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THE VIDEO SHELF · exponential growth

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

Part 1 of a lecture by physicist Albert Bartlett on the exponential function and its consequences for population growth, resource use and energy. It argues that steady growth rates quickly lead to enormous quantities.

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Why HN readers recommended it

A perennial HN recommendation for building intuition about exponential growth, cited whenever endless growth, energy or population come up.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
wonderingmind42
Topic
exponential growth
Format
lecture
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
13
HN mentions in dataset
20
Recommendation years in dataset
2010–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • If you haven't previously seen Dr. Barrett's "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy", I strongly recommend it: [VIDEO] It doesn't address quite the same scale, but is very sobering.

    dredmorbius on Hacker News · 2011-08
    In Galactic-Scale Energy

  • 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]

    mark_up on Hacker News · 2011-10
    In What is the Limit to Human Population Growth?

  • Not sure if you've seen this series: [VIDEO] (despite looking/sounding boring at the start, stick with it; it's really captivating and interesting), but it is amazing just how much 'small' growth (even 2-3% p/a) can cause things to double in much less time than you'd …

    tristanperry on Hacker News · 2011-10
    In You are the nth person alive on earth

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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