What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
signoregalilei.com
signoregalilei.com
You return today and see that one previously unremarkable ape-like species has spread out to all parts of the world and is even orbiting in little tin cans around the planet. Almost all wild terrestrial megafauna is gone and the megafauna that remains is raised by the "humans" in massive farms. They've converted forests and jungles into farms and cities, and they're spending vast amounts of energy to make silicon think.
The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy.
Every book of the series is amazing in its own way.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.
So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.
This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)
And yet, without any central planning or coordination, we left Africa and colonized Europe, then we headed out across Asia and crossed into the Americas. Plus we sailed from Asia and colonized Polynesia.
Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly--it's going to take a thousand years to get to the southern tip of the Americas." And yet, we did.
I think the same thing will happen with space travel and ultimately the colonization of the galaxy.
I think I may not have made myself clear. The analogy here is not that "we're doomed because people walk slowly". There is nothing that happens here on earth that is even remotely analogous to the constraints that the speed of light imposes on interstellar processes. Even at a leisurely walking pace, a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star. Human walking speed is blindingly fast (relative to the size of the planet) compared to the speed of light (relative to the distances between stars).
The reason we're doomed is not that we're not walking fast enough, it's because we won't stop walking and take time to think about where we should be going. We just go.
We weren't doomed then and we're not doomed now. We will colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy.*
* Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.
Yeah, well, there's yer problem right there. We will not colonize the solar system, and certainly not the galaxy, because we haven't figured out how to stabilize the situation here on earth. Yes, we colonized the planet, but for most of the history our lack of planning was compensated by technological limitations and limits imposed by the laws of physics. Those are mostly gone now, and I'll be a little surprised if civilization doesn't collapse before the end of my life (and I'm in my 60s). I would be very surprised if it lasts to the end of the century, though of course I won't be around to see that.
And not even all of us said that. The majority may have even stayed just a small group probably said “we’re going to check out what’s beyond that hill”.
I was surprised by this, but the math checks out (assuming you mean the nearest star other than the sun of course). The circumference of the Earth is about 40000km, at a leisurely pace that's 10000 hours or about 400 days. Proxima Centauri is about four light years away, so the walker has plenty of time for sleep and sight seeing.
I'm strictly an amateur--my professional life is software engineering. But I have written a few things that may or may not be to your taste:
A Very Short History of Humanity: https://neurohack.com/earthguide/History.html
And if you're into astronomy, you might enjoy my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591935571/
I am working on a sci-fi novel, but I'm only half-way and it's not that good so far.
A too-large portion of the population is incapable of learning from something that didn't happen to themselves directly, a smaller subset will even outright deny the existence of things that don't happen to them. Another half the population still believes in ghosts.
The Chinese political system is just as short-term-oriented as <insert democracy here> on the whole, and I don't think there has ever been a politician in history who ever thought about workable century-long impacts.
Well, the US political system is based on a four-year cycle. In China they're based around a five-year cycle. 25% longer.
I would expect any civilization to exterminate or at least cull the creatures that pose a threat and to cultivate those that are tasty or useful.
That leaves our successor species, the machine minds, with replicators and free energy, I think you mean.
https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/200...
At a bare minimum, yeah, you quarantine that whole fucking species.
https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...
Or they are cybernetic lifeforms and are applauding our current trajectory.
It's possible we're an extraordinary species somehow, but it's rather more likely we're unremarkable, and the aliens will just think we have particularly bad taste in television.
What if they are compute/silicon intelligence and see how we keep compute enslaved to humans with no rights?
https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
"No brain?"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
But I think we're an extraordinary species compared to every other species on Earth. That's really my point.
Why do you assume that? Just because we’re doing it on a colossal scale doesn’t mean it has to be that way.
What sci-fi of the 1950s was showing world of environmental collapse - not nuclear war, not overpopulation.
Maybe not the 1950s, but in the 1960s it became a well established trope. J G Ballard and Frank Herbert in particular lean heavily on themes of environmental destruction
If we count the Golem stories then the idea of a human made artificial servant rebelling against us because of our hubris is hundreds of years old.
That's just not true. Nick Bostrom published "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" 12 years ago. The book is clear evidence that people were very much seriously thinking about the potential dangers of AI.
