today at 10:36 PM
Note that certain large nationnal fleets are currently trying to fish every last krill they can find, so it might not be dominant in the future.
today at 10:27 PM
What about Bristlemouths? [0] Estimated to be in the TRILLIONS, inhabiting 70% of the earth's surface. Even if they are small, I think they have Spruce and "Larches" pretty handily beat by biomass. Cyclothone upper estimates are quadrillions of fish[1].
[0]https://a-z-animals.com/articles/the-10-animals-with-the-hig...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonostomatidae
today at 10:36 PM
[delayed]
today at 7:52 PM
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)
today at 9:26 PM
I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild
today at 8:27 PM
Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?
today at 9:10 PM
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_...
today at 8:55 PM
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).
today at 8:53 PM
How does
“There are more jiffy’s lubes than pandas in the world “
sound?
today at 8:55 PM
Slippery.
Now I want to give a panda a slip-n-slide and film it.
today at 10:23 PM
There's one panda called Lingyan (who lives in a zoo in China) that has a slide he seems to very much enjoy using, here's a compilation video of that - https://old.reddit.com/r/panda/comments/1p1ce9r/giant_panda_...
today at 10:37 PM
Mosquitos? I think of the massive bloodsucking politicians and billionaires...
today at 8:52 PM
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
today at 9:15 PM
There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...
today at 9:01 PM
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.
today at 9:19 PM
Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.
today at 9:43 PM
And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.
today at 9:30 PM
Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.
today at 9:47 PM
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.
today at 10:06 PM
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.
today at 10:35 PM
>We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.
That leaves our successor species, the machine minds, with replicators and free energy, I think you mean.
today at 10:03 PM
Or the aliens did the same thing we did?
today at 9:49 PM
Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.
today at 10:05 PM
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.
today at 8:13 PM
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.”
today at 10:35 PM
I read somewhere that some scientists now think there may be more species of wasps than beetles. No least because many species of beetle seem to have a species of wasps that prey on them.
today at 9:28 PM
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.
today at 8:44 PM
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.
today at 9:48 PM
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
today at 9:32 PM
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
today at 9:33 PM
That was actually covered by Randall Munro of XKCD:
today at 9:45 PM
Excellently written, informative, entertaining and a bit scary. Oceans of slime yet viruses are so small. It is mind-blowing to think about.
today at 9:38 PM
Haha of course it was! Thanks for the link.
today at 8:40 PM
I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses
today at 8:55 PM
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.
today at 9:06 PM
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.
today at 12:48 PM
It was fun and gave human written. Thanks for that!
today at 8:24 PM
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
today at 8:23 PM
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.
today at 9:43 PM
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
today at 10:03 PM
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.
today at 9:59 PM
It serves an important structural purpose for them. Similar to corals.
today at 10:02 PM
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?
today at 8:47 PM
>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.
today at 8:50 PM
It's talking about species that currently exist. As far as we know there is only one currently existing species in the genus Homo.
today at 8:40 PM
How come algae did not make the list?
today at 9:03 PM
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.
today at 6:52 PM
Was surprised not to see whales on the list
today at 9:05 PM
Individual whales are large, but there aren’t that many individuals.
today at 7:44 PM
I wonder if populations have fully recovered from the whale-oil era.
today at 8:04 PM
They've got a long, long way to go.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Whale_Populatio...
today at 9:36 PM
Fish species in general have been badly affected by commercial fishing:
today at 8:03 PM
LOL
today at 7:58 PM
Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:
today at 9:06 PM
It’s nice to see he separated the sheep and the goats.
today at 5:13 PM
[flagged]
today at 8:01 PM
[flagged]
today at 8:38 PM
Plastic is a species?
today at 9:07 PM
Ever hear of the Nestene consciousness and the autons?
today at 2:01 PM
Anaerobic bacteria in rock underground. Because they inhabit cubic volume, not 2D surfaces, there can be no comparison.
today at 7:47 PM
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.
today at 8:34 PM
Pretty much all life is 1 g / ml give or take 20%
today at 10:14 PM
[flagged]
today at 9:47 PM
The same argument could be had for fish, since they inhabit the volume of water, instead of the thin land surface of earth.
today at 9:59 PM
They are in zones and layers, yes. But very very thinly spread. Most life in the ocean are withing the top 3 meters.
