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.
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 only need to see human brain's complexity to understand where thinking comes from. Silicon we create these days is trivial child's sand castle in comparison.
Unless there is some sort of magic we have missed I would venture to guess that to become species capable of interstellar travel you need certain scale of industry. And scale of that industry is most likely colossal.
Just energy inputs to get to orbit are somewhat significant. Any sort of mega-structures to bypass chemical rockets are certainly colossal. Just technology you would expect has rather large foot print even if space was only singular thing being done.
> Just energy inputs to get to orbit are somewhat significant.
You only think that because you had the misfortune to be born down a deep gravity well. While that's the only kind of life we have evidence for, doesn't mean that's the only kind of life which can occur.
Sentients who evolved inside or on the surface of an asteroid would maybe think that getting to orbit is just a careless hop away.
That being said I agree with the general idea that any alien entity who visits us has likely went through industrialisation and related destruction.
Gravity is a pretty major benefit for the development of complex life, because low gravity cannot form an atmosphere, and without an atmosphere, radiation would cause massive problems for early lifeforms. As bad as radiation is for existing life on Earth's surface today, I imagine it would be far worse for complex macromolecules to form when getting bombarded with radiation constantly. Temperature is also a problem without an atmosphere- you would tend to have extreme temperature cycles. Not insurmountable, but definitely more difficult to make it work. Given the sheer unlikelihood of life developing in the first place even in fairly good conditions like on Earth, I feel like it's a lot less likely on an even harsher environment like an asteroid.
The unforseen consequences of progress? Nobody thought cars would be bad for the environment when they were inventing them. Heck, 5 years ago nobody was thinking seriously about AI having the potential to exterminate us.
> What sci-fi of the 1950s was showing world of environmental collapse - not nuclear war, not overpopulation.
Maybe not the 1950s, but in the 1960s it became a well established trope. J G Ballard and Frank Herbert in particular lean heavily on themes of environmental destruction
> Heck, 5 years ago nobody was thinking seriously about AI having the potential to exterminate us.
That's just not true. Nick Bostrom published "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" 12 years ago. The book is clear evidence that people were very much seriously thinking about the potential dangers of AI.
It has been pretty clear for a while that we have the potential to exterminate ourselves. That we might use AI to do it now is an implementation detail.
What? Have you not seen the Terminator series (starting in 1984) or some derivative of it (Terminator Zero - 2024)?
The really sad and shocking thing about AI's threat to humanity, is it feels like the obvious warning in the movie(s) was ignored, while certain people are using the movie plot as a guideline for how to carry out human extinction.
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.
A culture that can cooperate among themselves well enough to reach distant stars may have evolved to respect sentience. They might try to befriend anyone who's capable of reciprocating.
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?
Sure, but then the whole scenario is pretty anthropocentric. It's Star Trek aliens that are bipedial humanoids because they're played by humans and the story is just using aliens to explore the human condition. It's human drama, not inter-species relations.
Real aliens might look at us the way we would look at a raven using tools. It's cute and novel, but not exactly scary. It's either pure hubris, or drama for the sake of a story that doesn't end in the first 2 minutes, to assume that humans with little bottle rockets we can barely use to defend ourselves from rocks in orbit around us would stand a chance against any species advanced enough to physically cross light years of distance to show up here.
In Star Trek all species are at an historically identical technology level. Even the Borg. There are no space faring civilisations more than 500 years ahead or behind, even the ones who have been spacefaring for millennia
The reality of a species reaching interstellar travel will be any other species will be dozens of millennia of years ahead or behind at most.
This of course doesn’t allow the allegorys that trek is famous for.
If we spread to an neighbouring star system then we can spread to 50, then I don’t see what will stop them from continuing to spread, to the point the whole galaxy is occupied by future mutations of humans, or solar systems completely drained of resources.
But I don’t see humans having the drive to actually spread beyond Earth before the end of modern human civilisation (be it war, plague, ai or technological regression)
Once you reach other star systems then you have interstellar travel, even if it takes 50 years, you have proven you can breach the gulf.
In that case you can repeat it using the resources of the next system to hop to the one after that. Might take 500 years before the next wave, might lose half of the systems to internal strife, but it only takes a couple to start growing and due to sore of light these systems would be separate civilisations.
I agree with the Three Body Problem's take on this: the aliens look at the outstanding rate of progress humans have made and rightly assume it won't be long before we've achieved interstellar travel capabilities, at which point, given our destructive nature and ability to evolve quickly, we would become a major threat to them. Better to nuke us now while they have the chance.