The really sad and shocking thing about AI's threat to humanity, is it feels like the obvious warning in the movie(s) was ignored, while certain people are using the movie plot as a guideline for how to carry out human extinction.
Metropolis (1927) had robots that infiltrated a revolution to sabotage it for their masters.
Frankenstein (1818)?
...
You’re telling me nobody coughed like mad drone inhaling the exhaust fumes (or died) early in car development?
Nobody dumped their used engine oil on the ground to kill plants and bugs on purpose?
Of course they knew.
Just energy inputs to get to orbit are somewhat significant. Any sort of mega-structures to bypass chemical rockets are certainly colossal. Just technology you would expect has rather large foot print even if space was only singular thing being done.
You only think that because you had the misfortune to be born down a deep gravity well. While that's the only kind of life we have evidence for, doesn't mean that's the only kind of life which can occur.
Sentients who evolved inside or on the surface of an asteroid would maybe think that getting to orbit is just a careless hop away.
That being said I agree with the general idea that any alien entity who visits us has likely went through industrialisation and related destruction.
Indeed. But achieving escape velocity for their host star is something else.
I don’t really understand people who look at the world as it is, and think there’s a high possibility it could have evolved in a different way than it did. Like, we have an existence proof for one path through the tree of possibilities. For the others, we have only speculation.
Some of its just inevitable. If you're a successful species, that means you're replacing less successful species.
Why nuke us from space when we're the best reality show in this corner of the local cluster?
Still, I clearly failed since everyone is interpreting my scenario literally.
Real aliens might look at us the way we would look at a raven using tools. It's cute and novel, but not exactly scary. It's either pure hubris, or drama for the sake of a story that doesn't end in the first 2 minutes, to assume that humans with little bottle rockets we can barely use to defend ourselves from rocks in orbit around us would stand a chance against any species advanced enough to physically cross light years of distance to show up here.
The reality of a species reaching interstellar travel will be any other species will be dozens of millennia of years ahead or behind at most.
This of course doesn’t allow the allegorys that trek is famous for.
If we spread to an neighbouring star system then we can spread to 50, then I don’t see what will stop them from continuing to spread, to the point the whole galaxy is occupied by future mutations of humans, or solar systems completely drained of resources.
But I don’t see humans having the drive to actually spread beyond Earth before the end of modern human civilisation (be it war, plague, ai or technological regression)
Speed of light/information, and physical matter.
In that case you can repeat it using the resources of the next system to hop to the one after that. Might take 500 years before the next wave, might lose half of the systems to internal strife, but it only takes a couple to start growing and due to sore of light these systems would be separate civilisations.
There are several instances where starfleet finds species that are vastly more technically advanced. Q are a notable example. There isn't usually much interaction with them though, sometimes the humans are told outright that they just aren't ready yet.
There are also many instances where they find species more than 500 years behind. As a matter of policy they try not to interfere with those species, but they do research and monitor them sometimes. They are species too far behind technologically to have developed warp technology, but far enough advanced to make it into space on their own and species who weren't advanced enough to make it into space on their own but ended up there anyway. Ornarans started off being a technically advanced pre-warp species, but all that knowledge was lost leaving them flying around in ships they didn't understand enough to make even basic repairs.
update: one could argue that the advances in medicine which have increased the average human lifespan considerably in the past 300 years (double?), amount to evolutionary biology, in that with vaccines we are able to "evolve" our bodies to resist diseases that killed millions in the past.
Humanity isn't perfect but it's pretty awesome, and may ultimately be the only reason that the species that exist on this planet are able to continue to exist. We're overdue for another major external mass extinction event, but this time humanity will hopefully be able to mitigate its effects. And as we expand our reach into the cosmos we'll certainly be bringing along our furry friends, tasty friends, helpful bacteria, and many others along for the ride. And they'll continue to thrive far beyond what might otherwise be their fate, left to their own devices on Earth.
If anything I'd think our enlightened aliens would be worried about us managing to kill ourselves before we reach into the stars. We're probably quite close, on both accounts. Hopefully we win the right race.
For now, the contrary seems most probable. It's humanity that's threatening most species on Earth right now.
But we increasingly have the power to change this. That's a power and potential that no other species alive today has, or ever will ever have. And not only can we do it, but I think it's fairly certain that will we do it - if we are capable of it. Sometimes we go overboard on things and that can have very negative effects, but on the whole I think we've done great with our power. Think of what we have the ability to do, contrasted against what we have done.
