“Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.”
- J. Paul Getty
Imagine bacteria growing steadily in a bottle. The bacteria double in number every minute (the so-called ‘doubling time’, in other words, is one minute). At 11 o’clock, there is just one bacterium in the bottle. At 12 o’clock, the bottle is full of bacteria.
Question 1: at what time was the bottle half full ?
Question 2: if you were one of the bacteria in the bottle [if any bankers are reading this, the question effectively goes beyond the hypothetical], at what time would you first realize that you were running out of space ?
Question 3: suppose that at 11.58, some of the more far-sighted and progressive bacteria [evidently not bacterial politicians] realize that they are running out of room. So they launch a great search for new bottles. They search offshore, on the outer continental shelf, and in the arctic, and in wildlife preserves, and they end up finding three new bottles – a “colossal new discovery”. How long can the bacterial growth continue as a result of the discovery of three new bottles (a quadrupling of the proven resource) ?
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