7 ms·
Your maths seems off. 600 years at, say, 25 years per generation, yields 24 generations. Doubling each generation gives a factor of 2^24, or around 16 million,
by dsymonds 10y ago
Your maths seems off. 600 years at, say, 25 years per generation, yields 24 generations. Doubling each generation gives a factor of 2^24, or around 16 million, not 1 billion.
- smallnamespace 10y agoHe just got to 2^30, which implies a 20 year generation time. Pretty reasonable before the 20th century.
- trapperkeeper79 10y agoThis is hilarious. Given that the world's population is 7 billion today, we started with (7x2) people 600 years ago? LOL. Doesn't check out.
- nom 10y agoHilarious indeed. Are you aware that people die? :D
- vitaminbandit 10y agoClearly just a rounding error... ;)
- OscarCunningham 10y agoIt's not forgetting death that's the error; it's forgetting that people have 2^30 ancestors from 30 generations ago rather than just one. Everyone's family tree grows exponentially, but they all overlap.
- saiya-jin 10y agoThere had been roughly 120 billion humanoids living (and dying) so far. Not sure where cut-off line between apes and homo sapiens exactly is though. The growth is +- exponential. So 1 billion doesn't mean much (and yes all overlaps with other trees, so voila we have present). Plus many people died before having kids, tough times it were.