People tend to shit on clones, but who else can come up with a large enough army to defend the Republic?
At 1/2^42 odds, you’re unlikely to have a large enough army to man a V Wing, much less defend the Republic
For me, the main issue with cloning is that it inherently assumes that the cloned organism is way better than any potential organism you could get the ol’ fashioned way. Like eg. people cloning their old pets are literally saying that their old pet was perfect and any other puppy/kitty couldn’t match them.
Though it’s a nice strategy to get a bunch of soldiers quickly
You didn’t factor recombination. Nobody ever receives any of their parents’ exact chromosomes, except the sex chromosomes from dad - each pair shuffles up the equivalent DNA between the 2 chromosomes, resulting in 2 chromosomes that are each a mix of both of that parent’s chromosomes of that pair, one of which is passed on to the child for each pair for each parent.
It’s unlikely to have ever happened.
2^42 is 25 times the total number of people ever born in all of history.
…i think it’s quite a bit more than that
I got 38x with 117 billion total people. Not sure where OC got their number, but it’s kind of in the ballpark, so maybe it was just shitty mental math.
I made a typo and used 177 b.
getting correct within a factor of 2 after a 42-fold exponentiation would be amazingly good mental math
The easiest way would be to say 117 billion is ~2^37 because 2[1] are 128, 1024, and about a million (1024*1024), so multiplying those all together gives a little over 128 billion, which is pretty close to 117 billion. So, 242/237=2^5=32. Pretty close, all mental math. Granted, it does require you to either memorize or compute powers of 2 up to 10.
7, 10, 20 ↩︎
I had to check the math and I was surprised that 2^42 is “only” 4.4 trillion. Thought it would be a lot greater like there are less atoms in the universe similar to the uniqueness of a shuffled deck of cards.
Also, twins aren’t identical copies either. Different fingerprint etc.
Fingerprints aren’t genetically coded, and clones wouldn’t have the same fingerprints, either.
I typically associate “clone” with “an exact copy”, with the same exact molecular layout and even thoughts. So a literal exact copy. Clones on a DNA basis, so something possible for years, would indeed be different in some details.
The definition of “clone” you believe in is science fiction nonsense. Why believe in nonsense when the scientific definition of clone is different?
Delete your account
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
google chromosome crossing over
Yea the number is way higher than that
Holy genetic diversity
You mean googol?
Untrue, chromosomes also get shuffled during crossover
deleted by creator
Well that’s some cursed knowledge right there.
I figured this out while thinking about Red Dwarf. Canonically, Lister is his own father. How can his DNA remain stable across all the time loops if he’s saturated his own ancestry with himself? This is the answer. It was a 1 in 2^42 chance the first time, but after that, the time loop preserves the coincidence and Lister ends up his own clone every time. He gets all his own DNA from himself every time, and then he just has to get the same DNA from his mum every time. The science is sound. It’s tremendously unlikely, but in the infinity of the universe it had to happen eventually, assuming an infinite supply of time travellers banging their own mums.
You can also apply this logic to Futurama, Star Trek, and any other science fiction show with a grandfather paradox.
Great now I have to change accents in the 3rd panel.
