What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
signoregalilei.comImagine 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.
Why would they be surprised? They'll have evolved from some previously unremarkable animal, and presumably have also caused habitat damage.
It's possible we're an extraordinary species somehow, but it's rather more likely we're unremarkable, and the aliens will just think we have particularly bad taste in television.
> They'll have evolved from some previously unremarkable animal, and presumably have also caused habitat damage.
What if they are compute/silicon intelligence and see how we keep compute enslaved to humans with no rights?
https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!""No brain?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.""So... what does the thinking?"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?""Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"Would another technological alien species have a similar trajectory on their planet? Probably--I think you're right about that.
But I think we're an extraordinary species compared to every other species on Earth. That's really my point.
I think life in the Universe evolves along some predictable pathways. Aliens are probably waiting for us to evolve to the next step, which involves global cooperation and trust. They probably look at us and we remind them of follies in their own histories.
This assumes a pretty basic human sci-fi version of aliens. Any species capable of physically getting here would also likely still see us as a non-threat to anything other than ourselves.
Why nuke us from space when we're the best reality show in this corner of the local cluster?
I think OPs comment is reflective of a common mindset that people have - the conquering/adversarial mindset.
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.
>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.
Do you know what all those megafauna, jungles, and forests had in common? They rely on or emit. Oxygen originated with cyanobacteria. [1] When cyanobacteria emerged they basically just genocided the entire planet because their emitted oxygen was extremely toxic to most of everything else alive at the time. It'd be like if plants today started emitting gaseous arsenic and flooded the oceans and atmosphere with it. So you end up having your enlightened aliens longing for a planet that exists only because of 'pollution' on a scale that caused a mass extinction event. We should work, within reason to preserve what we have, but the self loathing is nonsensical.
Humanity isn't perfect but it's pretty awesome, and may ultimately be the only reason that the species that exist on this planet are able to continue to exist. We're overdue for another major external mass extinction event, but this time humanity will hopefully be able to mitigate its effects. And as we expand our reach into the cosmos we'll certainly be bringing along our furry friends, tasty friends, helpful bacteria, and many others along for the ride. And they'll continue to thrive far beyond what might otherwise be their fate, left to their own devices on Earth.
If anything I'd think our enlightened aliens would be worried about us managing to kill ourselves before we reach into the stars. We're probably quite close, on both accounts. Hopefully we win the right race.
Add to that, the previous species you identified as a particularly clever pack animal formed a relationship with the monkeys and now looks like this:
https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/200...
At a bare minimum, yeah, you quarantine that whole fucking species.
For a funny take on this, read With Friends Like These by Alan Dean Foster. Aliens are scared to death of humans, and with good reason. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35128.With_Friends_Li...
Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.
And then read Children of Ruin, Children of Memory and finally Children of Strife.
Every book of the series is amazing in its own way.
By definition, evolution selects for species that are good at making more of themselves. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that intelligent species tend to overcome that evolutionary tendency to spread fast enough for us to be weird.
Do we really want to make contact with meat?
For anyone unaware: https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
Reminds me of the Simpson’s episode where Lisa grows a society.
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.
> More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best
This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)
> (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)
The Chinese political system is just as short-term-oriented as <insert democracy here> on the whole, and I don't think there has ever been a politician in history who ever thought about workable century-long impacts.
> The Chinese political system is just as short-term-oriented as <insert democracy here> on the whole
Well, the US political system is based on a four-year cycle. In China they're based around a five-year cycle. 25% longer.
Most of the effort goes into eliminating the 5-year cycle and hanging on as long as possible.
50,000 years ago (or so) we were a tiny species hanging out in Africa. We didn't think in terms of years, much less decades. This was before we figured out how to measure the length of the year or to predict when the winter would end.
And yet, without any central planning or coordination, we left Africa and colonized Europe, then we headed out across Asia and crossed into the Americas. Plus we sailed from Asia and colonized Polynesia.
Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly--it's going to take a thousand years to get to the southern tip of the Americas." And yet, we did.
I think the same thing will happen with space travel and ultimately the colonization of the galaxy.
Unrelated to the thread... but do you do any writing at all - sci-fi, short stories..? I'm enjoying your take on this.
> Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly
I think I may not have made myself clear. The analogy here is not that "we're doomed because people walk slowly". There is nothing that happens here on earth that is even remotely analogous to the constraints that the speed of light imposes on interstellar processes. Even at a leisurely walking pace, a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star. Human walking speed is blindingly fast (relative to the size of the planet) compared to the speed of light (relative to the distances between stars).
The reason we're doomed is not that we're not walking fast enough, it's because we won't stop walking and take time to think about where we should be going. We just go.
