How many children?

[sbalas]

Given the conditions and opportunities, how many children can a MAN have in his lifetime?

[Calvesy]

A man can pump out billions of sperms everyday of his life from say, 14 to 90. Most of these are spilled in vain. For a married man, it depends upon his wife's fertility and it is not unknown for the same couple to produce up to twenty children, given good health. In some cultures where the king has a harem it has been claimed that one man had 4,000 offspring, but I would doubt the fidelity of all his frustrated wives. An unscrupulous doctor running a sperm bank could abuse his position, and this has been done with unknown consequences.

Women trying for a baby normally conceive at an average of 4 months at 20 to 12 months at 40. Suppose our stud has access to an unlimited supply of women aged 20 to 40, with whom he can have his way every night with any of them who are not yet pregnant, at these odds the chances of conceiving on any given night are about one in two hundred, so if he has an active sex life spanning, say,  60 years in this harem he could have up to a hundred children that are his.

[IndieSinger]

These figures are all hypothetical, and using some of the figures above, let's say for instance a man can ejaculate effectively three times a day between the age of 14 and 90.

Again, presuming their is an unending supply of fertile women who conceive first time, that makes 83,220 children. If, as Calvesy says, the odds of conceiving are 1 in 200 (0.5%), then he will only (!) be the father of just over 416 sproglets.

[Greenbhoy]

Is this a trick question as a MAN cannot have any children at all?

[IndieSinger]

Greenbhoy - only if you use the verb "to have" in the sense of "to give birth to" rather than "to own" ("to father").