Comments

what about leap year
Miri Buchman
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Ahh in that case, I calculate: 365142857.142857000000000
Pretty sure, but I would run it by someone else…maybe
Sean or James or Frank
Here is my math:
Column A is the million years
Column B is the amount of time between leap years
Column C is A/B which gives you how many years are leap years (1st row) and how many aren’t (2nd row)
Column D is how many days are in the year
Column E is C*D which gives you the amount of yesterdays in the leap years (1st row) and non leap years (2nd row)
Total is the sum of the two values in E
However, I could not get excel to round out any further than 9 decimal places, I don’t know how much of a difference
that makes…
Dean Brandi
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1
Just one… possibly zero.
“Yesterday” is a special designation… it means the day before today.  What was yesterday today will not be yesterday tomorrow.  It will be the day before Yesterday.
In any span of a million years, there can be one or zero yesterdays, depending on if the span includes the day
before today.
Ask a programmer a silly question, get a literal answer
James Fitch
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It comes down to how you define 'yesterday'.

If you're talking about a personal current yesterday, then
as James points out it's either one (if the million years
ended yesterday) or zero (if the million years ended further in the past).  But that's just for one person, so you could
also argue that if the million years ended yesterday there were approximately 6,635,339,371 yesterdays, one for each person on Earth.

Of course if the day before yesterday still counts as a yesterday (yesterday's yesterday) then clearly the day before that would count too (yesterday's yesterday's yesterday) and we need to count more yesterdays all the way back to the beginning of the million years.  Jason had the right calculation but forgot leap years, so by this model there'd be 365,242,380 yesterdays[1].

However, the same logic about all of us having our own yesterdays applies here as well; If we assume that about 106,456,367,669 people have ever been born[2] that would make for 38,882,377,100,000,000,000 yesterdays (The earliest modern human is believed to have lived approximately 100,000 years ago, so it's reasonable to say that every human ever born lived in the past million years).  That's 38 quintillion, 882 quadrillion, 377 trillion, and 100 billion yesterdays.

But that breaks down because not all of us were alive for
the entire million year span.  So we could also say that the average life span for a human in the upper paleolithic era was about 33 years, the current world average is 67 years, split the difference and assume that the average human saw a grand total of 18,262.119 yesterdays, and that therefore the lot of us have seen 1,944,118,850,000,000 yesterdays
all together (that's 1 quadrillion, 944 trillion, 118 billion, and 850 million yesterdays).

Then there's the question of whether you'd even want to know this much about yesterday, what with it lighting fools the way to dusty death and all.  But that's another subject entirely.  Personally, I believe in yesterday.

-- 
Sean Kerwin
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Food for thought........

Yesterday is history
Tomorrow is a mystery
All we have is the GIFT of today.....that's why it's called the PRESENT
Dantzler Bruce
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