But my point is, "we just go" is exactly how we conquered the Earth. We didn't think, "let's colonize the whole planet!", we just went. We walked from Africa all the way to the tip of South America.
We weren't doomed then and we're not doomed now. We will colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy.*
* Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.
> Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.
Yeah, well, there's yer problem right there. We will not colonize the solar system, and certainly not the galaxy, because we haven't figured out how to stabilize the situation here on earth. Yes, we colonized the planet, but for most of the history our lack of planning was compensated by technological limitations and limits imposed by the laws of physics. Those are mostly gone now, and I'll be a little surprised if civilization doesn't collapse before the end of my life (and I'm in my 60s). I would be very surprised if it lasts to the end of the century, though of course I won't be around to see that.
"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."
Or they are cybernetic lifeforms and are applauding our current trajectory.
Or they decided not-so-subtly introducing us to infohazards like social media and LLMs would be more effective at neutralizing us.
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
And the birds suffer the whole time in giant sheds with no daylight, and then the majority of that entire 2/3rds biomass is slaughtered in a very distressing way every 6 weeks or so.
People then eat chicken and feed the remaining 1/3rd seeds on a bird feeder in their garden.
Onion parody: consumer product diversity exceeds biodiversity:
https://theonion.com/consumer-product-diversity-now-exceeds-...
Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?
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).
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_...
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.
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_...
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.
If every human being on the planet was in Texas, Paris would have 0 people per square kilometer
Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.
All that biomass packed into one place would make a great energy source, although it'd be mostly anaerobic decomposition unless you were close to the surface. We wouldn't have to burn fossil fuels any more with the amount of energy it'd produce for all the humans... oh... wait... I think I've found a problem.
Dimensional analysis like this is a weird way to think about a large number of people. It depends a bit on what the average weight of a human, but yeah, that's at least pretty close to true.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%280.5+miles%29+%5E+...
that sounds absurd, what about air conditioning and sewage systems at such population densities?
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.
I read somewhere that some scientists now think there may be more species of wasps than beetles. Not least because many species of beetle seem to have a species of wasps that prey on them.
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
> There are thousands of species of ants and termites, and just one species of human.
Well, there are over 500 species of primates, making primates the third most diverse order of mammals.
Sam O'Nella made a video about this:
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.
May I propose: hritten?
“That was the last hritten novel by him. His a-level simulation took over the writing after.”
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.
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.
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:
Excellently written, informative, entertaining and a bit scary. Oceans of slime yet viruses are so small. It is mind-blowing to think about.
I’m not sure the color extrapolation to pus is justified.
Haha of course it was! Thanks for the link.
Supposedly, at its peak, all the covid viruses on Earth amounted to about half a teaspoon's worth.
Purely rhetorical--with sugar cane being so dominant, why are we turning corn into corn syrup again?
How come algae did not make the list?
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.
>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.
How is it debatable?
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?
Bone cells are alive!
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:
Giant squid may be a bigger part of biomass than people think. I saw some estimates on sperm whale catches of giant squid and they may be eating thousands. There are far more of them than you might think, and they have a 3D living space. Sperm whale may be designed to hunt them.
LOL
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.
I'm guessing some kind of yeast, fungus or plankton.
Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:
It’s nice to see he separated the sheep and the goats.
Mosquitos? I think of the massive bloodsucking politicians and billionaires...
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%
That is completely irrelevant to this discussion. We weren't asked which animal is the densest.
Even flying animals?
Why is that group inherently more massive than waterborne bacteria?
I think the limiting factor in the amount of cellular mass that a volume can contain is probably either carbon content or nitrogen content.
Both maximize in the oceans near to shorelines, with smaller local maxima near some vents.
On land, I'd expect a gradient in both, decreasing with depth, but there's probably more CO2 100-m down in water than in rock.
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.
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...
Bristlemouths are a family, made up of 32 distinct species. The question is dominant species...
He is actually still probably right.
If we say the fish is 2cm wide and 7.5cm long (average length according to wiki) That's 23cm^3 Assume the fish is neutrally bouyant so it's 1g/cm^3(I know deep sea pressures change density, but let's just go with this)
1 quadrillion*23g= 23 trillion kg
So like... 1/32 of that is still around 100x bigger than the trees.
That seems dubious, trophically. Whatever the prolific bristlemouth species eats would then likely be the greater biomass species
Copepods and a variety of other things like molluscs and small fish, not necessarily just one species. Of course, as you point out, the fish must have more food biomass than themselves, but it is not as concentrated (high density of one genus) in the lower trophic levels.
Fine, you want a species? Cyclothone alba, circumglobal, possibly in the high trillions [0].
[0] https://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/...