Why Our Forefather Adam Had to Bite the Apple

Dear reader, take out a sheet of paper and a pen and follow my calculations. This measure will not be pointless, as the numbers we will be dealing with are rather enormous, and mistakes can be easily made.

Let us suppose, then, that each couple that has descended from the house of Adam and has lived on this beautiful planet had only three children (a not at all unrealistic supposition); let us further suppose that only 6,000 years have passed from the time of Adam’s birth to today, and that human beings’ ability to bear children begins only at 30. All of these suppositions are perfectly reasonable, given what realistically occurs in the world. If, then, we allow that the human race has passed through only 200 generations, with three children allotted to each couple (husband and wife), the result is a geometric progression whose first term is 2, the exponent 3ƒ2, and the number of terms of the progression is 200. The following formula will serve to summarize this progression:

Plugging in the respective values of the present case, we get:

According to this formula, the value of S—that is to say, the number of people on earth if no one from Adam on had died—would be a trifling 1,661 quintillion.

I see you are smiling, dear reader, asking me, “And so?” But, do you perhaps have any idea of what this immense number means?

I shall demonstrate it with a few practical examples.

The entire surface of the Earth measures approximately 506 ¼ million square kilometers, or 5,347 trillion square feet. Supposing, then, that no one had died since Adam, the question would be how to fit all these people on the planet. How much space must we allot each individual? Maybe a square foot? That is very little, and yet if we were to arrange people in this manner, their shoulders would be touching. Even if the surface of all the seas were used for this purpose, would there be enough room on Earth? If you believe that, dear reader, you are sadly mistaken. Only 5,347 trillion could fit; so what would we do with the rest? Even if we placed 10 individuals per square foot, we could only fit in 53,470 trillion of them. In order to place all 1,661 quintillion people on the planet, we would have to crowd in 310,680 trillion people per square foot.