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Message:: [QUOTE="-jeffB, post: 1356948, member: 27832"]YOU JUST FINISHED DENYING THE MATH IN THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH! An exponential trend never "goes to infinity". It just doesn't. It continues to increase, with all the warning and predictability in the world -- in the example you set, doubling over a period of approximately eight years. From any point on the curve, things look the same -- flat and close to zero in the past, increasing in the present, and increasing more sharply in the future. Take your curve and scale it vertically by half. You'll find that it looks exactly the same as the previous curve, shifted to the right by about eight years. Take your curve and double it vertically. You'll find that it looks exactly the same as the previous curve, shifted to the left by about eight years. When you talk about "going to infinity", you're talking about a hyperbolic curve, one with an asymptote -- a point on the X-axis that it never reaches, because it goes to infinity first. You don't get that from exponential growth. And you certainly don't get it from polynomial growth, despite all the talk about silver or gold "going parabolic". A parabola is gentle in comparison to exponential growth, even though it may look the same on a chart. Only the hyperbola, and the hyperbole around chart-reading, "goes to infinity".[/QUOTE]