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
There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html" rel="nofollow">https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...</a>
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.
Facts I try not to think about:<p>- More than 2/3rds of the world's avian biomass is poultry<p>- There are more Panda Expresses than pandas (<i>edit</i> - in the wild)
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.”
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.
He did not calculate the weight of bacteria, archaea, viruses?<p>I understand that they each individually are small, but they
are literally everywhere - and include carbon too.
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,
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae</a>, so these are covered
by the grass family - but grasses would be the non-eatable
variants in the wild. See Wikipedia:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass</a><p>"The three major families of grasslike plants are true grasses (Poaceae), sedges (Cyperaceae), and rushes (Juncaceae)."<p>So he at best only did the family Poacaea but where are the
wild poaceae in his calculations?<p>Tons of things are missing in that article.
>There are thousands of species of ants and termites, and just one species of human.<p>that's rather debatable. unless, of course, you're an adherent of creationism.
How come algae did not make the list?
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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2ew2UHaCuY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2ew2UHaCuY</a>
funny that i didn’t think about it till i read your comment. and then realized i read the entire thing. checks out.<p>on the other hand i don’t think I’m physically capable of reading the AI landing pages of every new product on HN.
Was surprised not to see whales on the list
Individual whales are large, but there aren’t that many individuals.
I wonder if populations have fully recovered from the whale-oil era.
LOL
Obligatory xkcd has a nice visualization of the land mammals by mass:<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/1338/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1338/</a>
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Plastic?
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.