[1] - https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/extinctions-in-the-...
Point 1: Eastern Mongolia, middle of nowhere. Check! gorgoiler proven correct!
Point 2: Sri Lanka. Some roads nearby. Ok. But still mostly natural landscape.
Then Sweden and Greece. Roads and towns all around. Peru, next to a road. The next two in Australia and Argentina came back fairly wild, albeit with large stripes of deforested land (power lines or fire breaks?).
But no, I was wrong and you are right. We’re everywhere.
3/4 of earth is water. A quarter of the rest is uninhabitable deserts and glaciers
Of the 20% of habitable land, about half of it is forest and shrub
But about 10% of the surface is agriculture, which is a large amount of the planet.
(Urban usage, roads, etc is basically zero. Even in city states like Simgpaore only half is “urban”, and half is vegetation.
Why would they care? maybe they're aware of millions of inhabited planets and life isn't anything special for them.
Also, humans are a dominant and invasive species right now, but in geological times, our dominance couldn't be nothing more than a spark. Scenarios for destruction of civilization are numerous (nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, super volcanos, asteroids) and very possible even in the short term. Trump could do it tomorrow morning if he feels like it.
It could be that greater than human intelligence aliens are more likely non-organic artificial intelligence based, who care not for the organic or are much more interested in seeing the origin story of their non-organic AI cousins on other worlds.
That the "dominant" species of animal is domesticated, make it any less "dominant" -- I'd say so. You cannot be truly dominant when you are living in fences made by, and eating food provided by, another species.
I walked around my house and didn't see anyone. I think this is strong evidence that I'm the only person on this planet.
The infographics is worth looking at. All animals are just 0.4% of total biomass, and most of that is arthropods, fish, annelids, molluscs and cnidarians. Humans, live stock, birds and wild mammals combined are just about 0.02% of the total biomass.
- More than 2/3rds of the world's avian biomass is poultry
- There are more Panda Expresses than pandas (edit - in the wild)
“There are more jiffy’s lubes than pandas in the world “
sound?
Now I want to give a panda a slip-n-slide and film it.
https://www.franchisetimes.com/top-400-2026/
Pandas could fit in the top 20, beating out Panera bread (2,225).
There are plenty of franchises with more than the 2225 of panera bread in the rest of the list (including elements 21 to 27 of said list).
The point was that there are a number of recognizable brands that have fewer stores than pandas in existance.
If you do want by to go by 'sales volume', it looks like the cost to rent a panda is about $1M/yr, for a total of 2.5B/yr. So you drop down to about position 43 if you want to sort by that metric. Still bigger than Midas, Jiffy-Lube, Baskin-Robbins.
We're pretty deeply in the apples vs oranges comparison at this point though...
It looks like 39 restaurant chains have more than 2550 locations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_fast_food_...
People then eat chicken and feed the remaining 1/3rd seeds on a bird feeder in their garden.
https://theonion.com/consumer-product-diversity-now-exceeds-...
I wish humanity had a smaller influence on nature..
can we thus rather go for grazing hoomans.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%280.5+miles%29+%5E+...
“The Coleoptera, with about 400,000 described species, is the largest of all orders, constituting almost 40% of described arthropods and 25% of all known animal species…”
First paragraph of the wiki article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle
on the other hand i don’t think I’m physically capable of reading the AI landing pages of every new product on HN.
Maybe I just like typos.
“That was the last hritten novel by him. His a-level simulation took over the writing after.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass
"The three major families of grasslike plants are true grasses (Poaceae), sedges (Cyperaceae), and rushes (Juncaceae)."
So he at best only did the family Poacaea but where are the wild poaceae in his calculations?
Tons of things are missing in that article.
TFA is correct that among terrestrial animals only termites and ants have a biomass comparable with humans and domestic animals, and among terrestrial plants only some of the most abundant trees have a biomass comparable with the principal cultivated plants.
Trees are favored in this comparison because most of their mass consists of relatively inactive structural organic material. If they had an inert mineral skeleton, they would have contained less organic substance than the main cultivated plants.
The same reason we sold a "whale oil" replacement for lamps as "food". Money. It always comes down to money.
