The Math of Life, Growth & Pain on Scale

Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute spoke this morning at the Techonomy conference on The Secrets of Scale. He went through chart after chart demonstrating a simple and reliable mathematical relationship between growth and various costs and benefits to animals, people, cities and corporations. The magic number is 1.15.

"Doubling the size of a city," West concluded, "systematically increasess income, wealth, number of patents, number of colleges, creatives, police, crime, AIDS and flue and waste all by 15%. Regardless of the city. This data suggests that these are not independent phenomena."

West said that unlike average animals, we in our society today have a consumption/metabolic rate that corresponds with what you would expect to find in a 30,000 kg gorilla.

"We need a new paradigm," he urged, "a new integrated quantitative predictive paradigm. We are in deep doo-doo if we don't come up with a theory integrating all these things in a sustainable way."

Comments

[Mark Essel]

30,000kg gorilla seems a little high.
So we consume that much or metabolize that much. Can I please burn calories like King Kong?

[Marshall Kirkpatrick]

Mark, I think he meant it literally. Remember how many gallons of water are required to produce a single pound of beef these days, for example.

[TahoeBlue]

I would pay to see a real 30-ton gorilla ! I suspect that the figure was really 300kg.

[Steve Shoop]

A theory integrating all these things in a "sustainable" way?

It's Called ""negative population growth"".

In around 780 years, at the current rate the population of the earth is growing. Each person will have one square meter. We will have standing room only folks...

Check this guys math, prove him wrong....

Prof. Albert Bartlett- http://www.albartlett.org

one-hour lecture, "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101"

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