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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly
I think I may not have made myself clear. The analogy here is not that "we're doomed because people walk slowly". There is nothing that happens here on earth that is even remotely analogous to the constraints that the speed of light imposes on interstellar processes. Even at a leisurely walking pace, a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star. Human walking speed is blindingly fast (relative to the size of the planet) compared to the speed of light (relative to the distances between stars).
The reason we're doomed is not that we're not walking fast enough, it's because we won't stop walking and take time to think about where we should be going. We just go.
But my point is, "we just go" is exactly how we conquered the Earth. We didn't think, "let's colonize the whole planet!", we just went. We walked from Africa all the way to the tip of South America.
We weren't doomed then and we're not doomed now. We will colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy.*
* Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.
> Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.
Yeah, well, there's yer problem right there. We will not colonize the solar system, and certainly not the galaxy, because we haven't figured out how to stabilize the situation here on earth. Yes, we colonized the planet, but for most of the history our lack of planning was compensated by technological limitations and limits imposed by the laws of physics. Those are mostly gone now, and I'll be a little surprised if civilization doesn't collapse before the end of my life (and I'm in my 60s). I would be very surprised if it lasts to the end of the century, though of course I won't be around to see that.
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.
All that biomass packed into one place would make a great energy source, although it'd be mostly anaerobic decomposition unless you were close to the surface. We wouldn't have to burn fossil fuels any more with the amount of energy it'd produce for all the humans... oh... wait... I think I've found a problem.
Dimensional analysis like this is a weird way to think about a large number of people. It depends a bit on what the average weight of a human, but yeah, that's at least pretty close to true.
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…”
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:
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.
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.
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].
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.
Well, there are over 500 species of primates, making primates the third most diverse order of mammals.
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 nuke us from space when we're the best reality show in this corner of the local cluster?
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.
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?"But I think we're an extraordinary species compared to every other species on Earth. That's really my point.
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.
That leaves our successor species, the machine minds, with replicators and free energy, I think you mean.
https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/200...
At a bare minimum, yeah, you quarantine that whole fucking species.
Every book of the series is amazing in its own way.
Or they are cybernetic lifeforms and are applauding our current trajectory.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.
So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.
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.)
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.
Well, the US political system is based on a four-year cycle. In China they're based around a five-year cycle. 25% longer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- More than 2/3rds of the world's avian biomass is poultry
- There are more Panda Expresses than pandas (edit - in the wild)
https://theonion.com/consumer-product-diversity-now-exceeds-...
People then eat chicken and feed the remaining 1/3rd seeds on a bird feeder in their garden.
https://www.franchisetimes.com/top-400-2026/
Pandas could fit in the top 20, beating out Panera bread (2,225).
It looks like 39 restaurant chains have more than 2550 locations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_fast_food_...
“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://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%280.5+miles%29+%5E+...
“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
https://youtu.be/ZDYRorgSt-8?si=E9uPIAbYWLzRpsF8
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2ew2UHaCuY
“That was the last hritten novel by him. His a-level simulation took over the writing after.”
on the other hand i don’t think I’m physically capable of reading the AI landing pages of every new product on HN.
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.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/
that's rather debatable. unless, of course, you're an adherent of creationism.
The trees are cheating
This is like counting the dead skin cells that are still attached, which (sure enough!) does count toward animal biomass.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Whale_Populatio...
https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
I understand that they each individually are small, but they are literally everywhere - and include carbon too.
https://xkcd.com/1338/
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.
[0]https://a-z-animals.com/articles/the-10-animals-with-the-hig...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonostomatidae
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.
[0] https://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/...