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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8708603" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Well, the beauty of the Fermi Estimation is that your assumptions don’t necessarily need to be accurate, as long as you’re “in the right ballpark.” And as long as you understand that what you’re getting is not an accurate answer, but a reasonable range. Some of your estimations will be too high, and some will be too low, but as you multiply these factors, the over-estimates and the under-estimates tend to cancel out and you end up with a result that’s “close enough” (that is to say, within  about an order of magnitude), which makes it a useful tool for checking your calculations that are meant to produce an accurate results against. If the calculations you use to try and find an accurate answer produce one that’s off from your Fermi Estimate by more than about an order of magnitude, there’s a good chance that there’s a flaw in your methodology.</blockquote>