Well that solves overpopulation then
Posted on May 01 2008 | Tagged as: Media, Science, The Stupid
The online version of a piece by Martin Rees for the Guardian’s science course series:
“We are each made up of between 1028 and 1029 atoms. [...] More than 1078 atoms lie within range of our telescope.”
So there’s only about 1.05 people in the visible universe, and bugger all else.
(In a recent post, which I’ve since misplaced, I criticised Madeleine Bunting for writing C02 rather than CO2, and took some flak myself for not being entirely accurate either, and not writing CO2. In that case the lack of a subscript doesn’t obscure understading — not much anyway; it’s reasonably obvious we’re talking about a molecule made of one carbon atom and two oxygen. But in Rees’s article, having lost the superscript on 1028 and so on makes it a complete nonsense.)
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