are bad at it, many people have done it far better than I ever could.
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function”
Al Bartlett
There’s a good video, it’s long and not the best produced one, but it’s by Al Barlett and he does a really good job of explaining why we’re fucked.
His main focus is overpopulation, but the same applies to carbon emissions, either way, it’s pretty easy to see that population growth and it’s inability to keep going up will mean massive changes for how we live. We take for granted now that we can have children, as many as we want really, but that’s going to change, and it’s going to change faster than any of us will expect.
The same will happen with climate change and the same is happening with COVID. It’s nothing and then all at once.
At least from our limited linear ability to perceive the “nothing” that becomes this “all at once”