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It all began with a word problem about exponential growth in Algebra class today. The scenario was simple enough: someone is feeding pigeons. 10 come at first, but each minute the number of rat birds triples. It sounds like a simple problem, but when you do the math, something horrifying is revealed: This can wipe us all out of the Universe. First let's get to the topic of exponential growth. It is a function of change where the y-values are always being changed by multiplication - either of fractions or whole numbers. The result is a non-linear trend that becomes quicker and quicker as time goes on. It is a good way of graphing incomes and population of organisms. But if left unchecked, certain things undergoing a rapid exponential growth over a certain amount of time can result in disastrous consequences. Humans are just a weak example of this. If a population keeps growing at an exponential rate that's large enough, it can cause quite an issue with mass. Let's get back to the pigeons. One of the goals of this problem was to find out how many pigeons would appear after just 4 minutes. Now, keep in mind that the starting number of pigeons (10) keeps tripling every minute. Also keeping in mind this handy equation: y=a*bx, where a is the starting number, b is the factor of change, and x is the x-value you choose. The latter can be a unit of time, or amount of tries, or something along those lines. For our problem the equation we would use is y=10*34. Plug it in a handy-dandy calculator and you get a whopping 810 pigeons begging for food. That's going to suck for the person feeding them - so many wings smacking you in the face (I can relate to that). However, we're just getting warmed up. Prepare to hate pigeons! Remember that the amount of pigeons increases by THREE TIMES every MINUTE. That is a very quick exponential growth, much faster than that of humanity. This means that over a short period of time you would get so many pigeons. Let's just imagine that this example of exponential growth is solely dependent on the bird food. The amount of pigeons on our planet - in our UNIVERSE - does not matter in the context of the problem. They just keep coming! Just one minute after the 810 pigeons, you now have a whopping 2,430 of them. But it gets a whole lot worse from here. By 10 minutes you have 590,490 pigeons fluttering around you. That's enough to crowd an entire park. But what about an HOUR later? Believe it or not, there will be an astronomical amount of pigeons - 423,911,582,752,200,000,000,000,000,000 in total. That is 423.9 OCTILLION pigeons! Madness! But having 4.239e+29 birds in that area would essentially destroy the entire planet. Taking into account that the average pigeon has a mass of approximately 0.907 kilograms, we can calculate that the total mass of these pigeons would be 64,388.4 times the mass of Earth. That's over 202 times the mass of JUPITER, or 19.3% the mass of the SUN! This collection of pigeons would be so massive it could collapse into a thermonuclear ball of superheated plasma and begin NUCLEAR FUSION. This would form a red dwarf star, swallowing up Earth and destroying all life on it! That's 7.5 billion humans gone in the drop of a hat - all because of some pigeons. But how, do you say, will all these pigeons destroy reality as we know it? Well, in this scenario, they would still be coming despite any other cataclysms. After 3 hours they would reach a mass of 6.91e+86 kilograms. If that sounds like a lot that's because it is - approximately 3.022e+44 times the mass of OUR ENTIRE FLEEPING GALAXY!!! If our universe consists of 100 billion galaxies, and if they're all about the mass of our galaxy (unlikely), then our entire UNIVERSE is quadrillions of times less massive than this pigeon mass! It would become its OWN PLANE OF EXISTENCE, then quickly start to rip apart the fabric of reality. This is the new Big Rip model, where dark matter rips a hole in space-time, sucking all the universe somewhere into oblivion - maybe into an alternate dimension. If this is the same case with the Pigeon Mass, then it would create a giant rip in our universe, sucking everything into a superheated maw of oblivion. The Pigeon Mass would quickly self-destruct, destroying all of what's left of our universe and whatever reality the spacetime hole leads to. Essentially, this would kill trillions upon trillions of lives and completely destroy two whole dimensions, including our own. Starting to fear pigeons now? If so, you're having the right reaction! Have a nice day! DISCLAIMER: