A Key Tool: Guesstimation

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher

University of Southampton
Computational Engineering and Design Group
School of Engineering Sciences
University of Southampton

United Kingdom

06. 03. 2009

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

Opening Words of ‘Mistakes Were Made’

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be

untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong,
impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an
indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a
false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a
battlefield.

George Orwell1 (1946)

1
Real name: Eric Arthur Blair
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
How To Recognize When We Are Wrong

Stubbornly sticking to false beliefs until feedback becomes

overwhelming can cause an extreme amount of pain and
suffering. . .

. . . so, what can we do in order to detect early on where we

have gone wrong?

While this is a difficult problem (more so as we are biologically

– and in this culture also socially – programmed against seeing
our mistakes), there are a few important tools which we can
utilise.

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

Carl Sagan’s Last Book

When Carl Sagan, the famous planetary as-

tronomer and popularizer of science, learned
he was to die of myelodysplasia in about a
year, he invested all his remaining time and
energy into this book, his ‘testament’.
From the Preface (“My Teachers”):
It was from Kuiper that I first got a feeling for what is called a
back-of-the-envelope calculation: A possible explanation to a
problem occurs to you, you pull out an old envelope, appeal to
your knowledge of fundamental physics, scribble a few approximate
equations on the envelope, substitute in likely numerical values,
and see if your answer comes anywhere near explaining your
problem. If not, you look for a different explanation. It cut through
nonsense like a knife through butter.

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

Enrico Fermi
The art of doing such guesstimations is intimately linked with the
name of its great master and popularizer, Enrico Fermi2 .
Fermi once asked a student in a Physics
exam to guesstimate the number of Piano
tuners in Chicago.

What Fermi observed when witnessing the first nuclear explosion:

About 40 seconds after the explosion the air blast reached me. I tried to
estimate its strength by dropping from about six feet small pieces of
paper before, during and after the passage of the blast wave. Since, at
the time, there was no wind I could observe very distinctly and actually
measure the displacement of the pieces of paper that were in the proces
of falling while the blast was passing. The shift was about 2 21 meters,
which, at the time, I estimated to correspond to the blast that would be
produced by ten thousand tons of T.N.T.
2
Image: Wikipedia; Quote: Fermi’s report to LANL
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
A Personal Anecdote (I)

I recently was invited to give a talk on one of my quantum gravity

research papers. When having lunch with my hosts, the question
came up over coffee what I would think about the “global
warming” debate – whether relevant man-made changes to the
composition of the atmosphere really are a possibility.

I (essentially) replied: How can – to us physicists – there be any

‘debate’ about that if we easily can find out what to think about it
by means of a ‘Fermi calculation’ ?

. . . and so I explained.

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

A Personal Anecdote (II)

Radius of Earth 6370 km known

2
Surface of Earth ∼ 5 · 1014 m2 6.4 · 104 · 12.5
STP Mol-Density of Air 40 mol/m3 n/V = p/RT
STP Air Density 1.2 kg/m3 ∼ 0.030 kg/mol · 40 mol/m3
Eff. height of Air Column 8400 m 100 000 N/m2 / 12 N/m3
Eff. Volume of Atm. 4 · 1018 m3 {height}×{area}
Mols of Gas in Atm. 1.6 · 1020 mol 40 mol/m3 · 4 · 1018 m3
Share of CO2 ∼ 400 ppmv known
Mols of C in Atm. 7 · 1016 mol {share}×{total mols}
Mass of C in Atm. ∼ 800 Gton 0.012 kg/mol × 7 · 1016 mol
Pres. Oil Consmptn. ∼ 80 · 106 bl/day known
C per liter of oil ∼ 0.75 kg/ℓ Eff. formula (CH2 )n ,
ρ ≈ 0.9 kg/ℓ
Oil-C per year ∼ 3.5 Gton/a 0.16 m3 · 365 · 750 kg/m3·
·80 · 106
Fossil C/year ∼ 7 Gton/a ∼ 2× Oil-C
Human C p.a./C-total ∼ 1%

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

A Personal Anecdote (III)

So. . .
The imbalance we cause in the atmospheric carbon cycle by itself
would cause atmospheric CO2 concentrations to roughly double in
∼ 100 years.
This settles the original question: Is it within human capacity to
noticeably change the chemical composition of the atmosphere?
Yes, it certainly is!
Note: We could do that analysis without resorting to any
propaganda, media statements, or similar (potentially questionable)
sources: all that entered was simple secondary school knowledge in
geography, chemistry, physics, and the ‘rule of three’ !
Of course, other questions are left unanswered by such analysis, e.g.
“how much of that extra input can the planetary carbon cycle mop
up?”

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

A Personal Anecdote (IV)
What conclusions to draw?
Guesstimation is one important source for discovering
untenable assumptions (Here: “what we do is so irrelevant we
never would be able to noticeably alter the atmosphere”).
Of course, those people who became deeply caught up in this
game of “If I am being proven wrong, I will confabulate the
next strange belief” will just continue to spin out the next
questionable statement, such as: “but earth’s ecosystems will
be able to absorb all that”. (No, they do not – measurements
clearly show that atmospheric CO2 is rising rapidly.)
There is a difference between being wrong some of the time
due to e.g. failing to take into account some previously
unknown effect, and being wrong almost always due to just
not taking care to do a detailed analysis but confabulating
relations instead.

