[HN Gopher] Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by huma...
___________________________________________________________________
Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic
animals
Author : pseudolus
Score : 90 points
Date : 2023-02-28 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| [deleted]
| nwatson wrote:
| What I'd really like to know: the approximate total mass of all
| the COVID-19 viruses/virii that have infected humans since the
| start of the pandemic; the volume (in a vacuum perhaps) these
| virii would take up if dumped into a container and given a few
| shakes. Would they take up a thimble? shot glass? coffee mug?
| liter bottle? drinks cooler? bathtub? car cabin? back yard
| swimming pool? olympic pool? Larger? (ChatGPT was just full of
| excuses on this question. Past searches also turned up nothing.)
|
| Edit: searches
| Y_Y wrote:
| Virus is uncountable in Latin, so you can pluralize it however
| you like. I prefer "viropodes".
| Sharlin wrote:
| "Poison feet"?
| delecti wrote:
| "Virus" kinda refers more to the phenomenon of the species as a
| whole (kinda like how "humanity" refers to all of us, plus
| people who came before, plus all the stuff associated with us).
| Likewise "COVID-19" refers to the pandemic, rather than the
| viral species.
|
| Meanwhile "virion" is the term to refer to the virus particles,
| so I suppose the most precise/pedantic way to say it would be
| "all SARS-CoV-2 Virions"?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Guarantee nobody's going to say that.
| delecti wrote:
| And I don't necessarily think they should, I just think
| language is a fun toy. From context it's clear what they
| meant, I thought it was interesting to find the most
| precise way of conveying the concept.
|
| I don't think that level of precision is needed for this
| discussion, except as a "proof of concept" of sorts.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| I certainly appreciated the breakdown.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I enjoyed it too, don't get me wrong, but as much as I
| like playing with the cruft in the (English) language
| spec, constructions like this are write-only.
| jerf wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVgBjRFSMYs - All the World's
| Coronavirus fits in a Coke Can - Numberphile
|
| I was able to pull this up quickly because I remembered they
| used a Coke can specifically, which helped zoom in quickly
| despite the noise in the search results.
| nwatson wrote:
| Awesome, thanks for the link!
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Wonder what it'd taste like!
| shagie wrote:
| That gets to a classic "xkcd what if" - Pile of Viruses
| https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/
|
| > What if every virus in the world were collected into one
| area? How much volume would they take up and what would
| they look like?
|
| And remember that the images have mouse over text.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Haha, this is awesome! Thank you!
|
| Here's another question... if I drank a spoonful of HIV,
| would I get HIV? Would it even survive my stomach acid? I
| suppose it depends on whether it found its way into my
| blood, right? Or would mere exposure to the mucous
| membranes in my mouth be enough? You can't, as far as I
| know, transfer HIV by kissing, but maybe if there was
| lots of it?
| KronisLV wrote:
| Apparently mammals are a small percentage in general, I recall
| looking at the graph in the article: "The biomass distribution on
| Earth"
|
| Have a look: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
|
| Seems like Earth belongs to plants, bacteria, fungi and so on.
| bashmelek wrote:
| I feel woefully disconnected from the natural order in this day
| and age. There is so much variety and beauty out there that we
| remove for the sake of maximizing material utility. Even in
| bovines, I recently learned that there is a lot diversity, but we
| hardly ever see it: the diversity is contrary to the maximizing.
| I feel that humanity has the power, to both solve our problems
| and preserve something of nature, to even make use of it, if only
| it were valued enough.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I can only speak to my own experience, but buying a bit of
| sheep grazing land and slowly nursing it back has brought me
| great joy. The field is full of flowers and even has ground
| nesting birds, where before there was only close-grazed rye
| grass.
| donnowhy wrote:
| under this logic, a sack of lead ought to 'rule over' a living
| animal because of being heavier
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Analogies almost universally accomplish nothing but creating
| arguments unrelated to the topic. Usually this is because, when
| we think of an analogy, we change something critical without
| explaining why we've changed it. In this case, the article
| compares living animals to living animals, while you have
| changed one side to a non-living material. The phrase "by that
| logic..." is a big red flag that this category of analogy is
| about to follow.
