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

What people said

stouset · 2025-08 · Strong recommendation

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 operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food? Seriously, if you haven't read his take on things yet, at least the first few posts are a must-read. It's on par with the Arithmetic, Population, and Energy lecture at UC Boulder by Al Bartlett (popularly titled "The Most Important Video You'll Ever See", which is less hyperbole than you might think; the lecture is riveting)[2]. To very TL;DR things: solar and tidal energy (and their derivatives like wind) are essentially the only sources of energy we can rely on as our energy requirem

Read the original HN comment ↗

jodrellblank · 2019-06 · Strong recommendation

The bacteria are mentioned in Albert Bartlett's famous lecture here: [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.

Read the original HN comment ↗

mark_up · 2011-10 · Strong recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