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Posted by surprisetalk 9 hours ago

What's Earth's dominant species by mass?(signoregalilei.com)
99 points | 48 comments
GMoromisato 12 minutes ago|
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.

kridsdale1 10 minutes ago|
Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.
ortusdux 2 hours ago||
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)

stult 32 minutes ago||
I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild
sidewndr46 1 hour ago||
Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?
ortusdux 48 minutes ago|||
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_...

hex4def6 1 hour ago||||
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).

anukin 1 hour ago|||
How does

“There are more jiffy’s lubes than pandas in the world “

sound?

komodo99 1 hour ago||
Slippery.

Now I want to give a panda a slip-n-slide and film it.

niccl 1 hour ago||
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
divan 43 minutes ago||
There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...
santadays 16 minutes ago|||
And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.
schnevets 57 minutes ago|||
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.
DennisP 39 minutes ago||
Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.
GMoromisato 28 minutes ago||
Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.
gumby 1 hour ago||
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.”
0cf8612b2e1e 30 minutes ago||
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.
adammarples 1 hour ago||
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.
boston_clone 10 minutes ago||
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

NDlurker 26 minutes ago||
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
WillAdams 25 minutes ago|
That was actually covered by Randall Munro of XKCD:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/

jrapdx3 13 minutes ago|||
Excellently written, informative, entertaining and a bit scary. Oceans of slime yet viruses are so small. It is mind-blowing to think about.
NDlurker 20 minutes ago|||
Haha of course it was! Thanks for the link.
TZubiri 15 minutes ago||
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

imzadi 1 hour ago||
I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses
yorwba 1 hour ago|
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.
shevy-java 53 minutes ago||
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.

gkoenig 9 hours ago||
It was fun and gave human written. Thanks for that!
elevation 1 hour ago||
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

apsurd 1 hour ago||
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.

vlyan 1 hour ago||
>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.

pfdietz 1 hour ago|
It's talking about species that currently exist. As far as we know there is only one currently existing species in the genus Homo.
shevy-java 55 minutes ago|
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.

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