|
| You may certainly argue that mass comparison among living
| organisms isn't useful or at least interesting in the context
| in which the article discusses it, but you haven't done that.
| donnowhy wrote:
| I'm on a deep strange trip into the differences between
| "animated" and "inanimated" entities with only the loose idea
| of "emergent phenomena" to "guide me" on this winding road
| yogthos wrote:
| For all the intelligence individual humans exhibit, humanity as a
| whole behaves indistinguishably from a slime mold [1]. If we
| treat humanity as an organism where individuals humans are cells,
| then the behavior of the organism is to just spread mindlessly
| across the planet and extract resources until they're exhausted
| and it dies off. It seems that there's a phase transition
| happening at scale where all the internal complexity of human
| society is reduced to a very simple behavior.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-
| just-...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The same is true of every living creature or cellular life on
| the planet, so it shouldn't be very surprising to draw
| similarities.
| sho_hn wrote:
| And the worst part is that we're self-aware about it.
| CalRobert wrote:
| We live in an empty, denuded world, a faint shadow of its former
| self. Even "green" Ireland which sells itself as a natural place
| is an ecological wasteland.
|
| From Whittled Away, by Padraic Fogarty
|
| https://iwt.ie/product/whittled-away/
|
| """ In 1623 it was reported chat Ireland was exporting 20,000
| tons of pilchard annually.4 To pm this figure in perspective, it
| is over four times the toal landings for all species from the
| Irish Sea in 2014 and is exceeded today only by the individual
| open-water catches of mackerel. horse mackerel. and blue whiting
| Even if this figure is m exaggeration it gives some idea of the
| scale of shoals. However, It was not to last. The pilchard began
| its decline in the middle of the eighteenth century and by 1795
| the Baltimore fishery was spoken of in the past tense. After thh,
| shoals of fish continued to appear, albeit intermittently. well
| into the nineteenth century. An appearance off Kilmore Quay in
| County Wexford in 1835 was the first in living memory and 'people
| did not know their value and there was no means of saving them
| and great quantities were used as manure'. In 1879 the Baltimore
| Company was wound up after a number of unsuccessful years and
| then fell into a terminal decline. The pilchards didn't disappear
| entirely but subsequent appearances resulted in catches being
| dumped or used to fertilise fields because demand was nor there
| to actually eat them. Today, there is no targeted fishery for
| pilchards and their occurrence in Irish waters is sporadic and of
| no commercial signifieance. """
| ericmcer wrote:
| You don't need to go back to 1623. Talk to fishermen who have
| been working the same waters for 30 years, the decline is very
| apparent.
| Jensson wrote:
| Just look at google earth photos anywhere. Its all just large
| patches of farmland. Only exceptions I've found are Africa,
| deserts and far north/south. Pretty soon Africa will probably
| be all farmland as well.
| SamPatt wrote:
| I see forests all over the world.
|
| Seriously, there are so many trees. I have no idea what
| you're talking about.
|
| Edit: I looked up the numbers, and one quarter of the earth's
| land is covered in forest.
|
| The same percentage as twenty years ago.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area
| nhchris wrote:
| But remember, Malthusianism was proven wrong, because we're not
| starving. Nature is driven to the brink, but we're not
| starving, so go ahead and make yet more people.
| chitowneats wrote:
| Ah yes. An empty, denuded world, with unprecedented flourishing
| for our friends, family, and fellow humans. This type of
| nostalgia for a wild world full of disease and dangerous
| predators fails so utterly to motivate me.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is claiming that humans haven't
| flourished. What is being lamented is that this has clearly
| been at the expense of other species on Earth and
| biodiversity and ecology seems to be quite a fair bit worse.
|
| Plastics in every source of water, rapid global warming,
| acidification of the ocean. There's not a whole lot of good
| news about the health of the Earth ecosystem and this is a
| system that will take millions of years to recover (if it
| ever does).
