Tal­mu­dic Ques­tion #89

If we as­sume that the pop­u­la­tion of cells is con­stant (10^30) and each cell can di­vide into two cells, then one of those two must die or the pop­u­la­tion of cells will rise. Con­versely, one of those two must live or the pop­u­la­tion of cells will lower.
So, I would guess that about 50% of cells are vi­able if abil­ity to repli­cate in the given en­vi­ron­ment is the mea­sure of vi­a­bil­ity.
If a cell is con­sid­ered vi­able if it will repli­cate given ad­e­quate nu­tri­ents, then 99% or more are vi­able, since per repli­ca­tion mu­ta­tion rates are said to be some­where from 1 in 100 to 1 in 1000.
Elio replies: Nice ar­gu­ments. Thanks a lot.

What is "vi­a­bil­ity" — the abil­ity of the whole or­gan­ism to re­pro­duce or the sur­vival of a genome (with ad­e­quate po­ten­tial to be trans­mit­ted to an­other or­gan­ism)? I ad­mit it is a bit of a stretch to ar­gue that a chunk of DNA large enough to be con­sid­ered as rep­re­sent­ing a spe­cific or­gan­ism would be able to sub­vert a pas­ing mi­crobe. How­ever, a pass­ing mi­cro­bi­ol­o­gist could fa­cil­i­tate that event. Hence the ar­gu­ment can be re­duced to that of what % of a genome is re­quired to de­fine an or­gan­ism. Then one won­ders how long that %age would re­main once self-repli­ca­tion of an or­gan­ism has been in­ac­ti­vated. In this ar­gu­ment, the to­tal num­ber of "vi­able" mi­croor­gan­isms is >10e30 by a fac­tor which I chose to ar­gue is 5x but with no ba­sis for that num­ber what­so­ever (other than a spe­cious gues­ti­mate of the min­i­mum genome size of a bac­terium).
In the end, the an­swer to the ques­tion must be 100% since the mea­sure­ment of to­tal num­bers will in­clude a de­f­i­n­i­tion of what con­sti­tutes an or­gan­ism. This de­f­i­n­i­tion must be based in DNA and such DNA can be re­cov­ered, am­pli­fied, and re­stored to a self-repli­cat­ing con­di­tion.