• JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      The pond is the Pacific Ocean.

      Let’s see…2^120 is 1.329•10^36 lily pads. Say 15cm diameter for a lily pad, that’s got an area of 177cm^2. That’s 10.3•10^38 cm^2.

      The surface area of the Pacific Ocean is only 1.652•10^18 cm^2.

      We’re boned.

      • emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

        I mean sure it would? That’s rhe whole point is that exponential growth quickly reaches massive quantities. Like literally after 120 days I doubt that many lilypads would fit on earth.

        • Cypher@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I’m not sure what lily pads so I went with the largest which have around 7.069m2 of surface area or 0.0000007069km2 surface area.

          Earth has a surface area of 510,064,472km2

          After 120 days of doubling we have

          6.64614x1035 * 7.069x10-6 = 4.6982Ex1030

          So you are correct but it’s also around 23x the surface area of the sun.

        • barsquid@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I think the lilypads might need to be smaller than an atomic nucleus? Someone check my math. But still larger than a Planck length, so it is fine.

        • pyre@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          they wouldn’t, but it’s not a real pond, and not real lily pads. i was going to say 20 but went for 120 to make the ratio more extreme, not to make it realistic.