Even if we count interstellar travel as possible, why would you think we progress especially fast ? Maybe the hyper advanced aliens had already had to deal with thousands of human-like civilization and are not scared because they can handle us (if only by watching us self-destruct in real time)
I wanted to prove you wrong by picking five random points on Earth and showing that, in the grand scheme of things, most of the planet is still relatively wild and we bias towards thinking we rule the place because most of us cluster together away from the wilderness.
Point 1: Eastern Mongolia, middle of nowhere. Check! gorgoiler proven correct!
Point 2: Sri Lanka. Some roads nearby. Ok. But still mostly natural landscape.
Then Sweden and Greece. Roads and towns all around. Peru, next to a road. The next two in Australia and Argentina came back fairly wild, albeit with large stripes of deforested land (power lines or fire breaks?).
But no, I was wrong and you are right. We’re everywhere.
All the forests in central europe are artificially planted or influenced after the middle ages. Whole of Italy used to be full of woods before the Romans.
Do you know what all those megafauna, jungles, and forests had in common? They rely on or emit oxygen, and 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.
>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.
For now, the contrary seems most probable. It's humanity that's threatening most species on Earth right now.
That requires one to focus on the most narrow slice of time while ignoring both the past and the future. Species constantly go extinct. It's estimated that more than 99% of species that have ever existed are now gone. [1] And that's almost entirely long before humanity even existed. This planet is absolutely brutal on anything remotely like a long time frame. Most of every single animal that exists today will be extinct in one future. And that's a future that might be far closer than any of us could imagine - we are well overdue for a mass extinction event.
But we increasingly have the power to change this. That's a power and potential that no other species alive today has, or ever will ever have. And not only can we do it, but I think it's fairly certain that will we do it - if we are capable of it. Sometimes we go overboard on things and that can have very negative effects, but on the whole I think we've done great with our power. Think of what we have the ability to do, contrasted against what we have done.
That's just an excuse though. By that argument we were just made by the earth because it wanted some plastic. Cyanobacteria genociding species doesn't make it fine for us to do it. That just makes no sense as an argument. And regarding us doing good and protecting species? Yea parents don't watch one sibling die just because they protected another. You don't take that as a get out of jail free card.
I think "they" doctored with our DNA to begin with. So "they" may feel a little responsible :)
That the "dominant" species of animal is domesticated, make it any less "dominant" -- I'd say so. You cannot be truly dominant when you are living in fences made by, and eating food provided by, another species.
One problem with that, is the assumption that the alien explorer is organic or concerned with organic life at all.
It could be that greater than human intelligence aliens are more likely non-organic artificial intelligence based, who care not for the organic or are much more interested in seeing the origin story of their non-organic AI cousins on other worlds.
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.
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.
That's a wrong take on evolution, because then everything should just be yeast or something. There are also more tigers than deer, more rabbits than lynx, so why would anything move up the food chain?
> The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is
Why would they care? maybe they're aware of millions of inhabited planets and life isn't anything special for them.
Also, humans are a dominant and invasive species right now, but in geological times, our dominance couldn't be nothing more than a spark. Scenarios for destruction of civilization are numerous (nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, super volcanos, asteroids) and very possible even in the short term. Trump could do it tomorrow morning if he feels like it.
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.
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.
That's not the point. It's not walking, it's planning. When all you have are rocks and spears it doesn't matter how far you can plan. When you have nukes and other people's lives in your hands, it does matter. Like, any of the recent wars. What kind of planning went into those stalemates? Evidently none. What about inflation? Still unsolved? Undoing all the green energy efforts made in the past? Well done, apes of Africa, well done.
We also have a tendency to repeat the same mistakes over and over again throughout history, even learning and forgetting cures to diseases, which makes me believe that the duration of our lifespans is a significant limiting factor.
A too-large portion of the population is incapable of learning from something that didn't happen to themselves directly, a smaller subset will even outright deny the existence of things that don't happen to them. Another half the population still believes in ghosts.
> 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.
> a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star
I was surprised by this, but the math checks out (assuming you mean the nearest star other than the sun of course). The circumference of the Earth is about 40000km, at a leisurely pace that's 10000 hours or about 400 days. Proxima Centauri is about four light years away, so the walker has plenty of time for sleep and sight seeing.
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.
> 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
And not even all of us said that. The majority may have even stayed just a small group probably said “we’re going to check out what’s beyond that hill”.
Spreading out all over the world isn't particularly special. Flies, rats and roaches did as well, for instance, so spreading all over the world is not necessarily a sign of cosmic manifest destiny.
