One Tribe

Resource Depletion   "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -Albert Bartlett     As everyone knows, economies around the world all function on growth. Without growth, economies will collapse. Percentage growth is exponential growth. Exponential growth has two unique characteristics. One, at any given percentage there is a doubling period and two, the magnitude of the growth speeds up over time. For example, a quantity (x)  growing at 10% per year will be double (or 2x) in a little over 7 years. After another 7 odd years, that new amount will double again (or 2*2x). In addition, the amount of the quantity will get larger and larger in a shorter and shorter period of time ( by that I mean it took a little over 14 years to get 4x but it will only take 7 years to get another 4x).     Worldwide, GDP has grown at an average of about 3% a year since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In order ...

We Need to Behave Better   Mark Twain     Living in a western country, in a large city, it is easy to look around and be amazed. You look and think,  we humans are pretty clever. Look at all we've accomplished; all the inventions; all the technology. We are so smart for a bunch of hairless apes...we're so advanced. It seems we've evolved so much in our time here on spaceship Earth but I'm not so sure. Things progressed reasonably well until the onset of agriculture. Then, in many ways, human ingenuity took off while in other ways, humanity took a nosedive. At the same time as we improved intellectually, we continued doing very stupid things. I am sure that if an advanced alien species were to come for a visit, they would be impressed by some of our achievements but otherwise would consider us to be dumb as posts. They would probably gauge us to be in our teens, intellectually, as a species...at best.     When I read blog posts or editorial opinion pieces, I...