Sand, Stars, and People

It is a game of numbers.
Today, everybody who exists is/are the end result of survivors.

Let me restate the obvious, all people who are currently alive, are the end result of thousands upon millions, upon billions of survivors. No matter what was thrown at them, war, plague, whooping cough, large cats, these people survived long enough to have and somehow raise children, who survived and raised more children.

It got me thinking, how many people have ever been born? Is it a number that can be estimated with any certainty? A simple google search gives an average answer from many different sites.

Using a log rhythmic formula the best estimates are 108 to 110 billion people ever born. The 7, nearly 8, billion people currently existing claim parentage within that number. Obviously many of the people who were born died before the age of conception. But many of the survivors were very fruitful with dozens of children, so maybe it averages out. In any case, the success rate has been climbing rapidly in the last thousand years. How far will it go?

It’s a sobering fact that an estimate of all the people in the past can be made. What about the stars? Again, according to google search, an estimated 70 sextillion, (7 with 20 zeros), estimated to be 10 times the amount of grains of sand in all the world’s beaches, about 7 sextillion to be exact.

Wow, is that a static number? Sand is created, sand is destroyed? Stars are created, stars are destroyed? Is there a parallel formula for the continued growth? Don’t know, but would like to.

In any case, that’s a lot of sand and stars.

According to the Bible in Genesis, we are equated to the sand and stars. We are a little more than nine zeros in the total number of zeros for humans, towards the estimated 20 zeros for sand and stars. That means we have about 11 zeros to go before we match the estimated number, which might be a measure of the end of time.

Hey, we are not even halfway there!

We better make some plans to populate some of those star systems before we run out of room.

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