While fun to think about big numbers at these scales this fact seems entirely arbitrary. You can fit a million Earths into our singular sun. 200 billion stars is still quite a bit more impressive than 3 trillion trees.
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.