> Someone did a calculation that if the first cell had kept splitting at the rate it had, there'd be a ball the size of the solar system by now or something crazy like that.
What? That makes no sense as an exponential process. It'd be at least unfathomably larger than the universe by now, not just solar system sized.
Or were they assuming it'd expand constantly only from the surface in all directions?
The grandfather post is probably misremembering something like "it will become a sphere expanding at greater than the speed of light" around the time it is Solar-System-sized.
Depending on how you measure it could be allowed... the diameter of the sphere could grow faster than the speed of light without any component exceeding c because you can grow at near light speeds in two directions.
I think the point was that's the answer given by extrapolation, and its obvoiusly physically impossible. The contradiction with laws of physics is the point.
For starters, anything that large wo ui pd collapse into a black hole.
What? That makes no sense as an exponential process. It'd be at least unfathomably larger than the universe by now, not just solar system sized. Or were they assuming it'd expand constantly only from the surface in all directions?