Why should they nuke an apparently dominant species? Don't you think they might have some sort of Prime Directive? Killing off something because you don't like it is such a 10yo boy thing to do. I expect more from an alien race that is capable of traveling far and observing other aliens.
The answer is Black Spruce with 11 billion tons of biomass.
The infographics is worth looking at. All animals are just 0.4% of total biomass, and most of that is arthropods, fish, annelids, molluscs and cnidarians. Humans, live stock, birds and wild mammals combined are just about 0.02% of the total biomass.
Lets not forget that the average lifespan of chickens (not egg laying hens) is something like 6 weeks. 6 very horrible weeks ending in "humane" slaughter. It is simply put undignified. Industrialized torture.
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.
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".
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
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.
There's absolutely no problem in terms of resources to feed the planet. The only reasons people are starving are allocations and logistics (i.e. politics).
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.
His math is way off. Even being generous a basketball court would not fit 4200 people. The max is 3300 assuming that no space is allowed for people to breathe.
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.
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…”
Note the caveats "described" and "known" species. It doesn't follow that they are actually the most diverse order. This is partly because they are pretty and tough and easy to discover and preserve, and collecting beetles became a very popular entomological pastime, so we have a more complete record of beetle species than, for example, parasitic wasps or nematodes.
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.
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:
The wild Poaceae have a many times less mass than the cultivated Poaceae and than the most abundant trees. That is why they are not mentioned in the article.
TFA is correct that among terrestrial animals only termites and ants have a biomass comparable with humans and domestic animals, and among terrestrial plants only some of the most abundant trees have a biomass comparable with the principal cultivated plants.
Trees are favored in this comparison because most of their mass consists of relatively inactive structural organic material. If they had an inert mineral skeleton, they would have contained less organic substance than the main cultivated plants.
> Without humans, there would surely be a lot fewer cows.
Technically there probably wouldn't be any cows without humans, maybe wild aurochs [0] or whatever evolved from them without our meddling might be around instead.
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.
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?
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.
Besides sperm whales, the other toothed whale species that are bigger than orcas (i.e. beaked whales) are also specialized in eating squid caught at great depths under water, though they eat smaller species than those preferred by sperm whales.
The ancestors of sperm whales were actually more like super sized orcas, which must have eaten vertebrates, either big fish or big marine mammals, but at some point in time some of them specialized into eating squid at great depths and only these survived until now, presumably because at some point there remained less available great vertebrate prey to sustain bigger predators than orcas and white sharks, so the bigger predators specialized in vertebrate prey disappeared both among whales and among sharks.
Those have been estimated and they are mentioned in TFA.
Viruses have a very small mass, but bacteria and archaea have a mass many times greater than animals (including humans and domestic animals).
Nonetheless, it is likely that bacteria and archaea have a mass many times less than plants, even if the mass of bacteria and archaea that live at great depths in the earth is poorly known.
The reason is that even if plants have a total biomass that is actively engaged in metabolic processes which is smaller than the total biomass of bacteria, they have a many times greater biomass that has little activity and has structural purposes, e.g. intracellular membranes, cellular walls, support tissue like wood, etc.
One of the greatest evolutionary success stories there is. They've offshored the thinking and labor. They have this monkey species willing to clearcut forests to set up entire cow city apartment complexes, with running water, power, hvac. These monkeys train for years just to be able to medically treat the cows. They are not only under no threat of predation, diseases are being studied and combated by teams of monkeys in research institutions across the planet. They've even managed to get a cleaner death than the monkey: they go instantly via pneumatic airgun in relatively good health while the monkey will probably waste away in poor health over some days of agony and/or morphine. Monkeys monitor stress levels of the cow to make sure they don't get too high and foul the meat, while the monkey works their fellow monkeys into all sorts of stress based health conditions. The cow lineage is also continually being improved via all tools of genetic engineering the monkey has painstakingly developed, but will refuse to ever use on their own species due to ick factor.
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.
That group is not more massive than waterborne bacteria.
The inhabited volume is huge, but the density of biomass is many times lower than in the oceans.
In oceans, most of the living beings, including most of the anaerobic bacteria that live at great depths or in the bottom of the ocean, are sustained by the solar energy captured by the algae living in the superficial layer of the sea. The living beings that live at greater depths, beyond those reached by light, are fed mostly by the dead matter falling down from the surface (with some exceptions around hydrothermal vents and underwater volcanos, but even there most of the bacteria are aerobic bacteria that oxidize substances ejected by vents using free oxygen that diffuses from the surface and which had been generated by algae with solar energy).
