Friday, December 30, 2011

Duck to the 9th Power

Most people see children and think of multiplying the population, while I think in exponents. Just imagine these ducklings having eight or nine of their own little ducks and those ducks having eight or nine of their own.  If a duck can reproduce after 20-24 weeks, some ducks can have their own babies the year they are born. This means that these nine ducks assuming that half are male and half are female over ten years can produce about 5^10 ducks or 9765625 ducks. The mallard population is an estimated ten million breeding individuals. This means that ten years ago there were fewer than 12 ducks, and in another ten years there will be 9.77x10^66 a number so large that it has no name. This is roughly 1.40x10^57 times the human population today.
"University of Hawaii tried to guess how many grains of sand are on the world's beaches. They came up with 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion grains of sand." This is less than the population of ducks will be in ten years. If you thought politics was messy things are about to get a lot deeper in here. You may have to adjust for small effects like eggs that never hatch, ones that get eaten, ones that hatch and get babies get eaten, and various other incidents in which ducks get eaten. So if you follow my math then you will see that ducks now pose the biggest problem for over population seen in the history of man kind, or at least in the last ten years since the population increased from about 12 ducks to ten million of just mallards. So save us all and have a roast duck for dinner, and do not be fooled by their fluffy cuteness they are trying to out compete us for our backyard pools. My calculations may have a slight margin of error, so you may want to do the calculations yourself and post any results that you may find.
Post By Joshua Kirton
Photo By Aaron Kirton

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