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >and this is a system that will take millions of years to
| recover (if it ever does)
|
| Like Carlin said, Earth will be fine, it's been through
| worse before. It's the people who are fucked.
| chitowneats wrote:
| A great joke. It makes a good point; almost. I'm still
| waiting for the doomsday that's always just around the
| corner. We're technologists here. Let's focus on solving
| problems rather than trying to turn back the clock.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| It's not a joke. Billions of Dinosaurs, back then most of
| all live, have been wiped of the earth, with no human
| input at all. A 'healthy' earth is quite relative.
|
| It's easy to frame climate change as some hippies
| protesting to save some obscure insect that nobody heard
| of and that will just end up on the list of species to
| have died, which is quite full of things we human did not
| cause anyway. It seems a lot more urgent when you frame
| it as keeping our own life support system running.
| chitowneats wrote:
| I'm agreeing with that part. The part I disagree with is
| that we are somehow "fucked". We have lots of smart
| people working on that problem. Which is why we've
| actually had some good climate news lately. Doomer-ish
| statements like, "we're fucked", are just as likely to
| lead to demotivation and panic as they are to helpful
| solutions or action. So I avoid that mindset completely.
|
| It is a funny punchline. That's why I say it's a great
| joke. But let's not read too much into that.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It depends on the perspective you take. From my
| comfortable place here in Western society, 2C of global
| warming isn't going to destroy my quality of life. Goods
| might get more expensive, certain kinds of food products
| may become scarcer or disappear There might be more
| conflict "over there" because of water scarcity and
| famine. I may experience more political instability and
| degradation of some of the social fabric. But my day to
| day life probably won't change. However, if you talk
| about it from the perspective of the people who will
| actually bear the brunt of it, it's hard to see it as
| anything other than an unmitigated disaster.
|
| Pessimism can be as toxic as unfounded optimisim when
| it's not strongly rooted in the reality of the situation.
| And to be clear. 1.5C is baked in at this point [1][2]
| and I suspect 2C is too but it's failed to obtain enough
| scientific consensus to get political buy in (for some
| reason scientific consensus in this space is extremely
| conservative). To me a realistic evaluation is that any
| "good news" there is is a drop in the bucket against the
| tsunami headed our way. Maybe we get lucky with fusion or
| some other scientific breakthrough. But I've not observed
| a pattern for humanity getting lucky in that way.
|
| I also don't think it's demotivating to talk about it in
| real terms. For example, California's 2035 plan for
| fossil fuel cars is likely too little to late. It's
| better than nothing but also a lot can happen in 12 years
| to undermine that plan (it's also a pretty poorly thought
| out plan but maybe it'll work out well anyway). The US
| federal government is more lackadaisical about it with a
| plan to get to net zero by 2050. But you know what you
| don't hear politicians talking about? Net zero doesn't
| achieve any climate goals. Because we've been emitting so
| much CO2 for so long and will continue to do so for
| decades more, it's a runaway cycle. We would need to get
| to a substantial net negative to undo the warming that's
| baked in and to realistically try to avoid 2c. Lots of
| smart people are working on the problem. I think they've
| got the best sense of the urgency and import of the work
| and I don't think pessimism demotivates them as much as
| insufficient funding and legislative priorities.
|
| [1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129912
|
| > There's "no credible pathway to 1.5C in place" today,
| the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) insisted in a new
| report, despite legally binding promises made at the 2015
| Paris Climate Conference to prevent average temperatures
| rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels
|
| [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-
| will-li...
|
| > "Individually, in private, I don't think I know of many
| climate scientists that think 1.5 C is possible (I could
| count them on a hand)," Glen Peters, a climate policy
| expert and research director at the Centre for
| International Climate and Environmental Research in
| Norway, said in an email to E&E News.
| jsomau wrote:
| I like Carlin. I like the joke. The problem is we're
| taking a huge number of species with us. That is after
| all what makes Earth special compared to any other barren
| rock.
| oliveshell wrote:
| And with your comment, we now have both unhealthy extremes
| represented, viewpoint-wise.
|
| We need not spend all day tearfully mourning how Earth once
| was, yet we also clearly shouldn't tarmac the whole thing and
| turn it into a Costco.
|
| It is very possible to embrace industrialized existence while
| acknowledging the importance of, and promoting, biodiversity.
| chitowneats wrote:
| Biodiversity is important insofar as it facilitates human
| flourishing. Flowery poetry about An Idealized Past doesn't
| have anything to say about that. Therefore, it is
| uninteresting.