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

On Competence
A number of discussions with ‘professional deniers’ made me come
to this conclusion:
There are a number of tell-tale signs of a mismatch between
competence claimed by and competence present in a person.
We have to work towards providing society with the necessary skills
to spot such mismatch, so that people do not fall prey to
rat-catchers.
The most successful rat-catchers are, of course, those whose ego
makes them believe their own confabulations! (So, watch out! If
you find evidence that I (the present author) suffer from such a
problem, do the only sensible thing and vote with your feet!)
One tell-tale sign: The response to being proven wrong is spinning a
fresh hypothesis for the sole purpose of not having to change the
original belief.
Another tell-tale sign: The inability to discern between the supposed
future effects of a proposed plan and real, direct, actual,
experimentally readily available evidence.
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
Other Guesstimations
Some other important guesstimations that give important insights
into what is seriously wrong:
1 What would a liter of diesel cost if the mechanical work we can
produce from it were valued in the same way as hard manual labour?
2 How expensive is electricity from Photovoltaics in comparison to
electricity from the Utility?
3 If no more oil would be found from today on, and we could extract
all the oil that has been found as easily as ever, then, assuming a
constant annual production decline rate, how high would that be?
4 If a major part of the Amazon Rainforest went up in flames, how
much more CO2 would this positive feedback process release into
the atmosphere?
5 How does the average global temperature change if Earth’s albedo
changes by 1 per-cent?
6 How much does water vapour saturation pressure increase if
temperature goes up by 1 degree Celsius? What does this mean for
climate change and extreme precipitation events?
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
A Word of Caution

Back-of-the-envelope calculations are a great tool for finding

out when an idea will not work, often a very good tool for
getting an idea in what parameter range to take a closer look,
but often a catastrophic tool when too naively applied to
biological systems!

“If one hectare of peanuts yields 5 tons, then one million

hectares will yield 5 million tons(?)”

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

Mis-application: An Example (I)

Richard St. Barbe Baker (a professional British forester) on the ‘African

Groundnut Scheme’ (a failed plan of the British government in the late
1940s to grow peanuts on an area of about 600 km2 in
Tanganyika/Tanzania, and in Nigeria)3 :
Because Nigerian farmers could produce so many bushels of ground-nuts
in a fraction of an acre, it was estimated that so many billion bushels
could be produced on so many million acres elsewhere. Batteries of
bulldozers were acquired and chained together to walk away with the
bush and protecting tree cover. Little did the mechanics driving those
machines understand the disaster they were perpetrating. What did they
know of the biological contribution that trees made in the water cycle, or
their vital function in producing rich crops of ground-nuts year after year,
for the Nigerian growers? [. . . ]

3
From his Autobiography, “My Life, My Trees”
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
Mis-application: An Example (II)

[. . . ] From time immemorial it had been the habit of Nigerian farmers to

make little clearings in the high forest where they would sow the
ground-nuts. As the sun rose the areas were shaded by the surrounded
trees. Towards noon the leaves of the ground-nuts would open out and
shade the soil, keeping it cool, [. . . ] As the sun went down the warm air
from the surrounding forest would condense on the little clearing and by
the following morning perhaps the equivalent of a quarter of an inch of
rain would have moistened the patch. No doubt the planners in Whitehall
had estimated their returns on the crops of the Nigerian farmers grown
with the help of the trees. When they bulldozed the forest they wrecked
the delicate mechanism by which Nature worked her miracle of growth.
The scheme was not only disastrous economically and agriculturally but
socially produced repercussions from which Africa might never recover.

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

Trees and the Water Cycle: More Evidence

In the early 1980’s Gaviotas began planting a Caribbean pine tree in the
otherwise barren llanos of eastern Colombia. These trees were able to
survive in the highly acidic soil with the help of mycorrhizal fungus
applied to their roots. Over the years, this forest has expanded to
approximately 8,000 hectares, or 20,000 acres. The presence of the forest
has altered the local climate by generating an additional 10 percent
rainfall, which also supports Gaviotas’ water bottling initiative.4

4
Source: http://www.friendsofgaviotas.org/Gaviotas Forest/Gaviotas Forest.html
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
Yet. . .

I personally have witnessed certain people wondering, when

confronted with the evidence: Who knows – maybe the
Groundnut Scheme would have been a success had they had
better tractors.

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

Relevance

There are documents out on the web that essentially use ‘rule
of three’ reasoning almost along these lines:
About one in three Nitrogen atoms in the body of every
American has been provided by fertilizer produced from fossil
fuel. So, when we run out of fossil fuels, we have to see we
reduce population by 1/3, and fast.

