Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

imagine increasing the resolution of the measurement by a factor of two; then, for instance, the measured length of the west coast of Britain would increase by about 25 percent and that of Norway by over 50 percent. This is an enormous effect, which had been completely overlooked until Richardson stumbled across it just seventy years ago. So for the process of measurement to be meaningful, knowing the resolution is crucial and integral to the entire process.

You are extraordinarily efficient in your use of energy relative to anything that is man-made. Your dishwasher, for example, requires more than ten times more energy per second than you do just to wash dishes, while your car uses it at a rate in excess of a thousand times more just to move you around.

I remind you that a 2°C rise in average temperature leads to a whopping 20 percent increase in these rates. So small changes in the ambient temperature over relatively short periods of time that are not sufficiently long for adaptive processes to develop can lead to huge ecological and climatological effects.

One of the great ironies in all of these marvelous inventions (with the possible exception of the gruesome weapons of destruction) is that they all promised to make life easier and more manageable and therefore give us more time. Indeed, when I was a young man, pundits and futurists were speaking of the glorious future anticipated from such time-saving inventions, and a topic that was much discussed was what we would do with all free time that would now be at our disposal. With cheap energy available from nuclear sources and these fantastic machines doing all our manual and mental labor, the workweek would be short and we would have large swaths of time to really enjoy the good life with our families and friends,