PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

3. INANIMATE PRODUCTION LIKE ANIMATE REPRODUCTION
Lotka’s prediction. Confirmation of his prediction is all the more impressive
considering that when he wrote his book rail transport was
widely accepted as a young industry with a promising future.
To highlight the analogy, Lotka includes in his work a graph of the
growth of a sunflower plant, a typical case of a multicellular organism
growing along a population curve. (Appendix C, Figure 3.3.) The two
processes seem identical except for the scales. The sunflower seedlings
achieve their maximum size (eight feet six inches) in eighty-four days,
while the U.S. railway track mileage following the exact same curve
reached maturity (290,000 miles) in 150 years. Something as inanimate
as man-made ironworks has grown in a way typical of living organisms.
In that context it seems particularly appropriate that rail terminology
makes use of terms such as tracks, trunk lines, branches, and arteries.
MAN-MADE DINOSAURS
The railway infrastructure is not unique in having followed a naturalgrowth
pattern. Throughout history and over a broad range of time
scales, people have built structures that grew in numbers like species,
with well-defined life cycles.
• • •
King Kong is breathing heavily, lying unconscious on the
steel floor of the enclosure that is confining him, stunned by
the rocket-injected tranquilizer which allowed humans to catch
him and transport him to civilization. Transporting King Kong
is something easier said than done, however. According to tradition,
the giant ape is five stories tall and weighs hundreds of
tons. What means of transportation could do the job?
A supertanker, a man-made dinosaur.
• • •
In the original movie, King Kong was transported in the hold of a conventional
cargo vessel, which would have been impossible.
Conveniently, when the movie was remade there were supertankers
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