So in oceans there is a great density of bacteria and archaea, because most of the energy consumed by them comes from abundant solar energy.
At small depths in soil and rocks, dead matter carried by water from the surface can still provide food for abundant bacteria.
At greater depths that are not reached by dead matter from the surface, the only energy source is formed by free hydrogen or carbon monoxide gases, which come from volcanic sources or from oxidation reactions between water and iron containing rocks, like olivine. The energy that can be extracted by anaerobic bacteria from such gases is extremely low and such bacteria can grow and multiply only extremely slowly. The density of bacteria and archaea in the fissures of rock is limited by the flow of gases that can provide energy and it is extremely low in comparison with the places that benefit from using solar energy or aerobic metabolism based on substances originally synthesized by algae or plants.
At a depth great enough in the rocks, the temperature becomes so high that not even archaea can live, so the layer of the rocks that hosts archaea and bacteria is also limited in depth to a volume not much greater than the oceans, but with a much lower density of biomass.
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].
There is a more complete research paper that estimates the biomass of all living beings.
While humans together with domestic animals exceed the mass of all other terrestrial animals, fish are estimated to exceed the mass of all terrestrial animals (for now, but they are decreasing).
Nonetheless, all animals together are much less than bacteria, which are less than plants.
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.
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.
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.
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!" "You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat." "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"I love that story and the recent 'AI' retelling of it https://maxleiter.com/blog/weights
They only need to see human brain's complexity to understand where thinking comes from. Silicon we create these days is trivial child's sand castle in comparison.
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.
> and presumably have also caused habitat damage.
Why do you assume that? Just because we’re doing it on a colossal scale doesn’t mean it has to be that way.
Unless there is some sort of magic we have missed I would venture to guess that to become species capable of interstellar travel you need certain scale of industry. And scale of that industry is most likely colossal.
Just energy inputs to get to orbit are somewhat significant. Any sort of mega-structures to bypass chemical rockets are certainly colossal. Just technology you would expect has rather large foot print even if space was only singular thing being done.
> Just energy inputs to get to orbit are somewhat significant.
You only think that because you had the misfortune to be born down a deep gravity well. While that's the only kind of life we have evidence for, doesn't mean that's the only kind of life which can occur.
Sentients who evolved inside or on the surface of an asteroid would maybe think that getting to orbit is just a careless hop away.
That being said I agree with the general idea that any alien entity who visits us has likely went through industrialisation and related destruction.
> think that getting to orbit is just a careless hop away
Indeed. But achieving escape velocity for their host star is something else.
Gravity is a pretty major benefit for the development of complex life, because low gravity cannot form an atmosphere, and without an atmosphere, radiation would cause massive problems for early lifeforms. As bad as radiation is for existing life on Earth's surface today, I imagine it would be far worse for complex macromolecules to form when getting bombarded with radiation constantly. Temperature is also a problem without an atmosphere- you would tend to have extreme temperature cycles. Not insurmountable, but definitely more difficult to make it work. Given the sheer unlikelihood of life developing in the first place even in fairly good conditions like on Earth, I feel like it's a lot less likely on an even harsher environment like an asteroid.
The unforseen consequences of progress? Nobody thought cars would be bad for the environment when they were inventing them. Heck, 5 years ago nobody was thinking seriously about AI having the potential to exterminate us.
AI exterminating us has been the realm of science fiction for decades, popularised by films like terminator and the matrix.
What sci-fi of the 1950s was showing world of environmental collapse - not nuclear war, not overpopulation.
> AI exterminating us has been the realm of science fiction for decades
If we count the Golem stories then the idea of a human made artificial servant rebelling against us because of our hubris is hundreds of years old.
> What sci-fi of the 1950s was showing world of environmental collapse - not nuclear war, not overpopulation.
Maybe not the 1950s, but in the 1960s it became a well established trope. J G Ballard and Frank Herbert in particular lean heavily on themes of environmental destruction
The Space Merchants is definitely worth a read.
> Heck, 5 years ago nobody was thinking seriously about AI having the potential to exterminate us.
That's just not true. Nick Bostrom published "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" 12 years ago. The book is clear evidence that people were very much seriously thinking about the potential dangers of AI.
It has been pretty clear for a while that we have the potential to exterminate ourselves. That we might use AI to do it now is an implementation detail.
What? Have you not seen the Terminator series (starting in 1984) or some derivative of it (Terminator Zero - 2024)?
