The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (part 1 of 8)

What Hacker News said

Strong rec dredmorbius · 2011-08 · on “Galactic-Scale Energy”

If you haven't previously seen Dr. Barrett's "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy", I strongly recommend it: [this video] It doesn't address quite the same scale, but is very sobering.

Strong rec mark_up · 2011-10 · on “What is the Limit to Human Population Growth?”

Anyone really interested in this should watch Albert Bartlett's lecture "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy". It blew my mind when I first watched it two years ago: [this video]

Strong rec tristanperry · 2011-10 · on “You are the nth person alive on earth”

Not sure if you've seen this series: [this video] (despite looking/sounding boring at the start, stick with it; it's really captivating and interesting), but it is amazing just how much 'small' growth (even 2-3% p/a) can cause things to double in much less time than you'd imagine. Or if you haven't got the time to watch the whole thing (is close to an hour all in all), this touches on a couple of the topics the video covers: [LINK] (naturally doubling every minute is on a much faster scale to the Human population!)

Strong rec jodrellblank · 2019-06 · on “The poisons released by melting Arctic ice”

The bacteria are mentioned in Albert Bartlett's famous lecture here: [this video] It's clickbait titled and split into 8 parts, for who knows what reasons, but that quote is the tl;dr version of it. Exponential growth is unintuitive, and chasing endless growth is not going to work out well for us. Even if the bacteria find another entire jar of open space - as much space as has ever been known, as much space as they have used in their entire history - a fully terraformed Mars hanging out in the back yard previously unseen - it only lasts a single doubling-time.

Strong rec stouset · 2025-08 · on “The Sunlight Budget of Earth”

From Tom Murphy's excellent Do the Math blog[1]. Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes? When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we ope

Recommends dflock · 2010-04 · on “Peak Everything?”

There's only one planet Earth, finite in size - and therefore a finite amount of natural resources exist within it. Once we've split all the uranium and washed all the phosphorus into the ocean, that's it - you can't think up more Zinc, Rubidium or Lithium - once it's gone, it's gone. I'm sure we could do vastly more recycling, use alternatives for some things, improve efficiency, develop magical new technologies, etc, etc... but almost no-one I've spoken to about this appreciates just how terrifyingly rapidly we're approaching these limits. If we run out of available mine-able Zinc & Copper in 30 years - which is quite possible - what then? Do we have enough time to switch to coping strateg

Recommends SkyMarshal · 2010-10 · on “How Fake Money Saved Brazil”

Great rule, should be the very first thing taught in high school when you get to exponents. Dr. Albert Bartlet of University of Colorado has an excellent lecture on its implications for population growth, environmental degradation, and other big picture problems: [this video]

Recommends cletus · 2010-10 · on “The middle class is over. It's not coming back.”

To temper this pessimism with some sobering reality, on another HN thread today I was pointed to this: [this video] Well worth watching. Somehow, some time the population is going down. Way down.