| rektide wrote:
| Biodiversity & ecosystems seem obviously existentially
| important to the long term survival of humanity. Even if
| we're not sure what exactly would kill us (first) from
| acidifying the oceans, killing all the trees, melting the
| ice-caps, & killing most wild mammals.
|
| The enormous risk we've created against there being a
| human future. I for one hope for a sustainable
| flourishing, and find any other avenue not merely
| uninteresting, but actively malicious & evil. Global
| gaian awareness is absolutely required, or you are just a
| primitive wild mammal.
| oliveshell wrote:
| I'll admit here that I was biased by the apparently
| dismissive tone of your initial comment. This is a fair
| point that I agree with.
| chitowneats wrote:
| And I'll admit that I'm exhausted by eco-nostalgia and
| eco-doomerism, which led me to comment dismissively. I
| understand how that can be off-putting and unpersuasive.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| So you believe that the whole world is only important to
| the extent that it serves us?
| anonporridge wrote:
| Only? No. Mostly? Yes. For at least a couple of reasons.
|
| Because we humans seem to be the only creatures that have
| ever existed that have even been able to pose the
| question of what makes Earth "important". That level of
| consciousness is special and worth protecting and
| expanding at all costs. It's more special and magically
| generative than any other creature that we know to exist
| or previously exist.
|
| Because Earth without us is a dead man walking. The
| complete extinction of all complex life on this planet is
| already baked into the future as the sun expands and
| boils the oceans in 0.5-1 billion years. It seems to me
| exceedingly unlikely that any other spacefaring
| civilization will emerge after us if we fail. Even if you
| think other forms of Earth life are more "important" than
| us, the continuation of our human civilization is the
| only chance this other life has at having a longer
| existence (on other worlds) than this baked in timeline.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| That is a very reasonable stance, and I appreciate it
| being articulated. Baked into it is an appreciation and
| respect for life and consciousness, which I respect.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yes, with all that implies. There may be other habitable
| planets in the universe but I do not care about them. I
| care about Earth because that is where I live. I don't
| think there is any meaningful trade-offs to be made
| between what is good for Earth the planet and what is
| good for humans.
|
| That doesn't mean that I want Earth to be a hyper
| industrialized Forge World, but my reasoning is because
| that would not be a good place for humans to live.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| > Yes, with all that implies.
|
| I'm having a hard time responding in a way that meets the
| Hacker News guidelines. I don't want to attribute to you
| the implications (slavery, slaughter, environmental
| destruction, etc), because I have a hard time believing
| you actually mean that (or perhaps you thought I was only
| referring to the mineral aspect of the world and not the
| life that lives in it). I understand that you might
| object to slavery being implicit in your belief (because
| you make a special carve out for only humans mattering)-
| but understand that up until recently, in many cultures
| many people were not considered human.
|
| The most substantive thing I can suggest is to read
| Hegel's master slave dialectic, and consider the upshot-
| that by viewing others as only being instrumental, you
| inhibit the development of your own consciousness.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You're right that I do reject your implication of
| extending the ethics of human slavery to non-human life
| and granting it shared tenant owner rights to the Earth.
| I find it surprising that you struggle to respond to this
| idea because it is not a fringe one. I don't think it is
| an exaggeration to say that it is the predominant View
| held by humans on this planet about their relation to the
| natural world.
|
| As an aside, I also reject your claim that slaves were
| historically considered subhuman on factual grounds. For
| most of human history slaves were considered humans and
| subjugation was justified simply as a matter of having
| the might and means to do so. In a historical context,
| the idea of slaves as subhuman is primarily a New
| Philosophy developed in the Antebellum South.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| > I find it surprising that you struggle to respond to
| this idea because it is not a fringe one. I don't think
| it is an exaggeration to say that it is the predominant
| View held by humans on this planet about their relation
| to the natural world.
|
| I think you are correct that this is the predominant view
| held by humans, but it doesn't mean it is justified. It
| is hard to dispute it quickly without invoking something
| like god, which is something I am uncomfortable doing.
