820 ]. Bonner 



mind the relevant rates of increase of people and of auxinologists, 

 we can determine by simple calculation that the crossover point, the 

 time at which all people will be auxinologists, will be in the year 

 2229. (Don't trust the last figure.) At that time there will be approxi- 

 mately ten billion people on the earth's surface, and they T\ill all be 

 auxinologists. Isn't that a wonderful thought? 



We know further that an attendant at an auxinology confer- 

 ence submits a paper which appears in a book, and that on the 

 average, the individual paper contributes five pages to this book. The 

 book that results from our conference in the year 2229 will therefore 

 consist of fifty billion pages. If we bind the proceedings of the con- 

 ference up in volumes, each of 1,000 pages (which is a handy size), 

 they will constitute approximately 50 million volumes. And if we put 

 these volumes on a library shelf, they will occupy a shelf approximately 

 120 miles in length. My trusted agent in the Library of Congress has 

 studied the reading habits of scientists, and he assures me that the 

 biologist on the average reads down the shelf of biological literature 

 at the rate of about 12 inches a year. This means, therefore, that if 

 an individual wishes to read the Proceedings of the Auxinology Con- 

 ference of 2229, he must realize that the task is going to take him 

 about one million years. 



This isn't such a good prospect, and in fact our forecast begins 

 to appear rather ridiculous. It has evidently been made on too lui- 

 sophisticated a basis. Let us therefore start afresh and base our fore- 

 cast on an entirely different model. W^e know that all human activi- 

 ties undergo a grand period of growth. They rise and attain a maxi- 

 mum only to decline again. This is true of human activities, of human 

 innovations. Innovations are innovated; they appear; they increase in 

 number or importance; and then they disappear as they are supplanted 

 by some new innovation. Take, for example, bows and arrows. They 

 were invented and they increased until some large nimiber of them 

 were present on the earth's surface, and now they're almost gone again. 

 Or take horses on the North American continent. They were intro- 

 duced in the year 1515. They increased, attaining substantial num- 

 bers, and reached a maximum about the time of the first World "W^ar. 

 Since the end of the first World War they have catastrophically de- 

 clined in numbers until they have now almost disappeared. 



This same behavior is characteristic of the cx])loitation of fields of 

 human activity. Take an oil field. We find an oil field and some people 

 put down a well, and they start extracting the good stuff out of the 

 ground. They get it, and other people start putting down more and 

 more oil wells and they pump out more and more oil each year. But 

 finally the oil gets harder to find, and you have to pump it from 



