JohnW
Posts: 3217
Joined: Aug. 2006
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| Quote (blipey @ Nov. 18 2011,08:36) | Hey forastero,
Are you still having trouble coming up with the derivation of your growth rate in that population equation you kept touting?
Now, I'm just a clown; surely you can out-reason a clown? I mean, I am a professional clown but come on. Tell us how you derived your growth rate. Or, are you just a clown (of the amateur variety)? |
I looked at the muppet's conservative, for-the-sake-of-argument-and-not-copied-mindlessly-from-some-creationist-site growth rate of 0.5% per year.
Let's consider the rat.
As everyone knows, 4500 years ago the entire world population of rats consisted of Mr and Mrs Rat floating around on a big wooden boat. So when they arrived back on dry land, the population had some increasing to do. Now, rats breed a lot faster than people - their lifespan is about a year. So we need to scale the muppet's rate up a bit - if we multiply it by 20, that gives us 10% per year. In fact, let's be extra generous to the muppet and pull an even more conservative base rate of 0.1% out of my arse - so for rats we have a rate of 2% per year. As I'm sure the muppet would agree, this is really, really conservative.
Plugging this into muppet's compound interest formula, which we all know is an entirely sensible way to estimate population growth in organisms, 4500 years after Mr and Mrs Rat walked down the gangplank we have a population of 10^38 rats. That's just under 7,000,000,000,000,000,000 rats per square millimetre of the Earth's land surface.
I wonder where they are?
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Math is just a language of reality. Its a waste of time to know it. - Robert Byers
There isn't any probability that the letter d is in the word "mathematics"... Â The correct answer would be "not even 0" - JoeG
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