| What I can do is start with something like Descartes's
| meditation. Without his ability to invoke god, we are
| left with the paradox of the world being ultimately
| unknowable. Likewise if you start from the idea that
| there is a real world. At best, you become committed to
| the paradox that we are living within our own
| imaginations somehow embedded in our brains. From any
| other starting point, at some point in our reasoning we
| are led to a deep paradox, which seems to be a defining
| aspect of our consciousness. Ultimately, the world is
| unknowable and the best we can do is be honest, humble
| and do our best with what we have.
|
| That leads me to why I reject what we both consider to be
| the predominant view held by humans. If we trust natural
| history, we can see that the mammalian anatomy has been
| conserved for at least 65 million years. Mammals adapted
| to all kinds of environments, grew large, grew small,
| etc, but fundamentally, the mammalian anatomy remains the
| same (even the whales have essentially the same anatomy
| as any other mammal). As long as the physics of our world
| remains constant, function is determined by structure.
| That means that the same functions that underlie our
| experience underlie other mammals. The only major
| difference with humans is that we grew out a section of
| our brain (the neocortex), which gives us greater ability
| to visualize, synthesize the input from our senses,
| develop speech, and interrupt other parts of our nervous
| system (i.e., like using meditation to quiet the mind,
| dampen the response from the amygdala, etc).
|
| With that understanding, it seems deeply wrong to
| subjugate other consciousnesses. It seems like instead of
| having a "tenant owner rights" view of Earth, we should
| view ourselves as gardeners cultivating the planet out of
| a sense of beauty and love that coincides with helping
| ourselves and other creatures.
|
| That is one thing I am deeply committed to. Humans exist
| as the most exquisite and beautiful branch of life and
| are the greatest care-givers on this planet. We not only
| give of our bodies like the other mammals to nurture, and
| develop groups to care for individuals, we also care so
| much that we care about truth, and continue to grapple
| with it even when it seems out of reach.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > because you make a special carve out for only humans
| mattering
|
| Your relating of an anthropocentric ethics to support for
| slavery does not make sense to me. What does the previous
| horrors of human slavery have to do with our relationship
| to non-humans?
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| Similar logic
| DangitBobby wrote:
| There may be two extremes, but that doesn't mean both of
| them are wrong or "unhealthy".
| oliveshell wrote:
| I'm sorry if I didn't communicate clearly.
|
| I think extremism is obviously very clearly unhealthy by
| definition.
|
| I have yet to encounter a single scenario in my entire
| existence wherein the fully-to-one-side-of-any-spectrum-
| you-might-imagine "extreme" point of view on how to solve
| any particular problem has been the best, most useful one
| (to my problem-solving brain, at least).
|
| We humans tend to do this thing where, when we're
| presented with evidence that a previously-held position
| might be wrong or harmful, our opinions massively
| pendulum-swing the other way and we have a hard time
| finding clear, nuanced middle ground.
|
| "Turns out sunlight gives you cancer, so stay indoors all
| the time! Avoid all sun exposure at all costs!," we say
| for a time. But no, it turns out that even though it is
| technically _always_ doing harm to your DNA, sunlight is
| inescapably necessary for life and healthy immunological
| function.
|
| Life is complicated, and extremes are simply shit for
| problem-solving.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Are you familiar with the Overton window? According to
| it, you will never see successful extremes because what
| is considered extreme changes before the world does. I
| think you can find plenty of examples of historical
| extremism that is now normal (and "healthy").
| oliveshell wrote:
| My use of the word "extremism" may have been slightly
| misleading; by "extremes" above, I don't mean "ideas or
| movements popularly considered extreme", but rather
| literal extremes in the space of possible solutions to a
| given problem.
| CalRobert wrote:
| For what it's worth, I am not advocating some sort of
| primitivist disease-ridden Utopia where bears roam by my
| door. I am saying that we have utterly destroyed huge
| swaths of the animal kingdom and maybe should try not doing
| that.
| oliveshell wrote:
| I completely agree-- and, upon re-reading, it wasn't
| entirely fair of me to cast your comment as representing
| an "unhealthy extreme", so I'm sorry about that. That's
| what I get for trying to make a nuanced point hastily!
| orcajerk wrote:
| Ponder this question - if humans were removed from the Earth,
| would evil cease to exist?
| CalRobert wrote:
| People can differ but philosophically I find it distressing
| if our own comfort means obliterating virtually all
| wilderness.
