3 ms·
A virus that doubled in a second would be perceived as a swarm that dissolved people before our eyes as it quickly ate the biomass of the planet. Think 2^86400
by michaelmrose 6y ago
A virus that doubled in a second would be perceived as a swarm that dissolved people before our eyes as it quickly ate the biomass of the planet. Think 2^86400 in one day. Fortunately it would need faster than light travel to keep replicating at that rate for long.
- jamiek88 6y agoWhy would it need ftl? Aren’t all the doublings local?
- michaelmrose 6y agoI'm assuming it would consume all local mass shortly.
- lacker 6y agoAnything that keeps replicating exponentially will eventually have its growth limited by the speed of light, because the amount of space you can reach while traveling at a bounded speed only grows polynomially fast. Because the formula for the volume of a sphere is cubic. You’ll run out of space and the things in the inside of the ball won’t have room to replicate.