Exactly How Much Life Is on Earth?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.britannica.com/science/biomass
It depresses me that there is an order of magnitude more humans than wild mammals. But interestingly there are 35x more bacteria than all animals.
66 billion chickens! I just had fried chicken for lunch, but damn, we humans are savages aren't we...
[1] https://thehumaneleague.org/article/how-many-chickens-are-in... [2] https://faunalytics.org/global-animal-slaughter-statistics-a...
Another mind blowing stat is that of all the mammals in the world, wild mammals only make up 4% of the mammal biomass, humans 34%, and livestock (farmed animals) 62%. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
http://fishcount.org.uk/studydatascreens/2016/numbers-of-wil...
by biomass, but even just rats + mice outnumber humans
I'm not taking the position that the negative impacts of our civilization should be ignored, or that biodiversity shouldn't be preserved. But I really struggle to understand going from "we should be better stewards of the environment for our own benefit" to "it would be better if we never succeeded in the first place." Maybe that isn't your point?
That there are so many of us and so few of everything else isn't necessarily "faring well".
They didn't say the latter, though. I think it's odd to even bring the idea of success into the question - I would not define "10xing the rest of the mammal biomass" as "success". Not even on evolutionary criteria - usually I understand "successful" creatures as ones that are widespread and long-lived, but we really haven't combined those two traits yet.
I don't see where anyone even implied that.
I'm not going to say this is an exactly analogous situation. One, I don't know that is really is necessary to human civilization thriving that we have to rapidly and recklessly destroy natural habitats the world over to make way for farms or just plunder crops, pelts, and whale oil and what not for a few decades to make a single generation rich until it's all gone. There is very likely a more sustainable way to do it that isn't as disruptive to the pre-existing ecosystems and still allows us to feed and house a large number of people. This isn't purely a matter of hey, they needed to go to make way for us. Think of blue whales or bison in North America. Populations absolutely decimated, damn near reduced to nothing until legislation and interional treaties finally agreed to protect them. But all that ocean and all that grassland is still there. We didn't displace them to use it for something else. We just killed them damn near for nothing, because blubber and fur could be traded for a lot of money for a few decades.
Second, it remains to be seen whether this is really for the better even for humans. All of this "success" you're talking about is the population exploding over the course of the last 500 years. The reasons for this are largely positive reasons. Indoor plumbing, germ theory of disease, global transportation networks, figuring out how to rapidly move food and water, not only for ourselves but for crops. Drastically increased land yield. All great stuff. But we're talking about a few centuries of success here. Sharks have been apex predators for 200 million years. Whether humanity is truly going to thrive over the long run or be a flash in the pan that disappears and leaves a mass extinction in its wake is yet to be determined.
But still, even if it ends up ultimately turning out for the best, it is still perfectly possible and reasonable to feel grief about the loss virtually all other large animals with rich inner lives and social relations have had to endure while it happened. Have you ever read about or watched many US Civil War material? I don't know that it's totally unique or even atypical for wars, but it's always poignant to me in the way that the two sides largely didn't hate each other. Many of the victors took little joy in the victory. The land they plundered and people they killed were their own country and their own countrymen. I can't say it was a bad thing as it ultimately ended one of the most evil things humans have ever done to other humans, but it was still a sad thing.
Conversely, there are ~130 billion wild mammals in the world [1], but only 8.1 billion people.
We're just particularly large as far as most mammals go. But in terms of population, we're still far, far outnumbered. And important metrics like diversity or endangered status depend on population counts, not biomass.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_mammals_by_population
Eh, no? No other species there comes even close to 8 billion individuals. If you add the individuals from all the other species, then yes, we're outnumbered. But that's an even more odd metric.
It's a bit like saying Smith is an unusual name since the Smiths are outnumbered by people with other names.
Saying that we're "far outnumbered" is really nothing but Mark Twain's third form of lies.
If you have a parliament with 100 seats, and the biggest party has 10 seats, and then 30 other parties split up the remaining 90 -- then yes, the biggest party is still far, far outnumbered. It's the largest, but it's nowhere even close to a majority.
There are no statistical lies here, so please don't make those kinds of accusations here. The point is, biomass is not the only lens to look through.
Are there really that many viruses out there?
Meaning either some animals are 10x their mass from viruses (very unlikely), or there are *way* more tons of viruses just sitting outside of any animal waiting to get a host than there are inside hosts (which is surprising).
The west especially seems to have been conditioned to be anti-bacteria via all the advertisements. For example, people always want anti-bacteria soap. All bacteria is not the same (or bad) and most are actually critical for larger life.
We are working on it.(wars). The only problem is, when we finish with ourselves, there might be no mamal left.
Also even more ambitious: it would be really cool to see changes in this visualization over time. Watch bacteria and then plants inherit the world over millions of years, slow the timescale down and then see dinosaurs come and go, and finally the ominous explosion of human-controlled biomass at the very end.
Wait... what is the "deep" link exactly? And how does that follow from comparing numbers at face value?
NOTE: I am just a layman when it comes to biology and physics.
Humans are wired to think that because a phrase is clever, that it must be true. For example, the Rhyme-as-reason Effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect
ELIZA and PARRY proved this all the way back in 1966 and 1972. ELIZA was a silly AI hack which mostly just repeated back what users said to it, turning users' statements into questions in the style of Rogerian psychotherapy. People could tell it was fake. But PARRY used the same technique but pretended to be a crazy asshole, repeating users' statements in the style of angry accusations, and people thought it was real.
Take a simple AI technique, add some element to make emotion overwhelm analysis, and you pass the Turing Test (because the Turing Test was only ever meant to be a thought experiment). PARRY convinced a lot of people, and Peter Norvig's AI book in Lisp shows you how to write ELIZA in the first couple chapters. It's trivially easy to make an AI which is more persuasive than smart.
ChatGPT is like that smooth sales guy that can use so many words to say so little. Everything sounds great, and then you walk out of the meeting, and you can't figure out what you just learned, if anything.
Information follows paths, so you end up with the "-verse" suffix regarding speech. The universe you're in is the one you can say things about and back those things up with evidence. Other universes, well there are no paths along which evidence about them can reach you, so you're limited in what you can say about them.
The center of the Universe is the Big Bang, which is physically located at the beginning of time. Gravity is a depression on the surface of the Universe, which is why gravity and time are related: it literally brings us closer to the past :)
(Also note: physics is not my expertise, so take what I say with a giant grain of salt. I have just thought about this a lot over the years)
Only other thing I can think of is a "rubber bubble" which... is a balloon.
Perhaps the laws of physics would allow for different kinds, they just aren't ours (Lee Smolin's "Life of the Cosmos" is a fun exploration of this, recommended).
Overall I like your descriptions, but I'm going to have to do some thinking about the direction of a gravitational depression being one that points towards the past. I'm under the impression that many cosmologists reject the idea that something warped must be warped into some other dimension. The warping, I've read, can be intrinsic: Imagine a colored lens which is unevenly saturated with dye.
(I am also not a real physicist)
About the size of a eukaryotic cell, in particular.
https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_Gene...
That's the geometric mean of 4.4 * 10^26 and 1. He took the geometric mean of the radius of the observable universe and the Planck length. That's a reasonable way to define "halfway" across orders of magnitude
Can it be said that the universe has a centre of complexity, in the same way as it might be said to have a centre of mass?