EVERY LIVING CREATURE GETS ABOUT A BILLION HEARTBEATS WORTH OF LIFE.

My favorite magazines are OK Magazine and SEED - and I would like to highlight a GREAT article from SEED Magazine in Aug, "The Living City."   Here is the general story I have pulled out since its not online yet.

Biologist, Max Kleiber, found that in every species, the metabolic rate is equal to the mass of the animal raised to the 3/4th power.  This simple equation could describe cows and humans and elephants and mice...the formal always worked. . .

. . . The key part of the equation is the exponent, which is less than 1. This means that animals with a bigger mass will consume lass energy per pound than smaller animals.  As life grows, it develops enormous economies of scale.  The elephant is much more metabolically efficient than the mouse.  Humans are more efficient than hummingbirds. . . .

EVERY LIVING CREATURE GETS ABOUT A BILLION HEARTBEATS WORTH OF LIFE. Small animals just consume their lives faster.

Geoffrey West teamed up with two ecologist to figure out how to apply Kleiber's quarter-power scaling laws..."their key insight was that the supply networks of life could be described in the language of fractal geometry, since each section of the network shared the structure of the whole....A few later West started to wonder if social organizations, like cities, could be described with a set of simple equations.  Did cities behave like living things?"  The data was clear, "Cities are like elephants. They get more economical with size. It Doesn't Matter whether they city is located in China, Europe, or the American midwest; every city is simply a scaled version of the same city. "
"When the scientists began to analyze social phenomenon in cities, the Platonic metaphor of the city-as-body broke down...In bigger cities, people literally move faster.  In biological systems, the opposite trend occurs.  As creatures get bigger, their bodies slow down. "  

"For biological systems, growth is straightforward.  They eventually stop growing.  Economies of scale can take you only so far.  But when you have these super-linear exponents [exponents of great than 1], They growth equation is completely changed. these cities can go on growing forever."  all this potential growth has a dark side.  At a certain point, every city runs out of resources.  Their super-linear exponents, tilted toward infinity, collide with the practical demands of reality.  the positive feedback loop exhausts itself."