lazyevaluationranch:23/09/2020 There’s a tiny drainage ditch next to the garage, full of duckweed.Du

lazyevaluationranch:23/09/2020 There’s a tiny drainage ditch next to the garage, full of duckweed.Duckweed is unreasonably weird. It doesn’t have a stem or leaves. It technically can flower and make seeds, but that’s rare. Normally it reproduces by cloning itself and budding off another whole duckweed, like yeast. Under ideal conditions, duckweed can split every three days or so. So if there’s one duckweed in our drainage ditch today, there will be two duckweeds in three days, four duckweeds by the end of the week, two thousand duckweeds at the end of the month, and somewhere a little north of undecillion duckweeds in a year.It has proven understandably difficult to rid the drainage ditch of duckweed.Consider: we have duckweed fossils from the Paleocene, about sixty million years ago. Let’s say the first duckweed ever weighed a hundredth of a gram and showed up on a bright sunny Tuesday morning sixty million years ago. Fifty one days later, it has split in half seventeen times, and there’s now a kilogram of duckweeds in all the universe.Two hundred and forty nine days later, the duckweeds weigh approximately the same as the earth. Thirty six days after that, the duckweeds weigh as much as the solar system. Two hundred and twenty eight days later, the duckweeds weigh the same as the universe.(This is why aliens don’t return Earth’s calls even though our music is excellent.)So we know the universe isn’t entirely made of duckweeds because the universe way too small. All the vastness of the night sky would have been filled by duckweeds a couple years after they evolved. So that’s good. Unless, uh, someone reading this is a stack of duckweeds in an unconvincing trenchcoat. In which case I, for one, welcome our new duckweed overlords. -- source link

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