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 30 seconds ago [-]
Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.
niccl 57 minutes 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
Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.
schnevets 48 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 30 minutes ago [-]
Take food production into account and the planet looks a little more crowded.
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 23 minutes ago [-]
I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild
sidewndr46 1 hours ago [-]
Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?
ortusdux 39 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".
Excellently written, informative, entertaining and a bit scary. Oceans of slime yet viruses are so small. It is mind-blowing to think about.
NDlurker 11 minutes ago [-]
Haha of course it was! Thanks for the link.
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.”
0cf8612b2e1e 21 minutes ago [-]
There is a Discworld joke about this. After being introduced to the God of evolution, God shows off the magnum opus he has been developing, the cockroach.
adammarples 1 hours 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 40 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
TZubiri 6 minutes ago [-]
Should the wood of trees be counted? Its effectively dead cells of the plant, it'd be like counting the skin that we shed and sweep off the floor every weekend.
The trees are cheating
imzadi 1 hours ago [-]
I feel like it might be bamboo, but they sort of skipped over grasses
yorwba 54 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 43 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:
"The three major families of grasslike plants are true grasses (Poaceae), sedges (Cyperaceae), and rushes (Juncaceae)."
So he at best only did the family Poacaea but where are the
wild poaceae in his calculations?
Tons of things are missing in that article.
gkoenig 9 hours ago [-]
It was fun and gave human written. Thanks for that!
elevation 1 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.
It’s nice to see he separated the sheep and the goats.
liquid-monthly 5 hours ago [-]
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lukeify 2 hours ago [-]
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imzadi 1 hours ago [-]
Plastic is a species?
dhosek 42 minutes ago [-]
Ever hear of the Nestene consciousness and the autons?
JoeAltmaier 8 hours ago [-]
Anaerobic bacteria in rock underground. Because they inhabit cubic volume, not 2D surfaces, there can be no comparison.
TZubiri 2 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.
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 1 hours ago [-]
Pretty much all life is 1 g / ml give or take 20%
Rendered at 21:49:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
- More than 2/3rds of the world's avian biomass is poultry
- There are more Panda Expresses than pandas (edit - in the wild)
It looks like 39 restaurant chains have more than 2550 locations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_fast_food_...
https://www.franchisetimes.com/top-400-2026/
Pandas could fit in the top 20, beating out Panera bread (2,225).
“There are more jiffy’s lubes than pandas in the world “
sound?
Now I want to give a panda a slip-n-slide and film it.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/
The trees are cheating
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.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2ew2UHaCuY
on the other hand i don’t think I’m physically capable of reading the AI landing pages of every new product on HN.
that's rather debatable. unless, of course, you're an adherent of creationism.
I understand that they each individually are small, but they are literally everywhere - and include carbon too.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Whale_Populatio...
https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
https://xkcd.com/1338/