Monday, July 23, 2018

The Seneca Glass: Half Full or Half Empty?


Optimist: the glass is half full.

Pessimist: the glass is half empty.

Catastrophist. It will not be half full for long.

Cornucopian: We are running into water rather than out of it.

Oil executive: The more we drink, the more the water level grows.

Conspiracy Theorist: Water? What water? THEY want us to believe that there is water in the glass.

Chemtrail believer: Don't look at the water! Look up at the sky! Don't you see THEY are poisoning us?

Climate Science Denier: Scientists cannot predict the weather one week in advance, how can they say if the glass is full or empty?

Bad Pun Lover: A fish was swimming in the glass. It swam into the wall and said, "Damn!"

Thomas Malthus: You can only fill the glass at a linear rate, but people will drink from it at exponentially rising rates.

Harold Hotelling: When there will be no more water in it, we'll use beer as a backstop resource.

Robert Solow: the amount of water in the glass will keep growing exponentially.

Neoclassical Economist: when the water level will be low enough, market forces will create more.

Julian Simon: there is enough water in the glass to last for six billion years.

Colin Campbell: After you drink the water in the glass, there will be none left.

Charles Hall: the water return on energy invested (WROEI) declines as you drink it.

Gail Tverberg: Water is not really a renewable resource: you will always need fossil fuels to pump it into the glass.

Guy McPherson: All the water will have disappeared from planet Earth by 2030.

Donald Trump: We need to build a wall to keep the Mexicans from drinking our water.

Matsuo Basho: The old glass. A frog jumps into it. The noise of water.

William Shakespeare: The empty part of the glass is filled with the stuff dreams are made of.

Erwin Schroedinger: The glass is neither half full nor half empty - until you drink from it.

Jesus Christ: Have faith and walk on the stones, just like I do.

Lao Zi: A glass of a thousand gallons is filled starting with just one drop.

Buddha: The water is an illusion, just like the glass. And the drinker, too.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca: It takes a long time to fill the glass, but emptying it is rapid.





  

Who

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome, faculty member of the University of Florence, and the author of "Extracted" (Chelsea Green 2014), "The Seneca Effect" (Springer 2017), and Before the Collapse (Springer 2019)