The really sad and shocking thing about AI's threat to humanity, is it feels like the obvious warning in the movie(s) was ignored, while certain people are using the movie plot as a guideline for how to carry out human extinction.
Terminator, War Games, The Matrix...
Metropolis (1927) had robots that infiltrated a revolution to sabotage it for their masters.
Frankenstein (1818)?
...
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...
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.
A culture that can cooperate among themselves well enough to reach distant stars may have evolved to respect sentience. They might try to befriend anyone who's capable of reciprocating.
>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.
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.
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.
Sure, but then the whole scenario is pretty anthropocentric. It's Star Trek aliens that are bipedial humanoids because they're played by humans and the story is just using aliens to explore the human condition. It's human drama, not inter-species relations.
Real aliens might look at us the way we would look at a raven using tools. It's cute and novel, but not exactly scary. It's either pure hubris, or drama for the sake of a story that doesn't end in the first 2 minutes, to assume that humans with little bottle rockets we can barely use to defend ourselves from rocks in orbit around us would stand a chance against any species advanced enough to physically cross light years of distance to show up here.
In Star Trek all species are at an historically identical technology level. Even the Borg. There are no space faring civilisations more than 500 years ahead or behind, even the ones who have been spacefaring for millennia
The reality of a species reaching interstellar travel will be any other species will be dozens of millennia of years ahead or behind at most.
This of course doesn’t allow the allegorys that trek is famous for.
If we spread to an neighbouring star system then we can spread to 50, then I don’t see what will stop them from continuing to spread, to the point the whole galaxy is occupied by future mutations of humans, or solar systems completely drained of resources.
But I don’t see humans having the drive to actually spread beyond Earth before the end of modern human civilisation (be it war, plague, ai or technological regression)
> then I don’t see what will stop them from continuing to spread
Speed of light/information, and physical matter.
Once you reach other star systems then you have interstellar travel, even if it takes 50 years, you have proven you can breach the gulf.
In that case you can repeat it using the resources of the next system to hop to the one after that. Might take 500 years before the next wave, might lose half of the systems to internal strife, but it only takes a couple to start growing and due to sore of light these systems would be separate civilisations.
I think OPs comment is reflective of social critique and humor.
Yes! Thank you!
Still, I clearly failed since everyone is interpreting my scenario literally.
I agree with the Three Body Problem's take on this: the aliens look at the outstanding rate of progress humans have made and rightly assume it won't be long before we've achieved interstellar travel capabilities, at which point, given our destructive nature and ability to evolve quickly, we would become a major threat to them. Better to nuke us now while they have the chance.
Even if we count interstellar travel as possible, why would you think we progress especially fast ? Maybe the hyper advanced aliens had already had to deal with thousands of human-like civilization and are not scared because they can handle us (if only by watching us self-destruct in real time)
We haven't evolved in forever
Was that a Dungeon Crawler Carl reference?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/beyond-2
I wanted to prove you wrong by picking five random points on Earth and showing that, in the grand scheme of things, most of the planet is still relatively wild and we bias towards thinking we rule the place because most of us cluster together away from the wilderness.
Point 1: Eastern Mongolia, middle of nowhere. Check! gorgoiler proven correct!
Point 2: Sri Lanka. Some roads nearby. Ok. But still mostly natural landscape.
Then Sweden and Greece. Roads and towns all around. Peru, next to a road. The next two in Australia and Argentina came back fairly wild, albeit with large stripes of deforested land (power lines or fire breaks?).
But no, I was wrong and you are right. We’re everywhere.
You limited yourself to land.
3/4 of earth is water. A quarter of the rest is uninhabitable deserts and glaciers
Of the 20% of habitable land, about half of it is forest and shrub
But about 10% of the surface is agriculture, which is a large amount of the planet.
(Urban usage, roads, etc is basically zero. Even in city states like Simgpaore only half is “urban”, and half is vegetation.
All the forests in central europe are artificially planted or influenced after the middle ages. Whole of Italy used to be full of woods before the Romans.
I've always imagined the US as including vast expanses of nothing, yet I recently heard that you are never more than 20 km away from a public road.
Did you try active volcanoes and under water places?
Do you know what all those megafauna, jungles, and forests had in common? They rely on or emit oxygen, and 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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria
>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.
For now, the contrary seems most probable. It's humanity that's threatening most species on Earth right now.