Whenever we consider biological systems, aspects are more

involved than 19 out of 20 people realize. So, there is a very
real danger here of “jumping to conclusions”. Applying
rule-of-three reasoning to biological systems requires a fair deal
more knowledge than what is provided by secondary education.
For non-living, inanimate systems, however, we usually are on
the safe side with such “Fermi calculations”.

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

The true price of oil (I)

Architect Buckminster Fuller wondered what the world would be like if

we priced oil according to the effort nature had to put into its production
(which would give a price he considered to be in the range of 1 million
dollars per gallon of petrol). As this calculation involves a number of
rather questionable assumptions on pricing geological processes, let us
ask instead:
What would be the price of a liter of diesel if we valued the work we can
produce from it in the same way as hard manual labour?
Note that the energy density of hydrocarbons (oil) is about twice that of
carbohydrates (cellulose, sugars, chocolate, etc.), and that both human
metabolism and combustion engines have a fuel-to-work conversion
efficiency of roughly 1/3.

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

The true price of oil (II)

Average power output of a hard working individual: ∼ 50 W (estimate)

Work done during 8 hours of hard work: 1.44 MJ
Total food energy expended: ∼ 4.3 MJ (≈ 1000 kcal)
(Base metabolic rate: ∼ 2500 kcal/day)
Total energy in a liter of diesel: ∼ 35 MJ
Number of hard-work-days in a liter of diesel: ∼ 8 days
Wage for 8 hours of hard manual labour:∼ 80 EUR
Wage-based value of a liter of diesel: ∼ 640 EUR.
Seen this way (and considering that this energy source was not available
to previous civilizations), by pricing fossil fuels mostly by the effort
required to get them out of the ground, we under-value them by a factor
of ∼ 500!

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

Relevance (I)
Consequences of the large discrepancy between the value of
exosomatic and metabolic energy:
We must always keep in mind that the availability of cheap
energy in large quantity sets the present (especially western)
civilization apart from pretty much any other:
Energy-efficiency of processes was a much greater concern in
earlier civilizations.
The value discrepancy is so marked that, most likely, the
availability of incredibly cheap energy has a greater influence
on how our economy (and society) works than pretty much
anything else. (Think about mobility and how much we take
it for granted – often even require it!)
Considering the preciousness of fuel, and thinking long-term,
we may be well advised to employ quite a lot of human labour
to build fuel-saving or fuel-generating systems, such as e.g.
one-household biogas latrine pits (as done in rural China).
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
Relevance (II)
Present Situation:
In 2008, fossil fuels have become so expensive that – for quite some
time – it was much more profitable to invest money into hoarding
them rather than letting industry have them.
It is pretty evident that such a situation could not go on for long,
and, when something like that occurs, ‘something’s gotta give’ fairly
soon.
Due to the economic collapse, fuel has – for now – become
relatively cheap again.
While fuel will in the foreseeable future become too expensive to
“keep the show going” the same way as before, it is still by far not
expensive enough to make many energetically sensible alternatives
short-term competitive.
So, the implementation of strategies towards more sensible energy
utilization is complicated by the need to stage them according to
the fuel:labour price ratio. While there are numerous business
opportunities, if you started tomorrow to build small biogas latrines
in central London, you most likely would not be in business for long.
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
Guidelines
Guidelines for applying Fermi calculations:
In a complicated situation, try to find some aspects that are
both of crucial importance and accessible to guesstimation.
Guesstimation consists of various skills which must be
mastered:
Doing approximate arithmetics
Identifying relevant available knowledge (or just recognizing it
as such!)
Being aware to what degree implicit questionable assumptions
could be involved in the specific problem at hand. (This
especially holds for biological systems!)
The longer your calculation the more approximation errors you
will accumulate. Hence, try to keep them as short as really
necessary.
Never approximate an exponent!
Become proficient through practice and checking how good
your estimates were.
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
Watch Out

Unless you become proficient in utilising

immediately verifiable evidence whether some
particular claim holds or not, you will be easy prey
for demagogues of all sorts!
There are only very few sources for highly reliable insights. The
more you learn to command them (through experience), the better
your judgement will be.
First-Hand Experience from Personal Experiments (Gandhi’s
approach).
Fermi Calculation “does-that-quantitatively-make-sense”
Physical Checks.
Mastering Statistics.
Cultivating an attitude of professional skepticism.
Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation
The Present Situation

The present situation provides plentiful opportunities for “new

leaders” to come up with “the one and only way to really get
it right” – some may even be succesful, for some time. (Think
Adolf Hitler’s economic policies!)
So, avoiding to fall into such a trap is a major objective in the
implementation of viable strategies.
When having to deal with a complex situation, always look out
for those beacons that provide hard checks on what will work
and what will not.
This is both very important and very difficult when it comes to
strange beliefs we grew up with!

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation

A thought by Carl Sagan

From: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more
dangerous in our time than in any time that has come before. It is
perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant
about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic
and radioactive wastes, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation,
exponential population growth. . . . How can we affect national
policy or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives if we do
not grasp the underlying issues?

Dr. Thomas Fischbacher A Key Tool: Guesstimation