alt Hacker NewsWhat's Earth's dominant species by mass?
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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)
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
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.”
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
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
I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses
It was fun and gave human written. Thanks for that!
>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.
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?
Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:
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Anaerobic bacteria in rock underground. Because they inhabit cubic volume, not 2D surfaces, there can be no comparison.
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.