Study: How long would it really take for tribbles to fill Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise?
Captain Kirk under a pile of tribbles in the Star Trek episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles”
Some very clever scientists have figured out exactly how long it would take to fill the U.S.S. Enterprise with tribbles.
An article in Ars Technica over the weekend points to a paper recently published in the University of Leicester’s undergrad physics journal, which used canon references to precisely calculate the time (in days) for tribbles to reproduce enough to fill the entire interior space of Star Trek’s flagship starship.
The abstract for the paper, which was published last November, reads: “In the Star Trek universe, tribbles are small furry creatures whose population increases exponentially. Using the assumption made by Spock, that a tribble has 10 children every 12 hours, we find the growth constant for a tribble population to be 0.1998 h−1. From this, assuming the tribbles have an unlimited food supply, we find that the time needed for the tribble family to grow such that it fills USS Enterprise is 4.5 days.”
Those results, of course, assume that said tribbles haven’t been feeding on toxic grain. The paper’s authors suggest that a further study be carried out using a “death term” to determine how long it would take for the tribble population to become extinct.
There’s no indication in the study of how farming for the purposes of manufacturing tribble cereal would play into the results.
