Anyone good at math?

[wet_suit_one]

It is amazing to me that it took 20 posts for someone to actually comment on the content of the film. Kudos to you Buttercup.

That said, I think, just like the media, (especially the business media) has been telling me for all my life, endless growth is good and it cannot and should not be stopped. I'm pretty sure that this professor is simply wrong. I'm prepared to drive our whole damned civilization over a cliff to prove the business media right too goddamnit! Are you?

 

[buttercup]

Like Prof Bartlett says, endless growth is good economically, and would be good for mankind for ever, if only the resources of the earth were not finite. We are priveleged to be living in the middle (or maybe we're unfortunate enough to be living near the end) of the golden age of consumption. We are consuming the earth. There's already too many of us, and we are increasing, and there's no escape.

 

[LurkingInMyTent]

In reference to Gyaos, the term arithmetic is archaicly used to describe exponential. Most modern scientific jargon attempts to clarify the distinction, because it is horrendously confusing. This professor is using older nomenclature.

Bolding added...

Not having watched the video in the OP, but are you not confusing arithmetic with geometric here? An arithmetic progression is one where successive terms are generated by adding a constant quantity, whereas in a geometric progression each new step differs by a constant factor (i.e. multiplication)

As an example, the famous story of the advisor to an ancient king who asked to be paid with grains of rice on a chess board - in the geometric case there is 1 grain on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth, and so on, so that the 64th square would be filled with 2 to the 63rd power grains of rice.

If the advisor had specified an arithmetic progression, it would be 1 grain on the first square, 2 on the second, 3 on the third, 4 on the fourth and finally only 64 on the final square.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the total number of grains of rice that the advisor receives in the two cases.