Imagine you're an alien explorer. You visit Earth 25,000 krugs ago (51,304 Earth-years ago) and see a pretty standard ecological milieu: a wide variety of species, each adapted to its own little environment, no different than it was 50 million krugs before.
You return today and see that one previously unremarkable ape-like species has spread out to all parts of the world and is even orbiting in little tin cans around the planet. Almost all wild terrestrial megafauna is gone and the megafauna that remains is raised by the "humans" in massive farms. They've converted forests and jungles into farms and cities, and they're spending vast amounts of energy to make silicon think.
The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy.
Does that strike you as an unusual path for an intelligent species to become space faring? We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.
I would expect any civilization to exterminate or at least cull the creatures that pose a threat and to cultivate those that are tasty or useful.
More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best... and that's if anyone's looking for the faintest of faint traces.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.
So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.
Actually it looks like I had the numbers wrong. There are about 1800 wild pandas and 750 in captivity, while there are about 2200 panda express locations. I think the original fact was "more panda expresses than wild pandas".
In some book by P G Wodehouse (inventor of Jeeves the butler), one character says (out of nowhere) that all the humans on the planet could fit in a cubic hole 1/2 mile on each side. It took me a little while to convince myself that was true. It still is, apparently
I usually say if every human being on the planet were placed in Texas, it would be less dense than Paris as an argument against an area being "too crowded", but this is an even more jarring comparison.
There is a Discworld joke about this. After being introduced to the God of evolution, God shows off the magnum opus he has been developing, the cockroach.
This is because when they would lay a sheet on the ground and shake the branches of a tree, they would often find more species of beetles than anything else. However, they may have been extrapolating a bit far from the few places they tried this.
No, it’s because beetles have the most diversity of any animal order.
“The Coleoptera, with about 400,000 described species, is the largest of all orders, constituting almost 40% of described arthropods and 25% of all known animal species…”
Grasses mentioned in the article: rice, wheat, maize and sugar cane. I think all of them likely beat the bamboos because there are too many different bamboo species, not a single dominant one.
That's not necessarily grasses though. Rice is a Poaceae,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae, so these are covered
by the grass family - but grasses would be the non-eatable
variants in the wild. See Wikipedia:
Should the wood of trees be counted? Its effectively dead cells of the plant, it'd be like counting the skin that we shed and sweep off the floor every weekend.
A lot of the wood is used for transporting water - vital to keeping the trees alive high up in the branches. And it is structural - so should we subtract 70% of the bone weight from a mammal since it is non-living structural support?
English words like "goodbye" are contracted from longer expressions after centuries of common use[0]. Reading your phrase "gave human written" made me wonder how this phrase would contract if it were still in use centuries from today.
I'm not sure what cubic volume vs 2D surfaces means to you, but these comparisons are by mass, not volume. Plus, anaerobic bacteria would only come up on top if you counted all of them as one species, which they are not.
Imagine you're an alien explorer. You visit Earth 25,000 krugs ago (51,304 Earth-years ago) and see a pretty standard ecological milieu: a wide variety of species, each adapted to its own little environment, no different than it was 50 million krugs before.
You return today and see that one previously unremarkable ape-like species has spread out to all parts of the world and is even orbiting in little tin cans around the planet. Almost all wild terrestrial megafauna is gone and the megafauna that remains is raised by the "humans" in massive farms. They've converted forests and jungles into farms and cities, and they're spending vast amounts of energy to make silicon think.
The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy.
Does that strike you as an unusual path for an intelligent species to become space faring? We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.
I would expect any civilization to exterminate or at least cull the creatures that pose a threat and to cultivate those that are tasty or useful.
Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.
Or the aliens did the same thing we did?
More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best... and that's if anyone's looking for the faintest of faint traces.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.
So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.
Facts I try not to think about:
- More than 2/3rds of the world's avian biomass is poultry
- There are more Panda Expresses than pandas (edit - in the wild)
I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild
Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?
Actually it looks like I had the numbers wrong. There are about 1800 wild pandas and 750 in captivity, while there are about 2200 panda express locations. I think the original fact was "more panda expresses than wild pandas".
It looks like 39 restaurant chains have more than 2550 locations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_fast_food_...
Looks like there's about 2,500 pandas in the world.
https://www.franchisetimes.com/top-400-2026/
Pandas could fit in the top 20, beating out Panera bread (2,225).