|
| More worryingly, though, we are dependent on the natural
| world and its diversity. And even things like "the world we
| have now but with less meat in our diet" or "the world we
| have now but it's easier to walk, cycle, or take public
| transportation to work" would be an enormous improvement.
| magwa101 wrote:
| [dead]
| immmmmm wrote:
| i'll drop that here:
|
| "Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction
| signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines"
|
| Gerardo Ceballos et al., PNAS (2017)
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1704949114
|
| open access, almost 1k citations.
|
| have a nice read.
| cleanchit wrote:
| Related:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDYRorgSt-8&ab_channel=SamO%...
| chromaton wrote:
| Here's a cool infographic showing all the animals, and comparing
| that to all the other forms of life.
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in...
| cjlars wrote:
| A simple tree chart is a good way to understand this:
|
| https://images.app.goo.gl/2CBG9Se4vPB1jaMY9
|
| Animals in general are only a tiny sliver of life on this planet.
| What most people think of as 'nature' i.e. large animals that a
| child can name are vastly outweighed each by worms, molluscs,
| bacteria, insects, and of course -- by a couple orders of
| magnitude -- plants.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| Thanks for that. Now can we please break down the arthropods
| into spiders and non-spiders so you can alleviate my fear that
| spiders rule over us on this planet.
|
| My fear of spiders is valid- all I'm saying. There must have
| been some bad shit in our history to instill such a fear into
| us..
| timeon wrote:
| There is either not much of wilderness.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Relevant infographic xkcd "Land Mammals" (circa May 2018):
| https://xkcd.com/1338/
| rob74 wrote:
| That was my first thought too - maybe Randall can publish an
| updated version based on this new data?
| h2odragon wrote:
| I still think we fail to perceive entire orders of life, in the
| air around and above us, in the earth below us; as well as having
| a very tenuous grasp of the mechanics of the ecosystems on our
| scales that we can observe and participate in.
|
| Surely if we're going by weight then the bacteria rule the earth,
| right?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Apparently its anaerobic bacteria in the crust below us.
| Because they don't just have the thin crust to inhabit, they
| have miles of 3D rock.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Yes. We're just their department of transportation.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2018/5/2...
|
| Looks like plants outweigh it all by a lot.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Lichen covers ~7% of the surface area of Earth.
|
| "They can even live inside solid rock, growing between the
| grains. It is estimated that 6-8% of Earth's land surface is
| covered by lichens. There are about 20,000 known species."
| jmclnx wrote:
| To me, it is insects. And maybe their close relatives in the
| oceans and lakes.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| They're talking about total mass. So I think insects and
| whatever is in the ocean would probably be in very last place.
| According to them, it's white-tailed deer.
|
| > The heavyweight champion is that furtive denizen of parks,
| meadows, and forests throughout the Americas, the white-tailed
| deer. It accounts for almost 10% of the total biomass of wild
| land mammals.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Truth of it's the opposite. Even now general estimates put
| insect and fish biomass at significantly eclipsing mammal
| biomass. Insects might be small, but there are so many of
| them that it doesn't matter.
| garborg wrote:
| Indeed. Insects, then fish, then everything else, per
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-
| make-110000...
| krisoft wrote:
| > Insects, then fish, then everything else,
|
| That is not how I read your source. It seems to be
| plants, then bacteria, then everything else.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There's a species of small fish in the deep ocean that may
| have as many as a quadrillion individuals.
| goatlover wrote:
| The ocean has a far greater area than the land, and life
| there has been around much longer. Why would you think it
| would be in last place?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Insects outweigh us 17 to 1.
|
| https://www.vox.com/science-and-
| health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...
| andreofthecape wrote:
| I did a nature guiding course a long time ago, and according to
| that the biomass of termites in the Kruger National Park
| exceeds the elephant population there.
| archgoon wrote:
| [dead]
| adversaryIdiot wrote:
| As the same story goes, the 1% control everything.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| In the (excellent) _What We Owe the Future_ , William MacAskill
| discusses some ways of considering and weighing values on
| different lives, one of which was counting neurons. I don't have
| the book in front of me, but from my notes at the time:
|
| >There are 8 billion humans and 135 billion farmed animals, but
| in total humans have 700 million trillion neurons while farmed
| animals have in total only 20 million trillion. Still, there are
| maybe 600 trillion wild fish, which collectively have 12 billion
| trillion neurons. And that isn't even counting nematodes.