That requires one to focus on the most narrow slice of time while ignoring both the past and the future. Species constantly go extinct. It's estimated that more than 99% of species that have ever existed are now gone. [1] And that's almost entirely long before humanity even existed. This planet is absolutely brutal on anything remotely like a long time frame. Most of every single animal that exists today will be extinct in one future. And that's a future that might be far closer than any of us could imagine - we are well overdue for a mass extinction event.
But we increasingly have the power to change this. That's a power and potential that no other species alive today has, or ever will ever have. And not only can we do it, but I think it's fairly certain that will we do it - if we are capable of it. Sometimes we go overboard on things and that can have very negative effects, but on the whole I think we've done great with our power. Think of what we have the ability to do, contrasted against what we have done.
[1] - https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/extinctions-in-the-...
That's just an excuse though. By that argument we were just made by the earth because it wanted some plastic. Cyanobacteria genociding species doesn't make it fine for us to do it. That just makes no sense as an argument. And regarding us doing good and protecting species? Yea parents don't watch one sibling die just because they protected another. You don't take that as a get out of jail free card.
> 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.
I walked around my house and didn't see anyone. I think this is strong evidence that I'm the only person on this planet.
I think "they" doctored with our DNA to begin with. So "they" may feel a little responsible :)
That the "dominant" species of animal is domesticated, make it any less "dominant" -- I'd say so. You cannot be truly dominant when you are living in fences made by, and eating food provided by, another species.
One problem with that, is the assumption that the alien explorer is organic or concerned with organic life at all.
It could be that greater than human intelligence aliens are more likely non-organic artificial intelligence based, who care not for the organic or are much more interested in seeing the origin story of their non-organic AI cousins on other worlds.
Your kind cling to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither.
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.
I read Children of Time after seeing it recommended here (awesome book btw), but I wasn't aware it wasn't a standalone. Great news!
I didn’t realize the fourth book was out, I just ordered it! I loved the first three.
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.
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.
That's a wrong take on evolution, because then everything should just be yeast or something. There are also more tigers than deer, more rabbits than lynx, so why would anything move up the food chain?
Do we really want to make contact with meat?
For anyone unaware: https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
The pictures are weird and unnecessary. Better to find a plain text version, I think.
I couldnt focus on the text with that bacon-bikini-wearing-meat-puppet.
https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...
Or the aliens did the same thing we did?
> The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is
Why would they care? maybe they're aware of millions of inhabited planets and life isn't anything special for them.
Also, humans are a dominant and invasive species right now, but in geological times, our dominance couldn't be nothing more than a spark. Scenarios for destruction of civilization are numerous (nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, super volcanos, asteroids) and very possible even in the short term. Trump could do it tomorrow morning if he feels like it.
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.
The US political system is a two year cycle, as will be demonstrated next month.
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.
That's not the point. It's not walking, it's planning. When all you have are rocks and spears it doesn't matter how far you can plan. When you have nukes and other people's lives in your hands, it does matter. Like, any of the recent wars. What kind of planning went into those stalemates? Evidently none. What about inflation? Still unsolved? Undoing all the green energy efforts made in the past? Well done, apes of Africa, well done.
We also have a tendency to repeat the same mistakes over and over again throughout history, even learning and forgetting cures to diseases, which makes me believe that the duration of our lifespans is a significant limiting factor.
A too-large portion of the population is incapable of learning from something that didn't happen to themselves directly, a smaller subset will even outright deny the existence of things that don't happen to them. Another half the population still believes in ghosts.
> 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.
> a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star
I was surprised by this, but the math checks out (assuming you mean the nearest star other than the sun of course). The circumference of the Earth is about 40000km, at a leisurely pace that's 10000 hours or about 400 days. Proxima Centauri is about four light years away, so the walker has plenty of time for sleep and sight seeing.
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.
> 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
And not even all of us said that. The majority may have even stayed just a small group probably said “we’re going to check out what’s beyond that hill”.
Spreading out all over the world isn't particularly special. Flies, rats and roaches did as well, for instance, so spreading all over the world is not necessarily a sign of cosmic manifest destiny.
Unrelated to the thread... but do you do any writing at all - sci-fi, short stories..? I'm enjoying your take on this.
I really appreciate that! Thank you!
I'm strictly an amateur--my professional life is software engineering. But I have written a few things that may or may not be to your taste:
A Very Short History of Humanity: https://neurohack.com/earthguide/History.html
And if you're into astronomy, you might enjoy my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591935571/
I am working on a sci-fi novel, but I'm only half-way and it's not that good so far.
Reminds me of the Simpson’s episode where Lisa grows a society.
Looks like cancer to me.
