Picture an empty bottle.
At eleven o'clock in the morning…
…drop in a single bacterium.
It divides once a minute.
One becomes two.
At 11:02, two become four.
A minute later, four become eight.
After fifty minutes of doubling,
the bottle is only three percent full.
When would the bacteria realize they are running out of space?
11:57 — 12% full.
11:58 — quarter full.
11:59 — half full.
Noon. The bottle is full.
12:01 — the doubling bacteria spill out.
12:02 — the bacteria do not stop doubling.
And that's the end of the line.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
— Albert Bartlett, 1972For over 50 years, Al Bartlett's bacteria-in-a-bottle thought experiment influenced generations of scientists, environmentalists, and policymakers worried about overpopulation.
When Bartlett died in 2013, he was eulogized in white nationalist journals for his decades of advocacy to end immigration into the United States.
This is a story of how quantitative arguments, anxieties about growth, and commitments to conservation repeatedly become tools of exclusion and dominance.