Tuesday, September 22, 2015

"Get out of my trailer" revisited

In the essay "Get out of my trailer", I imagined a human-cell-sized trailer occupied by a bacterial denizen and assumed that was about right. Turns out my arithmetic was a little bit off. Your average eukaryotic cell is about 15,000 times the volume of your average bacterium.

courtesy http://www.tentrillioncellhuman.com

So, let's say we scale up a bacteria to the size of a human being. Let's make him a six-foot, two hundred pound specimen, which is pretty close to me. My volume, as a cylinder of 72" height with ellipsoidal cross section, is about 3.17 cubic feet. Times 15,000 is 47,550 cubic feet. Let's make a two story building, that's a footprint of 2,377 square feet, which is about your contemporary average house size. (Average US houses in 1973  first census data available - were 1,660 square feet.)

So, we've moved up in the world from a trailer to a well-to-do suburban ranch house.

Get out of my starter castle you bacterial bitch.

And take your dirty Pigpen menagerie cloud with you.

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