Are there more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way? (2016)
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There’s a reason a myriad that initially really mean 10,000, is also associated with a countless number or multitude.
It's not perfect, but gets you somewhere. Squaring and cubing makes it less relatable, but it's still a lot better than a completely abstract number IMO. Thinking about this just now made me realize both how long a line of 10000 people can be and how densely you can pack them in a square - or how many people (theoretically) fit into 5x5 kilometer area.
Like a billion is a cube of length 1 metre, made of cubes 1mm wide.
You can also roughly scale down by factors of 3 (square root of 10, roughly) by considering a 30cm ruler in place of the metre stick.
Multiple sources also claim that there are around 3 trillion fish in the world in total. How exactly do you reconcile that?
The estimated number of galaxies in the observable universe is between 200 billion and 2 trillion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy
The number of stars in our galaxy is estimated between 100 and 400 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...
-- Richard Feynman
I guess it’s is in the spirit of the original article though…
You can point to a star or a tree. Or even a coin or a banknote. But you can’t point to an abstract amount such as a national debt.
Let's not lose track of what this tread is about, shall we? It's "what is larger, the number of stars in the milky way or the national debt?" One of those values is countable. How many stars? The other one isn't. How many debts? That question doesn't make sense. You need to introduce a unit, and the choice of that unit is arbitrary.
So the USA couldn't pay back its debt now even if it had all gold in the world.
On the other hands, if a group of humans want to declare that there is no tree or no star in the universe, the only trick they can leverage on to shrink the count is to change the definition of these words (ta-da, good bye Pluto).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
> The brothers were estimated to hold one-third of the entire world supply of silver not held by governments.
It did not go well for them in the end, of course.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act?wprov=sfti1#
I spoke to the forester yesterday about the plans to thin. They are all marked out now and I'm the spring it goes to auction. And IF for some reason it isn't stopped by legal action, it will get cut in the next 1-5 years!
My property borders the public land in question and we'd love to see the fire risk reduced and stronger, healthier trees remain. I can't believe how long it takes and that people might want to stop this. We can thin it and take care of it or watch it all burn.
That’s in the linked paper:
> Following almost all of the collected data sources, we define a tree as a plant with woody stems larger than 10 cm diameter at breast height (DBH).
That assessment itself seems rather arbitrary, too.
It is indeed fun to think about these things.
Like how the number of fungal species on Earth keeps growing the better we get at counting them: conservative estimates of the past were at 500.000, and current estimates are at 2.2 to 3.8 million species: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/microbiolspec.funk-0052...
Or that Norway's coastline is arbitrarily long depending on your ruler's precision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
There’s a story from an old Joe Rogan interview with Paul Stamets about one species that mycologists had got wrong because of the way they sampled it: another species was “chasing” it, and sampling had hit the chaser.
Who knows, maybe some fungi chase themselves!
But what I understood was that one fungus was trying to consume another.
It's episode #1035 at around 1h53m:
https://www.youtube.com/live/mPqWstVnRjQ?si=AgxlSe4pXB4Fe9lT...
https://podscribe.app/feeds/http-joeroganexpjoeroganlibsynpr...
It starts a discussion about how the FDA is incompetent to make rulings about cordyceps mushrooms because the thousands of peer-reviewed articles about them predate a more precise sampling method that uncovers that there are multiple species (or anamorph strands of the same species, I'm unsure).
I ask because we barely understand our own star, the Sun. We know it has solar minima/maxima and we still track sunspots as a primary means of qualifying how we think it will affect us. We are still sending probes to get closer looks at the surface which is extremely dynamic.
In terms of physical processes and energy production, the sun is immensely complex in its own right, but it doesn't exhibit the same kind of dynamic, adaptive behavior that we associate with life.
So while obviously we can't say for sure, I stand by my original statement when speaking in terms of orders of magnitudes. I think it's a sensible argument.
You can have stars without lead, but you can’t have lead without stars; Lead (the element) is produced by stars but is itself not more complex than a star.
In the oceans, it's mostly in arthropods and fish! (Bacteria aside, that is...)
Biomass distribution of Earth estimates: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
Trees outweigh everything else, and:
A worldwide census of the total number of trees (32), as well as a comparison of actual and potential plant biomass (17), has suggested that the total plant biomass (and, by proxy, the total biomass on Earth) has declined approximately twofold relative to its value before the start of human civilization. The total biomass of crops cultivated by humans is estimated at ≈10 Gt C, which accounts for only ≈2% of the extant total plant biomass (17).
Humans haven't yet put such a dent into fish biomass, but we're getting there.
So I picked a relatively benign occurrence of Ohio state winning and jokingly misinterpreted his original comment.
The problem is that with our current models about the probability of such nuclear reactions and about the celestial bodies where such reactions occur, the predicted amount of gold in the universe is less than the observed amount.
So there is something wrong in the theoretical models or additional observations must be made, until theory will match with observations.
Of course trees are added, and it’s not clear if the 15 billion number is net loss. Assuming not, the number of years could stretch to infinity.
We still need more trees to fight climate change in the 21st century and according to the United Nations since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
There are more unique combinations [1] of a 16x16 1-bit grid/bitmap than there are:
* Cells in your body (10^13)
* Stars in the known universe (10^24)
* Atoms that make up our solar system (10^56)
1. 2^256 == ~1.2x10^77
Amazing
Population pressure and agriculture and industry means that land is continually being cleared.
I urge anyone with the ability, plant a tree this year — maybe even a couple! You'll feel good about it, and it may well outlive you. The birds and insects and other life will be happy about it.
The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago; the second best time is right now.
Only a small part of the overall land of most countries is used by agriculture[2], normally less than 30%. Cultivated lands add up to 17,235,800sqkm, "other lands" add up to 131,701,100sqkm.
You seem extremely pessimist given the actual numbers.
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/co2-is-making-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
Small bits of land can be changed by man to be hospitable to trees and here planting by hand would be the only way. Usually tree planting efforts are for man, not nature.
There are some good activities where we can help by watering, weeding around seedlings and protecting from pests which goes beyond planting.
Tree planting feels and is good and engages ourselves with nature. Nature itself can do nature stuff without our help.
> Following almost all of the collected data sources, we define a tree as a plant with woody stems larger than 10 cm diameter at breast height (DBH).
Although: Comparing that type of comparison to the general case of comparing quantities of different countable objects (“trees on earth versus stars in our galaxy”) is itself a different type of comparison that is even weirder. Maybe?