Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[DimesForShares]

Doubling from one generation to the next may have been beyond the capabilities of Prodigy in Gens 1 to 4. They apparently did not have much ability to screen genetics prior to Gen 5 and had to be trained on the equipment to test Gen 5.

So it might have been 10 kilos, 11 kilos, 12 kilos, and 14 kilos.

It won’t take long to verify a critical assumption of my analysis that you didn’t much care for. Female silkworms lay about 300 eggs. Since a male has to be involved in the process, we can think of a breeding pair producing 300 eggs or 150 eggs per silkworm. If one allows all silkworms to hatch and mate, that implies a 150-fold increase in egg numbers across generations.

The fact that Gen 6 is only 10 times larger than Gen 5, not 150 times larger, has several explanations. Prodigy might have harvested the other 140 times silkworms, for example. But the steady state percentage of 1% derives directly from that number of eggs per silkworm. The actual percentage is smaller, but I assumed that not all eggs would survive to cocoon.

My analysis isn’t particularly sensitive to the number of eggs. The story would be a little different if KBLB’s silkworms only produced 200 eggs or even 100. But it would be different if silkworms only laid 20 eggs, produced cocoons that had 10 times the silk of other silkworms, or had a mortality rate of greater than 50%. The first two alternatives are quite unlikely.