Albert Bartlett was born in Shanghai in 1923, worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, got his PhD from Harvard, and spent his career as a physics professor at the University of Colorado. But he's best known for one lecture he gave 1,742 times over 36 years — roughly once every 8.5 days — before his death in 2013 at age 90.
It always started the same way: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
The math is simple. Take the number 70, divide by the percent growth rate, and you get the doubling time. At 7% annual growth, something doubles every 10 years. Bartlett illustrated this with Vail ski tickets: $5 in 1963, $10 in 1973, $20 in 1983, $40 in 1993, $80 in 2003.
But the real gut-punch is the bacteria thought experiment. Imagine bacteria that double every minute in a bottle. One bacterium goes in at 11:00 AM. At noon, the bottle is full. When is it half full? Not 11:30 — it's 11:59, one minute before noon.
Now the question that haunts: At five minutes before noon, the bottle is only 3% full. 97% open space, "yearning for development." How many bacteria would realize there's a problem? A banker once told him afterward, "I knew that applied to dollars. I didn't know it applied to people."
Bartlett considered "sustainable growth" an oxymoron and called cornucopians — those who believe technology will always solve resource problems — "The New Flat Earth Society." His challenge to audiences: "Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population?"
A month before Bartlett died, CU-Boulder's Environmental Center began training people to continue giving his lecture. The message, they felt, was too important to die with him.
Previously:
• Explainer video — this is a good time to understand what exponential growth means
• Exponential population growth and other unkillable science myths
