| Explosive growth is exponential growth - doubling at a steady rate |
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 | If you were earning 100% annual interest on your savings account - in 10 years, your money would have increased more than a million fold | |
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| Did you know when something grows exponentially for a long time it may seem not to be changing at all | |
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| If we don't watch it steadily, it will seem as though something discontinuous and radical occurred while we weren't looking |
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| Imagine one person infecting 2 healthy people, and the next day after each of those two infect two others, and the next day after that and so on. The number of newly infected each day grows from 2 or 4 to 8. In a week 128 people come down with this disease in a single day, and twice that number are now sick, but in the population of 10 million, no one notices | |
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| But.... after another week, 40% of the population is sick, and the society collapses | |
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| exponential growth takes very little time to pass from unnoticeable change to highly visible |
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| Suppose it took a eek to develop and administer a vaccine. Then noticing the epidemic after a week and a half would have left ample time to prevent this disaster. | |
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| But that would have required understanding that there was an epidemic when only 2,000 people out of 10 million were infected | |
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