Oh great, you are back! What a relief, I trust that you were responsible
right? You know masks, six-feet, treat everything you touch as if it's raw chicken?
Yeah, it's pretty scary out there though, huh? How do we even get to this point?
It seems like it was just a few weeks ago, when we didn't even know to take this whole thing
serious-
Oh. It's cuz it HAS been only a few weeks?
Right.
Well, listen, there are dozens of reasons why this is snowballed into a global pandemic,
but I'm not really qualified to talk about most of it.
But there is something I could talk about, if you're up for it!
It's exponential growth. It is really really hard for human beings to understand exponential growth
Most people don't understand what an exponential is. When you say something is expanding exponentially...
So you take 100 you get 1,000 and get 10,000
Our intuition isn't really capable of understanding exponential growth,
and the irony is that it's actually fairly easy to understand on paper!
It's not hard math!
I mean, it's no vector calculus or differential equations or taxes.
It's just raising a number like 2 to the power of another number, you know squared, cubed, 2 to the power of 4.
We rarely have need for exponents larger than this. So what if we raise 2 to the power of 100?
Here is a classic sheet of paper. Nothing remarkable about it.
If I was to double this, I'd have two sheets of paper.
If I was to double this again,
I'd have four. Again, and I'd have eight so on and so forth, you get the idea.
So what if I doubled this a hundred times?
Don't calculate the answer!
What does your gut tell you?
We go straight from the gut!
Old-school Corridor Crew fans might recognize when I asked my coworkers this exact question.
I don't know, probably like 3 of these buildings.
200 feet?
Ok.
Probably like, freakin' the distance of the state of Texas or something, something outrageous.
That is pretty dang outrageous.
500 meters?
500 meters
Yeah, okay. Here's a hint:
How far into outer space will it go?
Oh my god.
At 10 doublings,
the stack of paper would be 10 centimeters tall, but just 5 doublings later
you wouldn't be able to stack it in your house!
At 20 doublings,
the stack of paper would stretch across an entire soccer pitch
At 30 doublings,
it would officially reach outer space.
(Stretching over a 100km straight up)
To get to the moon,
we would just need 12 more doublings on top of that. So what about a hundred doublings?
I bet you're prepared for a pretty large number,
But trust me, you're really not.
This stack would be so tall,
the only way to measure would be in light-years.
13 billion light-years.
That's over 500 meters man.
The thing about exponential growth, is that most of the growth happens at the last moment.
It's what gives graphs like this, that hockey-stick look.
And in the case of doublings,
literally half of the total amount was gained at the final step,
no matter which step you're on.
In fact at this virus's current rate of spread in the next four months,
it will have infected one trillion people.
Wait a minute...
Okay, okay
So technically the spread of this virus-
-actually follows what's called a logistic curve.
As more people use social distancing or... die,
There are fewer people the virus can infect and the rate of infection begins to decrease
This is called the inflection point and is the peak of the curves-
-we're trying to flatten right now, but this still doesn't explain-
-why most people are surprised by how fast this pandemic is spreading.
So here's a final example:
The Grand Canyon is the largest canyon on the planet.
It's 277 miles long and has a volume of 1000 cubic miles.
You could pour every single river on earth-
-into the Grand Canyon and still only fill half of it.
A water droplet, on the other hand contains 0,05 ml-
-of water. A miniscule amount. But in this example, every minute that goes by,
this droplet doubles in size.
2 drops, 4 drops, 8...
I'm sure you've caught on by now that it'll eventually fill up the entire Canyon and you'd be right, but how long will that take?
Imagine this:
You're finishing up a hike down in the Grand Canyon, and-
-you get word that 20 minutes ago a magic drop of water started doubling its size every single minute.
That's weird.
Even your Grandpa's never heard of that happening in his entire life!
But in the 20 minutes since it started, it's only gotten to the size of a couple jugs of water. Um,
okay.
You shrug it and move on with your hike.
Another 15 minutes go by when you get a warning alert on your phone.
The park is now in emergency lockdown and everyone has to evacuate immediately.
The water has now reached the size of an Olympic swimming pool.
You are already heading back to your car,
but this is ridiculous!
What kind of a danger does a swimming pool represent?
Have they forgotten that you're in the Grand Canyon?!
Sure. I mean if you hurried you can get out quicker, but it's a nice day out and what about your freedom?
Finally an hour has gone by since the water droplet began to double and you finally notice it.
You're nearing the top of the canyon,
but you can see it way down there at the bottom.
At the 60 minute mark, the water droplet has now overtaken the volume of the Colorado River.
Literal alarms are now blaring,
Everyone's panicking, people are being airlifted to safety!
But they don't have room for you.
It took an hour for the water to reach a point where you could finally see it
How much more time until the water fills the entire canyon.
The answer?
You've now run out of time to escape.
Now obviously this is an absurd scenario,
but you could probably see the parallels with the spread of the current pandemic.
Fortunately, it is not as bad as my examples might make it seem.
However, it is indeed proving to be a world-changing event,
that not enough people took seriously soon enough.
Perhaps now you understand the importance of the unprecedented measures currently locking down society.
You see, it was never going to seem like it was that bad,
until it was.
It's really hard to say where we'll be in the near future
Are we nearing an inflection point and things will start going back to normal soon?
Or are we sitting in a canyon watching the water level slowly rise?
I wish I could answer that but I can't.
The only way we'll beat this, is by stepping up individually.
Be responsible. And even though we're all apart, we'll make it through this together.