Editing Openai/6921ae73-3700-8000-8ab7-90012976bb8a (section)

=== Assistant: If every person started to double non-stop, things would go off the rails really fast. ===
If every person started to double non-stop, things would go off the rails really fast.

Let’s assume:

: 

I’ll talk about it like we double every “step” (second, minute, whatever) — the exact time just changes how fast it gets impossible, not whether it does.

==== Right now there are about 8 billion people. ====

If we double:
* After 1 step: 16 billion
* After 2 steps: 32 billion
* After 10 steps: 8 billion × 2¹⁰ = 8 billion × 1024 ≈ 8 trillion
* After 20 steps: × 2²⁰ ≈ 1,000,000 → 8 quadrillion
* After 40 steps: × 2⁴⁰ ≈ 1,000,000,000 → 8 quintillion

That’s in just 40 doublings.
If a “step” were 1 minute, this is less than an hour.

The numbers go insane so fast that:
* Very quickly there would be more people than atoms in your body, then more people than there are square centimeters on Earth, then more people than can physically exist in the observable universe.

==== Even way before the crazy huge numbers: ====
* The surface of Earth is finite.
* You can only pack so many humans onto it before: - There’s literally no space left to stand or breathe. - You’d be stacked on top of each other in towers of people.

Even if you packed people like sardines, you’d hit:
* Maximum crowding in just a few doublings.
* After that, you can’t physically fit that many human-sized bodies on or near Earth.

So what happens?
* People would have to be off-planet, or crushed together, or just… physics breaks.

Realistically: massive crush, instant disaster, everyone dies very early.

==== Every person needs: ====
* Air
* Water
* Food
* Space
* Energy

Doubling non-stop means:
* Demand for everything also doubles non-stop.
* Even if we magically had infinite food for a moment, after just a few more doublings we’d be short again.

Earth’s resources are limited. Exponential growth doesn’t just “use them up,” it obliterates them in almost no time.

==== If you imagine we ignore all the death, and the bodies just “exist” somehow: ====
* Total mass of humans keeps doubling.
* Human mass would eventually outweigh: - All life - All oceans - The whole Earth
* If it continued way, way beyond that (totally impossible in real physics), the human mass would be enough to: - Change Earth’s orbit - Collapse into something like a super-dense object (even a black hole if you somehow kept doubling long enough).

But honestly, you’d hit physical limits (not enough atoms in the universe) long before.

==== In reality, exponential growth always hits walls: ====
* No space
* No food/air/water
* Heat and waste build up
* Bodies crush each other

So if doubling started non-stop:

: 

===== If every person started doubling non-stop: =====
* Population would explode: 8 billion → trillions → quadrillions in just a few doublings.
* Earth would run out of space, food, and air almost instantly.
* People would be crushed, suffocated, and everything collapses.
* If you imagine it magically continuing, you’d hit “more people than the universe can hold” levels very fast.

If you want, we can pick a specific rate (like “doubling every day” or “every minute”) and I can show you exactly how many days it takes to fill the Earth.