How does
“There are more jiffy’s lubes than pandas in the world “
sound?
Slippery.
Now I want to give a panda a slip-n-slide and film it.
Land mammal biomass: https://xkcd.com/1338/
In some book by P G Wodehouse (inventor of Jeeves the butler), one character says (out of nowhere) that all the humans on the planet could fit in a cubic hole 1/2 mile on each side. It took me a little while to convince myself that was true. It still is, apparently
There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...
I usually say if every human being on the planet were placed in Texas, it would be less dense than Paris as an argument against an area being "too crowded", but this is an even more jarring comparison.
Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.
And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.
Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.
Famously, when asked about a god, J.B.S. Haldane allegedly said that if there is a god or gods, they must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.”
There is a Discworld joke about this. After being introduced to the God of evolution, God shows off the magnum opus he has been developing, the cockroach.
This is because when they would lay a sheet on the ground and shake the branches of a tree, they would often find more species of beetles than anything else. However, they may have been extrapolating a bit far from the few places they tried this.
No, it’s because beetles have the most diversity of any animal order.
“The Coleoptera, with about 400,000 described species, is the largest of all orders, constituting almost 40% of described arthropods and 25% of all known animal species…”
First paragraph of the wiki article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle
What would .2 billion tons of viruses look like? Or any large mass of viruses? Goopy? What color what it be? These are probably questions for an LLM
That was actually covered by Randall Munro of XKCD:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/
Excellently written, informative, entertaining and a bit scary. Oceans of slime yet viruses are so small. It is mind-blowing to think about.
Haha of course it was! Thanks for the link.
I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses
Grasses mentioned in the article: rice, wheat, maize and sugar cane. I think all of them likely beat the bamboos because there are too many different bamboo species, not a single dominant one.
That's not necessarily grasses though. Rice is a Poaceae, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae, so these are covered by the grass family - but grasses would be the non-eatable variants in the wild. See Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass
"The three major families of grasslike plants are true grasses (Poaceae), sedges (Cyperaceae), and rushes (Juncaceae)."
So he at best only did the family Poacaea but where are the wild poaceae in his calculations?
Tons of things are missing in that article.
Should the wood of trees be counted? Its effectively dead cells of the plant, it'd be like counting the skin that we shed and sweep off the floor every weekend.
The trees are cheating
If the dead cells were shed, I might agree! But they're not.
This is like counting the dead skin cells that are still attached, which (sure enough!) does count toward animal biomass.
It serves an important structural purpose for them. Similar to corals.
A lot of the wood is used for transporting water - vital to keeping the trees alive high up in the branches. And it is structural - so should we subtract 70% of the bone weight from a mammal since it is non-living structural support?
It was fun and gave human written. Thanks for that!
English words like "goodbye" are contracted from longer expressions after centuries of common use[0]. Reading your phrase "gave human written" made me wonder how this phrase would contract if it were still in use centuries from today.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2ew2UHaCuY
funny that i didn’t think about it till i read your comment. and then realized i read the entire thing. checks out.
on the other hand i don’t think I’m physically capable of reading the AI landing pages of every new product on HN.
>There are thousands of species of ants and termites, and just one species of human.
that's rather debatable. unless, of course, you're an adherent of creationism.
It's talking about species that currently exist. As far as we know there is only one currently existing species in the genus Homo.
He did not calculate the weight of bacteria, archaea, viruses?
I understand that they each individually are small, but they are literally everywhere - and include carbon too.
How come algae did not make the list?
Was surprised not to see whales on the list
Individual whales are large, but there aren’t that many individuals.
I wonder if populations have fully recovered from the whale-oil era.
They've got a long, long way to go.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Whale_Populatio...
Fish species in general have been badly affected by commercial fishing:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
LOL
Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:
https://xkcd.com/1338/
It’s nice to see he separated the sheep and the goats.
Anaerobic bacteria in rock underground. Because they inhabit cubic volume, not 2D surfaces, there can be no comparison.
I'm not sure what cubic volume vs 2D surfaces means to you, but these comparisons are by mass, not volume. Plus, anaerobic bacteria would only come up on top if you counted all of them as one species, which they are not.
Pretty much all life is 1 g / ml give or take 20%
The same argument could be had for fish, since they inhabit the volume of water, instead of the thin land surface of earth.
They are in zones and layers, yes. But very very thinly spread. Most life in the ocean are withing the top 3 meters.