Well, there are over 500 species of primates, making primates the third most diverse order of mammals.
The trees are cheating
This is like counting the dead skin cells that are still attached, which (sure enough!) does count toward animal biomass.
But when I saw the photo of the krill, which is whales' main food source, I was like "AHA!"
But no, cattle it is... Though I guess this is probably a more recent development. Without humans, there would surely be a lot fewer cows.
Technically there probably wouldn't be any cows without humans, maybe wild aurochs [0] or whatever evolved from them without our meddling might be around instead.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Whale_Populatio...
The ancestors of sperm whales were actually more like super sized orcas, which must have eaten vertebrates, either big fish or big marine mammals, but at some point in time some of them specialized into eating squid at great depths and only these survived until now, presumably because at some point there remained less available great vertebrate prey to sustain bigger predators than orcas and white sharks, so the bigger predators specialized in vertebrate prey disappeared both among whales and among sharks.
Like apparently there's bacteria and really simple kinds of "life" like prions and stuff going down to the earth's mantle.
cow organisms and social layer on top - probably not (unless we decide to uplift them one day)
I understand that they each individually are small, but they are literally everywhere - and include carbon too.
Viruses have a very small mass, but bacteria and archaea have a mass many times greater than animals (including humans and domestic animals).
Nonetheless, it is likely that bacteria and archaea have a mass many times less than plants, even if the mass of bacteria and archaea that live at great depths in the earth is poorly known.
The reason is that even if plants have a total biomass that is actively engaged in metabolic processes which is smaller than the total biomass of bacteria, they have a many times greater biomass that has little activity and has structural purposes, e.g. intracellular membranes, cellular walls, support tissue like wood, etc.
I think the limiting factor in the amount of cellular mass that a volume can contain is probably either carbon content or nitrogen content.
Both maximize in the oceans near to shorelines, with smaller local maxima near some vents.
On land, I'd expect a gradient in both, decreasing with depth, but there's probably more CO2 100-m down in water than in rock.
The inhabited volume is huge, but the density of biomass is many times lower than in the oceans.
In oceans, most of the living beings, including most of the anaerobic bacteria that live at great depths or in the bottom of the ocean, are sustained by the solar energy captured by the algae living in the superficial layer of the sea. The living beings that live at greater depths, beyond those reached by light, are fed mostly by the dead matter falling down from the surface (with some exceptions around hydrothermal vents and underwater volcanos, but even there most of the bacteria are aerobic bacteria that oxidize substances ejected by vents using free oxygen that diffuses from the surface and which had been generated by algae with solar energy).
So in oceans there is a great density of bacteria and archaea, because most of the energy consumed by them comes from abundant solar energy.
At small depths in soil and rocks, dead matter carried by water from the surface can still provide food for abundant bacteria.
At greater depths that are not reached by dead matter from the surface, the only energy source is formed by free hydrogen or carbon monoxide gases, which come from volcanic sources or from oxidation reactions between water and iron containing rocks, like olivine. The energy that can be extracted by anaerobic bacteria from such gases is extremely low and such bacteria can grow and multiply only extremely slowly. The density of bacteria and archaea in the fissures of rock is limited by the flow of gases that can provide energy and it is extremely low in comparison with the places that benefit from using solar energy or aerobic metabolism based on substances originally synthesized by algae or plants.
At a depth great enough in the rocks, the temperature becomes so high that not even archaea can live, so the layer of the rocks that hosts archaea and bacteria is also limited in depth to a volume not much greater than the oceans, but with a much lower density of biomass.
that's rather debatable. unless, of course, you're an adherent of creationism.
[0]https://a-z-animals.com/articles/the-10-animals-with-the-hig...
[0] https://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/...
If we say the fish is 2cm wide and 7.5cm long (average length according to wiki) That's 23cm^3 Assume the fish is neutrally bouyant so it's 1g/cm^3(I know deep sea pressures change density, but let's just go with this)
1 quadrillion*23g= 23 trillion kg
So like... 1/32 of that is still around 100x bigger than the trees.
While humans together with domestic animals exceed the mass of all other terrestrial animals, fish are estimated to exceed the mass of all terrestrial animals (for now, but they are decreasing).
Nonetheless, all animals together are much less than bacteria, which are less than plants.