What's Earth's dominant species by mass? (signoregalilei.com)

99 pointsby surprisetalk9 hours ago51 comments

GMoromisato 14 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 12 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)

sidewndr46 2 hours ago

Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?

anukin an hour ago

How does

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

sound?

komodo99 an hour ago

Slippery.

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

hex4def6 an 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).

ortusdux an hour 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_...

stult 35 minutes ago

I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild

jiggawatts 2 minutes ago

Land mammal biomass: https://xkcd.com/1338/

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

schnevets an hour 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 42 minutes ago

Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.

divan an hour ago

There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...

GMoromisato 31 minutes ago

Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.

santadays 19 minutes ago

And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.

gumby 2 hours 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.”

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.

boston_clone 13 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

0cf8612b2e1e 33 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.

NDlurker 29 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 28 minutes ago

That was actually covered by Randall Munro of XKCD:

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

NDlurker 23 minutes ago

Haha of course it was! Thanks for the link.

jrapdx3 16 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.

TZubiri 18 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

nkrisc 2 minutes ago

It serves an important structural purpose for them. Similar to corals.

imzadi an hour ago

I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses

yorwba an 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 an hour 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!

apsurd 2 hours 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.

elevation 2 hours 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

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.

shevy-java an hour 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

SoftTalker 2 hours ago

I wonder if populations have fully recovered from the whale-oil era.

ceejayoz 2 hours ago

They've got a long, long way to go.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Whale_Populatio...

WillAdams 25 minutes ago

Fish species in general have been badly affected by commercial fishing:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/

ninalanyon 2 hours ago

LOL

dhosek an hour ago

Individual whales are large, but there aren’t that many individuals.

andai 2 hours ago

Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:

https://xkcd.com/1338/

dhosek an hour 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%

TZubiri 14 minutes ago

The same argument could be had for fish, since they inhabit the volume of water, instead of the thin land surface of earth.

JoeAltmaier 2 minutes ago

They are in zones and layers, yes. But very very thinly spread. Most life in the ocean are withing the top 3 meters.