Release the Hounds
My sometime lodger Yuri, if anything, has an enquiring mind judging by his latest email from the mine adjacent to my community:
I guess lurking in the back of the male consciousness is the sheer magnitude of procreative redundancy present in each ejaculation. Women ovulate ovum by ovum (usually), so nature does not waste capacity. But I looked up in Wikipedia the number of spermatozoa present in each ejaculation and the numbers are staggering: 200,000,000 to 500,000,000 per splurge.
Now, we can assume that a man ejaculates an average of twice a week from age 13 to 70 - (this is as close an approximation I can come to balancing the fevered self-abuse of early adulthood with the wanning libido of senior citizenhood). This results in a lifetime statistic of 42,340 orgasms. And if we multiply by the half billion spermatozoa per event we are faced with the staggering figure of 21.2 trillion spermatozoa produced by the average man during the course of his lifetime.
According to Wikipedia, there are 7 sextillion stars in the known universe, which is the number 7 followed by 22 zeros, so Yuri's assertion that each ejaculation contains the same number of spermatozoa as stars in the universe is not right at all.
However, the number of stars in our own galaxy is approximately the same as the number of spermatozoa shot out the tube of an average male's lifespan.
Perhaps this is why we call it the Milky Way.
I guess lurking in the back of the male consciousness is the sheer magnitude of procreative redundancy present in each ejaculation. Women ovulate ovum by ovum (usually), so nature does not waste capacity. But I looked up in Wikipedia the number of spermatozoa present in each ejaculation and the numbers are staggering: 200,000,000 to 500,000,000 per splurge.
Now, we can assume that a man ejaculates an average of twice a week from age 13 to 70 - (this is as close an approximation I can come to balancing the fevered self-abuse of early adulthood with the wanning libido of senior citizenhood). This results in a lifetime statistic of 42,340 orgasms. And if we multiply by the half billion spermatozoa per event we are faced with the staggering figure of 21.2 trillion spermatozoa produced by the average man during the course of his lifetime.
According to Wikipedia, there are 7 sextillion stars in the known universe, which is the number 7 followed by 22 zeros, so Yuri's assertion that each ejaculation contains the same number of spermatozoa as stars in the universe is not right at all.
However, the number of stars in our own galaxy is approximately the same as the number of spermatozoa shot out the tube of an average male's lifespan.
Perhaps this is why we call it the Milky Way.
posted by nanuk at 1:29 PM Permafrost
5 Comments:
Now the bad news - you need that many spermatazoa because none of them will stop and ask for directions, making finding the egg a crapshoot at best. This forces nature to take the shotgun approach.
TPK: LOL. I've always thought there was an equivalent to a bar or monster truck rally somewhere in women's plumbing to distract the vast majority of our soldiers from completing their mission.
coincidence?
PK - Hahahahahaha! True.
When are you going to admit that there's no such Yuri person?!
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