| nealabq wrote:
| Future super-AIs may cite this as justification for their
| actions.
| turing_complete wrote:
| I love that humans rule Earth. It's awesome.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| They don't. They rule mammals, but insects and bacteria still
| outnumber and rule humans.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| I can see the argument that bacteria rule humans due to our
| microbiome, but how do insects "rule" humans?
| myshpa wrote:
| Relevant:
|
| "Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of
| humans. But we can turn things around by reducing the amount of
| land we use for agriculture."
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline
|
| "Over the last 1.5 million years, the mean mass of hunted mammals
| decreased by more than 98%. The evidence points toward one main
| culprit: humans."
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/large-mammals-extinction
| biomcgary wrote:
| Humans are the primary face of natural selection in the modern
| world? For mammals, certainly, but probably also for most non-
| microscopic species.
| chubot wrote:
| The fact that humans, our pets, and our livestock vastly outweigh
| wild animals was pointed out in Sapiens, and that struck a nerve
| for me.
|
| The best survival strategy for any species is to be useful to
| humans
| bilsbie wrote:
| I've always been curious if earths total biomass is increasing
| and by how much.
| willis936 wrote:
| On what timescale? I think on the correct timescales biomass
| tracks what the environment supports. I'm not a geologist or
| biologist, but I have the impression that estimating biomass
| from fossil records is difficult. We do know that the oxygen
| boosts of the Proterozoic eon and Cambrian explosion caused an
| increase in biodiversity.
|
| Given the lemma "life will thrive in a comfortable environment"
| it should thrive more when the environment is better.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Should evolution play a role? Life evolving to better process
| available resources over time?
|
| What about a simple cumulative effect.
| ajuc wrote:
| It should, and quite significantly. Since WW2 ended thanks to
| Haber-Bosch process we burn hydrocarbons stored for millions of
| years to suck nitrogen from air and turn it into artifical
| fertilizers that then are used by our farmed plants and animals
| to make biomass that wouldn't be there otherwise.
|
| > Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated
| from the Haber-Bosch process.[59] Thus, the Haber process
| serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling
| the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to
| 7.7 billion by November 2018.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
| bilsbie wrote:
| I see what you're saying but is that a significant number
| compared to all the microscopic sea life, algae and soil
| microbes?
|
| I have no idea.
| ajuc wrote:
| Agricultural land area is 38 percent of the global land
| surface, about one-third of this is used as cropland [1].
| Land is 29% of Earth [2].
|
| So we use 1/3 * 0.38 * 0.29 = 3.6% of Earth's surface for
| farming crops and 7% for cattle. Most of that is fertilized
| every year, and then the surplus fertilizer is flushed to
| rivers and seas and ends up in the oceans fertilizing algae
| there. [3]
|
| Basically we're all in the food chain, it doesn't matter
| where you add the new nitrogen - it goes everywhere.
|
| [1] https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/127
| 4219/ [2] https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/earth.htm
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/climate/nitrogen-
| fertiliz...
|
| EDIT: there are also negative effects, so it's not so
| simple. I'd still estimate that the global biomass should
| increase over time.
| korroziya wrote:
| >"Shockingly tiny" fraction of our planet's mammal mass is wild
| species
|
| How is this shocking? It should be obvious. Who is shocked, the
| scientists or us uneducated peons?
|
| It's bad enough when journalists inject marketing-level emotional
| words into news stories, now peer-reviewed academic journals have
| to stoop to this?
| Pxtl wrote:
| This is why I always find pastoralists ridiculous. They fantasize
| about us returning to nature, thinking that you can swap out
| factory-farmed cattle with wild buffalo and support the same
| population.
|
| Any greener way to eat involves a hard move away from animal
| agriculture altogether towards more veg-heavy diets, or mass
| death.
|
| As always, people with Malthusian/Thanos ideas are cordially
| invited to go first.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Tzt wrote:
| "Wild mammals"
|
| nice one, journalism
| happytoexplain wrote:
| What are you referring to?
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