A long time ago... ©

This is probably kid stuff to you but I am fascinated of exponential growth. I compared an exponential curve with one that do it in half the time. That must be a hard take off. These are the two scenarios I use to explain. At exactly midnight you have been given a bottle containing one specimen of a bacteria that replicates by dividing itself once every second and the bottle will be full after 24 hours. At what time is the bottle half full? -The time is one second to midnight. How many bottles do you need to manage the growth until a minute past midnight? -You would need 1 152 921 504 606 850 000 extra bottles. Again, it`s midnight and you have been given responsibility of a huge hospital that manages an enormous number of intensive care places with ventilators. A COVID 19 infected person has entered the huge multimillion city and within an hour passed on the virus to two more people who now are infected. The authorities are expecting an immediate outbreak and pandemic and estimates that the number of hospitals intensive care places only will be enough for about two weeks as each critical patient will have to be using a ventilator to breath for at least three weeks each. Does these criteria for a scenario sound fairly reasonable? Well, then I have a couple of three questions for you. Question 1) At what time are half of the intensive care places with ventilators occupied? (I won`t get you twice on that one, however, that wasn`t my aim) Question 2) How many intensive care places with ventilator do the hospital have? It`s now you will find out what you should have reacted to long before you got this question if your brain would had been built to handle exponential functions. Question 3) After answering the above questions, do you still think the criteria to the scenario sound reasonably? Answer 1) After thirteen days and night and twenty-three hours. Answer 2) The hospital was a bit bigger than you expected and so must the city have been. The intensive care unit contained 139 984 046 386 113 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 intensive care places with ventilators. You can round it up to 14 Googol. There are about a hundred quintillion less elementary particles in the universe than there are intensive care places with ventilators in your intensive care unit. Answer 3) We are off on such a huge marginal that it tells us that our brains have no intuition that can alarm us. So, yes, I still think the criteria to the scenario sound reasonably, the only difference now is that I know that they don`t. ©