What's Earth's dominant species by mass? (signoregalilei.com)
88 points by surprisetalk 9 hours ago
niccl an 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 23 minutes ago
There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...
GMoromisato 8 minutes ago
Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.
schnevets 37 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 19 minutes ago
Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.
NDlurker 6 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 5 minutes ago
That was actually covered by Randall Munro of XKCD:
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 12 minutes ago
I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild
sidewndr46 an hour ago
Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?
ortusdux 28 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 43 minutes 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 an hour ago
How does
“There are more jiffy’s lubes than pandas in the world “
sound?
komodo99 43 minutes ago
gumby an 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 10 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 an 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.
gkoenig 9 hours ago
It was fun and gave human written. Thanks for that!
elevation an 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.
apsurd an 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.
imzadi an hour ago
I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses
yorwba 43 minutes 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 32 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.
shevy-java 35 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.
a3w an hour ago
How come algae did not make the list?
nubinetwork 3 hours ago
Was surprised not to see whales on the list
dhosek 33 minutes ago
Individual whales are large, but there aren’t that many individuals.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago
I wonder if populations have fully recovered from the whale-oil era.
WillAdams 2 minutes ago
Fish species in general have been badly affected by commercial fishing:
ceejayoz 2 hours ago
They've got a long, long way to go.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Whale_Populatio...
ninalanyon 2 hours ago
LOL
andai 2 hours ago
Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:
dhosek 32 minutes ago
It’s nice to see he separated the sheep and the goats.
JoeAltmaier 8 hours ago
Anaerobic bacteria in rock underground. Because they inhabit cubic volume, not 2D surfaces, there can be no comparison.
xboxnolifes 2 hours ago
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.
QuadmasterXLII an hour ago
Pretty much all life is 1 g / ml give or take 20%
vlyan an 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 an 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.