Projecting Bacterial Growth

1. Approximately when was the bottle half full? 12pm
2.  How much closer? 11:59
3. If you were one of the bacteria, when do you suppose you’d start to worry about overcrowding? Approximately at a quarter to halfway full.
4. Would that leave you enough time to do anything about it? Not if it continued to grow exponentially it wouldn’t.
5. Did anything surprise you about these two parts? If so, what? I was surprised at how fast the bacteria grew. I initially guessed the time wrong because I didn’t expect it to grow so quickly.
6. Why do you think people might have trouble or resistance to understanding exponential growth? I think because in the beginning the growth difference doesn’t seem like it multiplies so quickly. Then all of the sudden it starts and it grows “exponentially” !
7. Whenever you hear that something is growing by some percentage, or that something is growing steadily, what rule should you remember in order to understand the rate of growth? Explain this rule. The rule of 70. 70 divided by the percentage of growth gives the amount of time it would take for the amount to double.
8. “When our consumption of a resource (energy, for instance) grows steadily, the doubling time takes on an even scarier meaning.” What is that scarier meaning? We use up more of the resources than we ever have before.
9. “…if we keep increasing our energy consumption like this, we’ll use more energy in the next 25 years than we’ve produced in all of history up till now.”
10. “There are those who say we don’t need to worry about running out of oil, because there’s still lots of oil left in the ground. Experts believe that over the past 150 years we have used up about half the total oil on Earth. In other words, our oil supply “bottle” is still half full.” But if we keep doubling our population, what will happen? We will use up all of the oil and there will not be any let.