Wie hieß eigentlich noch der US-Bundesstaat, der mal per Gesetz beschlossen hat, dass Pi = 3 ist? War das auch North Carolina? Das scheint da Tradition zu sein.

I’m exasperated by the professional optimists, who say, "These bad things are happening, but human genius and the resources this good earth has given us will allow us to keep on doing pretty much what we’ve been doing. So don’t worry about it." There is a huge flaw in that reasoning. You may be familiar with the famous French riddle of the 29th day of lily pads, which everybody should know. Most of the things that should be worrying us are happening exponentially. With each interval that passes, the impact is more serious. There comes a time when the next interval is devastating, and here comes the riddle of the 29th day.

There is a pond with one lily pad. The number of lily pads doubles every day. The pond will fill up by the 30th day. On what day is the pond half full? The 29th day. That’s the whole point. Okay, let’s take the optimists’ argument. Let’s assume that the lily pads are getting really worried. They point out, Hey guys, we’ve got one short period left and then we’re all going to be fighting over the same nutrients and choking each other out. Not to worry: some of the lily pads are technological geniuses. They’ll figure out a way to get around this. They announce to every lily pad’s joy that they have found an opening now to another empty pond of the same size, so you don’t have to change your patterns and way of life, fellow lily pads, we can go on. Okay. When does that new pond fill up? On the 31st day. That’s the problem with humanity today, and I don’t care if we spend a huge amount of money to shoot people off into space toward Mars. I don’t care if we figure out a way to do fusion or find some other energy source. We can’t go on like this.