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Comment by rhyme-boss | Hacker News Reader

I love that a guy as brilliant as Darwin spent time cutting paper into triangles to give to worms to see how they stuffed it into their burrows.

My favorite earth worm fact is you have approximately one hundred million worms worth of energy in your body *(the sum of the stored energy in all your mitochondria).[1]

[1] https://ryanblakeley.net/p/metabolic-energy-of-a-worm-vs-a-h...

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There's something fucky about that. He's comparing the total amount of electrical potential energy in a human body to the amount of chemical energy available to a living worm's metabolism. A typical human has about one hundred thousand times the mass of a typical earthworm, so this guy is saying human flesh is one thousand times more energy-dense than worm flesh. Horseshit.

Edit: That whole article is riddled with errors. For example, he states 220mm^2 is 88% the surface area of a dime when in fact it is 87% of the surface area of one face of a dime.

The actual sentence from the https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09486

(Mitochondria) "The electron and proton transfers of chemiosmotic energy coupling generate a transmembrane potential of 150–200 mV over the membrane (~5 nm across), giving a field strength of about 30 million volt per metre, equal to that discharged by a bolt of lightning."

Nick Lane and William Martin obviously don't talk about any directly obtainable energy. That number just can't be compared to the

"Available energy reserves (Ea)" "measured by quantifying the total lipid, protein, and carbohydrate content" from the

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6689315/

Also note: worms have mitochondria in their cells too.

Conclusion: "metabolism of a person and a worm" article is a good example of false claims which could be found on the internet, and the author, if he wants to help, should delete all the claims from it and put a note that what was on the page was false.

Maybe that comparison is wrong, i.e. different kinds of energy compared for humans and earthworms? For the later, if I understand correctly, the linked paper measures an equivalent of "how much energy one gets by burning the stuff from which an earthworm is made". For the former, it's something else: "total stored charge in all mitochondria membranes".

I'd expect that comparing the same kinds of energy the ratio would be more similar to a ratio of weights of the two organisms.

And checking the actual sources(1) the original authors correctly talk about the electric potential difference (voltage) over over the ~5 nm membrane, which is "equal to" the one "discharged by a bolt of lightning." It's clearly wrong to use that for the false claim in the article of "adding up" "the stored charge in one person".

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37145232

I do feel bad for how much food I eat, probably requiring several hectares to grow, compared to smaller animals which can survive by nibbling a few leaves.

cute

That's a major downside of being a warm-blooded mammal - it massively increases your energy requirements.

The human brain also uses a lot of energy, so it would probably be good to look into reducing its size.

so 50 million worms colliding with 50 million anti-worms

inside my body

> so 50 million worms colliding with 50 million anti-worms

Oh god no! If the average worm massed 10g, that's 10^9 grams of worm/anti-worm mix. Those 1000 metric tons of helminthic hitchikers would undergo total-annihilation to generate 9*10^22 Joules of energy, or 21.53 teratons of TNT.

Not only is that bigger than any nuclear bomb, it is likely way more than the yield of all nuclear bombs ever made rolled into one. This means it would be a Very Bad Day for both humans and worms on one or more continents. :P

(P.S.: Note that yield is only 1.7%-6% of estimates for the Chicxulub asteroid impact, so it is likely some worms will survive and maybe even some humans too if we don't botch handling the apocalypse.)

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