Biology might hold the key to developing a more ecological model of industrial scale before climate change kills us all. With Natsai Audrey Chieza for Logic Magazine.
A single E. coli placed in a sugary broth will divide into two genetically identical cells in twenty minutes. Another twenty minutes later, those two will grow and divide into four. Give those cells enough broth and room to grow and after about twenty-three hours there will be enough E. coli cells to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. Wait another twenty hours and the mass of bacteria would equal the volume of the earth. Round it out to forty-eight hours and you’d have a ball of E. coli twenty-two times the size of Jupiter.
The scales possible with exponential growth are as incomprehensible as they are impossible. E. coli’s potential for exponential doubling is realized only in the highly controlled environment of a researcher’s test tube, where food is abundant and no other species are in the way. Even then, the time that bacteria can be expected to grow exponentially is inevitably limited—growth slows once nutrients start running low or the cells are too crowded to keep dividing further.
Biological growth scales to fit its context. There are no gas giants full of identical E. coli. More than one hundred years ago, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson published On Growth and Form, a treatise on the mathematics of biological growth. In it, he summarizes this central maxim for biological scaling: “The effect of scale depends not on a thing in itself but in relation to its whole environment or milieu; it is in conformity with the thing’s ‘place in Nature,’ its field of action and reaction in the Universe.”
Biology’s ability to grow in relation to its environment—to grow ecologically rather than exponentially—is at the heart of what inspires biologists, engineers, and designers to work with organisms to build a new kind of technology. What if our technologies could grow and heal like living things?
What if concrete could be set by the metabolism of microbes, any cracks repaired in situ? What if factories were replaced with farms, growing new things that could be recycled back into the soil? What if, as MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito has proposed and further developed in a recent manifesto, “the role of science and technology [in the next hundred years] will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it”?
People don’t multiply like E. coli, but put a few people together and you’ll quickly end up with more. Over the scale of millennia we’ve ended up with 7,589,052,176—the mind-boggling number of people on earth today, whose ability to satisfy basic needs for shelter, food, and warmth are always dependent on the availability and distribution of resources.
How we’ve grown to this number is a story about the industrial revolution, where the convergence of steam power, chemical development, mechanized production and the ideas revolution of the Age of Enlightenment led to great leaps and bounds in our capacity to create life-giving stuff—and therefore the conditions for populations to multiply. We are currently riding that exponential growth curve, and the UN expects this to peak at 11 billion by the end of the century. Within our current economic framework, that’s 11 billion consumers of life-giving resources, taking from living ecosystems without regard to the environmental milieu. Industrialization has put manufacturing on exponential curves that can be as incomprehensible as the growth of E. coli—and as devastating on a global scale.