This product may then require isolation before proceeding with the next step in the reaction sequence. Synthetic chemists who do not carry out total synthesis in this manner may encounter challenges posed by what is often referred to as the arithmetic demon. This is the idea that, if a reaction takes place over many steps, and the production rate for desired products is smaller than the rate for the competing reactions, the concentration of the desired products will drop exponentially. This idea has previously been used to place constraints on the geochemical environments where a specific prebiotic scenario is feasible. A reaction with many products, all with similar production rates, can lead to an increase in the chemical diversity of the system with the potential for millions of molecules to all interact in a single environment. This is a situation some prebiotic chemists describe as chemical "mess" or "clutter". This high chemical diversity can make it extremely difficult to detect and quantify compounds. As chemical diversity increases, so does chemical complexity, which we define as the number of reactions occurring in the system. Eventually, the chances of two specific molecules meeting to produce a desired intermediate become very low compared to the likelihood of them reacting with other components in the system. In this regime, productive chemistry becomes statistically impossible without either an ordering mechanism or the concentrating conditions found in prebiotically promising geochemical environments.