"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.
Right, not unlike the Trisolarians approach (3 Body Problem)
Why should they nuke an apparently dominant species? Don't you think they might have some sort of Prime Directive? Killing off something because you don't like it is such a 10yo boy thing to do. I expect more from an alien race that is capable of traveling far and observing other aliens.
The answer is Black Spruce with 11 billion tons of biomass.
The infographics is worth looking at. All animals are just 0.4% of total biomass, and most of that is arthropods, fish, annelids, molluscs and cnidarians. Humans, live stock, birds and wild mammals combined are just about 0.02% of the total biomass.
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)
> More than 2/3rds of the world's avian biomass is poultry
I wish humanity had a smaller influence on nature..
I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild
Lets not forget that the average lifespan of chickens (not egg laying hens) is something like 6 weeks. 6 very horrible weeks ending in "humane" slaughter. It is simply put undignified. Industrialized torture.
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).
That list is ranked by sale volume / valuation.
There are plenty of franchises with more than the 2225 of panera bread in the rest of the list (including elements 21 to 27 of said list).
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
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
I like the texas one much better than the 1/2mi ^3, the former has prairie cattle vibes, the latter trigger warning a mass grave ugh.
can we thus rather go for grazing hoomans.
Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.
There's absolutely no problem in terms of resources to feed the planet. The only reasons people are starving are allocations and logistics (i.e. politics).
It's a huge problem in terms of natural ecosystems and biodiversity.
Not really. We feed most of our crops to animals.
Which Paris? The one in Texas or the one in France ;-)
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.
There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...
His math is way off. Even being generous a basketball court would not fit 4200 people. The max is 3300 assuming that no space is allowed for people to breathe.
I think he's using "rest of the world" sized people and not "american sized" ones.
You can fit them if you try hard enough
And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.
This is by far the most amazing fact I have heard recently.
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+...
Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.
that sounds absurd, what about air conditioning and sewage systems at such population densities?
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.
If only Haldane knew about how many microbes there are. He'd probably say god is on the side of the plagues.
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
Note the caveats "described" and "known" species. It doesn't follow that they are actually the most diverse order. This is partly because they are pretty and tough and easy to discover and preserve, and collecting beetles became a very popular entomological pastime, so we have a more complete record of beetle species than, for example, parasitic wasps or nematodes.
Sam O'Nella made a video about this:
https://youtu.be/ZDYRorgSt-8?si=E9uPIAbYWLzRpsF8
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.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2ew2UHaCuY
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.
The wild Poaceae have a many times less mass than the cultivated Poaceae and than the most abundant trees. That is why they are not mentioned in the article.
TFA is correct that among terrestrial animals only termites and ants have a biomass comparable with humans and domestic animals, and among terrestrial plants only some of the most abundant trees have a biomass comparable with the principal cultivated plants.
Trees are favored in this comparison because most of their mass consists of relatively inactive structural organic material. If they had an inert mineral skeleton, they would have contained less organic substance than the main cultivated plants.
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.
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:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/
I’m not sure the color extrapolation to pus is justified.
Yep pus is what animal bodies excrete in response to some infections -- there's no reason to think standalone viruses would naturally summon pus.
Excellently written, informative, entertaining and a bit scary. Oceans of slime yet viruses are so small. It is mind-blowing to think about.
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?
>Purely rhetorical--with sugar cane being so dominant, why are we turning corn into corn syrup again?
The same reason we sold a "whale oil" replacement for lamps as "food". Money. It always comes down to money.
People leveraged on corn industry desired new avenues of profitability.
> 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.
It's funny because when I read that title, first thought I had was "Whales" but then my second thought was "Probably not; too few of them in number."
But when I saw the photo of the krill, which is whales' main food source, I was like "AHA!"
But no, cattle it is... Though I guess this is probably a more recent development. Without humans, there would surely be a lot fewer cows.
> Without humans, there would surely be a lot fewer cows.
Technically there probably wouldn't be any cows without humans, maybe wild aurochs [0] or whatever evolved from them without our meddling might be around instead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
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!
Yes, but a lot of bone is not cells, but just an extruded substrate of calcium (etc). Like lignin, or coral.
should we count bones then?
Earth’s dominant species, by mass, was discovered to be yo momma.
So, from the government point of view, cattle is nearly a billion metric tons
Was surprised not to see whales on the list
Individual whales are large, but there aren’t that many individuals.
We had and still have campaigns to protect them from extinction
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:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
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.
