Looking backwards from full

Stand at the finish. Call it 100%. If the climb doubled at every step, the step before was 50%. The step before that was 25%. Two steps back you were still a quarter of the way, and it did not feel like you were close.

A park ranger sees a little growth in a lake — 0.01% of the water. Nothing to cancel a holiday over. The same doubling that looks like a stain can fill the lake while the ranger is gone, because most of the fill arrives in the last few doublings.

The Human Genome Project ran into this in public. Work to read the three billion letters of human DNA started in 1990, with a hope of about fifteen years. After seven years, about 1% was done. Skeptics multiplied: 1% in seven years, so a century of centuries. The series was doubling year after year. The project finished in thirteen years, ahead of the original hope. The first genome cost about $2.7 billion. Later the cost of reading a genome fell fast. That cost drop is a parallel story, not the same as finishing the first map.

1% can be the last quiet square before the pile.

The tempting mistake is to draw a straight line through 1% and call the rest impossible.

That is what lets you notice a climb that still looks like a quiet Monday.