You can’t have 9.550892 x 10^357’th power flies,
for lotsa reasons:
(1) There are only around 10^80 ATOMS in the discernible universe. Can’t have more flies than atoms!
If we roughly estimate 10^20 atoms per fly, we can’t have over 10^60 flies in the univese. Shucks.
(2) The flies are even more restricted, as they have to (at first) get their atoms from the good 'ol Planet Earth. I’m sure someone can multiply 6.6 sextillion pounds times whatever number of atmos per pound (average). I will instead just guess the Earth is somewhere around one part in 10^15 of the universe. That implies only 10^45 flies. Very roughly.
(3) Another problem-- the growing ball of flies can’t expand any faster than the speed of light. So after 11 years, they can at most epand to a ball 22 light-years across. That’s a miniscule fraction of a teense of a pinch of the size Cecil was quoting.
Is that flies only live a couple of months. The sphere of flies would have to be fairly hollow, since only two or three generations would be alive at any given moment, and the sphere is necessarily breeding mostly on the outside (otherwise, it will use up available internal volume too rapidly).
Let’s not even talk about “uniform distribution”. Also, how does Cecil pack 128 files into a cubic inch of space and still have them mobile enough for breeding?
where did you get that number from?? i find that very hard to believe… considering a mole of a compound contains 6.2 X 10^23 atoms… and a mole of water is about a liter… if i am mistaken i apologize, but that is what i learned in high school chemistry class…
But even at 6.02x10^23 atoms per mole, that means there are still 10^57 moles of stuff lying around. BTW, a mole of water is three moles of atoms (two moles of hydrogen, one mole of oxygen).
I feel obliged to point out here that each power of ten is exactly that, ten times more than the previous amount. So, 10^79 is one tenth of 10^80, and to subtract you use the mantissas, not the exponents.
So, subtracting the atoms in a mole of gold from the atoms in the universe:
10^80 - 6.02x10^23 would be something like this:
9.99999999999(to the 57th decimal place or so, then loose change afer that) x10^80
The universe is big. REALLY big. Don’t underestimate it!
We’re dividing, in which case you do operate on the exponents.
You know, in the shower yesterday I was trying to come up with the smallest upper bound on the maximum number of flies that you could find without knowing very much about either flies or the Earth. I think it’s actually that the physical volume they can occupy is the shell between two spheres, the inner one being the surface of the planet (flies not really burrowing very far into the ground, like thousands of miles) and the outer one being the maximum altitude that flies can attain, which to be generous, we can cap at about seven miles (a mile taller than Mt Everest).
The volume between those two spheres is
4/3 * pi * ([outer radius]^3 - [inner radius]^3)
which is approximately
4/3 * pi * (8007^3 - 8000^3)
for a value of ~1.345x10^9, throwing away significant digits we don’t really have.
1.345x10^9 cubic miles is 3.42x10^23 cubic inches, and according to Cecil’s estimate (who am I to argue), we get 128 flies to the cubic inch, which gives a maximum number of 4.379x10^25 flies.
Still a really, really big number, but not in the same league as 10^57. I challenge anybody here to find a smaller limit that doesn’t talk about statistical things we know nothing about (how many eggs in the average batch, how fast they can fly, fertility ratios, weather, disease, etc).
I forgot the factor of 4/3 pi in my calculation (I wrote it down, but didn’t carry it out). That means the maximum number is really 1.834x10^26 of the little buggers.
One mole of water is 18 mL. So if we take 10[sup]57[/sup] moles of water, we get a volume of:
10[sup]57[/sup] moles * 1.8 * 10[sup]-2[/sup] Liters/mole * 1 m[sup]3[/sup]/Liter = 1.8 * 10[sup]52[/sup] cubic meters of water
If this were a sphere, and since we all know water is incompressible ;), we can work out it’s radius:
4/3 * pi * r[sup]3[/sup] = 1.8 * 10[sup]52[/sup]
so r[sup]3[/sup] = 4.29 * 10[sup]51[/sup]
so r = 1.62 * 10[sup]13[/sup]
Hence we get a diameter of about a parsec, to within a reasonable tolerance. I think that this signals pretty strongly for a designed universe, don’t you?
Hmm, well I think flies require air, so it’s unlikely we can get more flies than our atmosphere will cover. If we assume a mixture of half-flies, half air, air up to say 25 miles, i get…
hmmm: 4.167 time 10^22 flies??
And that doesnt allow much space for sunlight to filter down to the plants that have to make oxygen for all those flies, so it’s going to get a mite stuffy after a nonce…
Um, grg, wasn’t Cecil’s whole point that the numbers he got were totally unreasonable? I had thought that the reasons were obvious for just why those numbers were implausible.
Well, Chronos, I agree with you, but they appear to be having fun, so let them be silly.
(Probably never took an Environmental Biology course, though. There is a lot of environmental restistance against flies. Everything from parasites to predators to big creatures stepping on them to good old fashioned limited food supply. Cecil does sort of refer to this in the column. Any creature population has a point at which it will be subject to limitation by “environmental resistance.”)
I think that this signals pretty strongly for a designed universe, don’t you? 
