I guessed off-hand “a billion” which I think was just my brain’s way of saying “wow, a really big number!” But it’s WAY too small.
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There’s a bunch of different numbers you can find on the web. Some of them are definitely way off. But there’s a wide range of values that seem reasonable (to me) because cells vary in size over several orders of magnitude.
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You can do a Fermi estimate based either on mass (which didn’t occur to me, but several tweeps did it that way!) or based on volume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem …
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I guessed a trillion, but only because you said you got it wrong. Then I calculated that a red blood cell weighs about 1.6 trillion times as much as a water molucule, so I'm pretty confident.
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Yes; they’re very small for human cells, though. Add an order of magnitude or two to get a typical-sized one.
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Twitter has made it very unclear whether you answered the question or not. I see various threads, but nothing clear.
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There should only be one main thread! Twitter sucks. I get 10^14:https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1031636209565687808 …
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A million?
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Million Billion?
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Well Avogadro's no is 6 x 10^23. A mol of water (18 g) would contain that many. A cell would be perhaps 10^-6 of a g. So Maybe around 10^17 or 10^18 if it were pure water. Most of the actual water in the body is in fluids, not cells. So somewhere between 10^15 and 10^16?
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I said ~10^15 for roughly the same reason. (Also because my snap judgment was 10^9 then I way overcorrected to 10^25 then did some thinking and it seemed decent enough.)
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