We better hope ebola doesn't get anywhere near exponential growth.
This is an example of exponential growth in one minute increments.
It’s 1pm. Imagine a normal sized football stadium. In this stadium you are sitting on the seat at the very top of the stadium, with the best overview of the whole stadium.
To make things more interesting, imagine the stadium is completely water-tight.
The question is, if a drop of water is added to the stadium and then one minute later it doubles in size to two drops, and then one minute after that it doubles again to 4 drops, and so on.. doubling in size every minute, how much time do you have to leave your seat and get out of the stadium before the water reaches your seat at the very top?
Think about it for a moment. Is it hours, days, weeks, months?
The first drop of water lands right in the middle of the field, at 1pm.
You have exactly until 1:49pm. It takes less than 50 minutes to fill a whole football stadium with water! This is impressive!
But it gets better:
At what time do you think the football stadium is still 93% empty? Take a guess.
The answer: At 1:45pm. So, you sit and watch the drop growing, and after 45 minutes all you see is the playing field covered with water. And then,
within four more minutes, the water fills the whole stadium.
This means that you think you are safe because it seems that you have plenty of time left, whereas due to the exponential growth you really have to take immediate action if you want to have any chance of getting out of this situation.
Think about that… let it sink in…