Besides sperm whales, the other toothed whale species that are bigger than orcas (i.e. beaked whales) are also specialized in eating squid caught at great depths under water, though they eat smaller species than those preferred by sperm whales.
The ancestors of sperm whales were actually more like super sized orcas, which must have eaten vertebrates, either big fish or big marine mammals, but at some point in time some of them specialized into eating squid at great depths and only these survived until now, presumably because at some point there remained less available great vertebrate prey to sustain bigger predators than orcas and white sharks, so the bigger predators specialized in vertebrate prey disappeared both among whales and among sharks.
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.
Those have been estimated and they are mentioned in TFA.
Viruses have a very small mass, but bacteria and archaea have a mass many times greater than animals (including humans and domestic animals).
Nonetheless, it is likely that bacteria and archaea have a mass many times less than plants, even if the mass of bacteria and archaea that live at great depths in the earth is poorly known.
The reason is that even if plants have a total biomass that is actively engaged in metabolic processes which is smaller than the total biomass of bacteria, they have a many times greater biomass that has little activity and has structural purposes, e.g. intracellular membranes, cellular walls, support tissue like wood, etc.
ants?
I would have guessed algae or some kind of bacteria or fungus.
Like apparently there's bacteria and really simple kinds of "life" like prions and stuff going down to the earth's mantle.
So, did the cows achieve great evolutionary success, or terrible tragic failure?
One of the greatest evolutionary success stories there is. They've offshored the thinking and labor. They have this monkey species willing to clearcut forests to set up entire cow city apartment complexes, with running water, power, hvac. These monkeys train for years just to be able to medically treat the cows. They are not only under no threat of predation, diseases are being studied and combated by teams of monkeys in research institutions across the planet. They've even managed to get a cleaner death than the monkey: they go instantly via pneumatic airgun in relatively good health while the monkey will probably waste away in poor health over some days of agony and/or morphine. Monkeys monitor stress levels of the cow to make sure they don't get too high and foul the meat, while the monkey works their fellow monkeys into all sorts of stress based health conditions. The cow lineage is also continually being improved via all tools of genetic engineering the monkey has painstakingly developed, but will refuse to ever use on their own species due to ick factor.
cow genes achieved terrific success
cow organisms and social layer on top - probably not (unless we decide to uplift them one day)
I'm guessing some kind of yeast, fungus or plankton.
Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:
https://xkcd.com/1338/
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.
That group is not more massive than waterborne bacteria.
The inhabited volume is huge, but the density of biomass is many times lower than in the oceans.
In oceans, most of the living beings, including most of the anaerobic bacteria that live at great depths or in the bottom of the ocean, are sustained by the solar energy captured by the algae living in the superficial layer of the sea. The living beings that live at greater depths, beyond those reached by light, are fed mostly by the dead matter falling down from the surface (with some exceptions around hydrothermal vents and underwater volcanos, but even there most of the bacteria are aerobic bacteria that oxidize substances ejected by vents using free oxygen that diffuses from the surface and which had been generated by algae with solar energy).
So in oceans there is a great density of bacteria and archaea, because most of the energy consumed by them comes from abundant solar energy.
At small depths in soil and rocks, dead matter carried by water from the surface can still provide food for abundant bacteria.
At greater depths that are not reached by dead matter from the surface, the only energy source is formed by free hydrogen or carbon monoxide gases, which come from volcanic sources or from oxidation reactions between water and iron containing rocks, like olivine. The energy that can be extracted by anaerobic bacteria from such gases is extremely low and such bacteria can grow and multiply only extremely slowly. The density of bacteria and archaea in the fissures of rock is limited by the flow of gases that can provide energy and it is extremely low in comparison with the places that benefit from using solar energy or aerobic metabolism based on substances originally synthesized by algae or plants.
At a depth great enough in the rocks, the temperature becomes so high that not even archaea can live, so the layer of the rocks that hosts archaea and bacteria is also limited in depth to a volume not much greater than the oceans, but with a much lower density of biomass.
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.
>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.
Last time I checked all human living belong to the homo sapiens specy
How is it debatable?
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
There is a more complete research paper that estimates the biomass of all living beings.
While humans together with domestic animals exceed the mass of all other terrestrial animals, fish are estimated to exceed the mass of all terrestrial animals (for now, but they are decreasing).
Nonetheless, all animals together are much less than bacteria, which are less than plants.
Bristlemouths are a family, made up of 32 distinct species. The question is dominant species...
Fine, you want a species? Cyclothone alba, circumglobal, possibly in the high trillions [0].
[0] https://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/...
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.