A useful visualisation of life on Earth is a picture in Encyclopaedia Britannica. (To the right on a desktop browser, Relative biomass in gigatons of carbon).
But that's by weight, which is kind of a weird measure.
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.
> But in terms of population, we're still far, far outnumbered.
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.
The point is, that when you've got a selection of thousands[0], having one element in that selection outmatch all the others put together by a factor of 1:10 by one metric (biomass), and clearly winning by a margin of more than one magnitude in another metric (number of individuals), that certainly indicates that that particular element holds an overwhelming dominance.
Saying that we're "far outnumbered" is really nothing but Mark Twain's third form of lies.
What are you talking about. That's not what the conversation was about.
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.
Why does it depress you that we as a species fared well thus far? Is there intrinsically higher value to a planet where humans struggle but the quagga dominates on all continents?
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?
> 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."
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 just have a gigantic feeling of loss. So many huge ecosystems, so many of the things we things we grew up with reading about in books and seeing in those beautiful Attenborough narrated documentaries are just coming to an end, forever. Replaced by the same human sprawl as everywhere.
That there are so many of us and so few of everything else isn't necessarily "faring well".
Not the parent, but I'm also frequently saddened by loss of wildlife and my "point" is definitely not that it would be better if humans never proliferated in the first place. I'm almost certain you can understand this sentiment. Most people have had to leave a home, break up with a significant other, change careers, in such a way that it ultimately worked out for the better and it was necessary to achieve some goal, but the loss at the time still brings about grief.
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.
This graphic is fascinating. I'd be really interested to see a breakdown of relative biomass in human-farmed crops, food compared to livestock feed compared to lumber
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.
People are generally shocked at how important bacteria are inside the human/animal body and outside in nature for the balance of the environment.
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.
I remember reading that we kill 2 billion chickens a year to eat, although this site[1] says more like 66 billion chickens a year (and their source[2], although on their graph they divided the chicken figure by 1000)...
66 billion chickens! I just had fried chicken for lunch, but damn, we humans are savages aren't we...
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
Thinking about it now yeah thats wild. For bacteria sure, I get it - but for viruses that's really surprising.
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).
Are they animal viruses or all viruses? There are a lot of bacteria viruses, bacteriophages. I can see the viruses being noticeable percentage of bacteria mass.
There is sufficient qty. of life on Earth to affect geophysics, cf. []. And actually has been for some time. When you see bands of iron in a geological record, it's because archaeobacteria were filling the ocean with oxygen and causing iron to oxidise. When there was no more room for dissolved oxygen in the sea, the excess took to the skies... the Great Oxygenation Event
I'm sorry but how, other than colorful language, is it useful to consider every cell as a universe? And how does that put us at the center of the universe? Equating cell to universes here does nothing of value.
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.
Amusingly, the cell is about halfway between the radius of the observable universe (4.4 * 10^26 meters) and Planck length (1.6 * 10^-35 meters), at between 10^-4 and 10^-5 meters, or 0.1mm and 0.01mm.
About the size of a eukaryotic cell, in particular.
You seem to be abusing exponential notation there. Halfway between 0 and 4.4 * 10^26 is 2.2 * 10^26, quite a bit larger than a cell. Halfway from Planck length should be just about the same given it's indistinguishable from 0 on that large of a scale. Even if you wanted to use logarithmic scaling, half of 4.4 * 10^26 would 4.4 * 10^13. Negative exponents are fractional. The Planck length isn't actually a negative number.
>Even if you wanted to use logarithmic scaling, half of 4.4 * 10^26 would 4.4 * 10^13
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
I actually like the thought, and ChatGPT totally misses the point. Cells don't have to be a universe to be the center of the universe. I think more to the point, each of us is the center of the universe, because the universe is relative.
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.
I don't think that having "universe" be a relative term is very useful. I prefer it as a topological one: If you're considering two universes, it's not just that they're very far apart, it's that there are no paths between them.
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.
Also regarding the "center" of the Universe: the reason that "everywhere is the center" is because the Universe exists in higher than three dimensions. Asking "where is the center of the Universe" is like asking where the center of the surface of a balloon is. The center of the balloon is not on the surface in the 2D Universe.
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)
These are the properties of our universe, and of course we'll only ever have one to study. But words change, right? Atoms are no longer indivisible. Black holes are no longer fully black. So I'm really going for the properties that a thing must have in order to be considered a universe, so we don't end up with a change that's obnoxious. I'd hate it if "universe" eventually just meant "any old really big astronomical structure".
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.
That’s silly. The center of the surface of the balloon is obviously the little part where you tie it off. I’m glad I could solve this universe paradox for you and all physicists in just a few seconds. Maybe I’ll get a Nobel Prize.
Consider a balloon with no tie. Like a basketball or something. The point is that the surface is elastic and the sphere is expanding. Balloons make the best metaphor for that imo. If you can think of a better one I'd be glad to hear it.
Only other thing I can think of is a "rubber bubble" which... is a balloon.
I often think of it as a soap bubble, but I have to stop and check myself: are we choosing spherical because that's simple, or because we have evidence? It could be toroidal or something even more bizarre.
I see it as a sphere because of the uniform expansion of the Universe. The Universe might just be so large that any measurable difference in the rate of expansion is outside the observable Universe, which could suggest a shape other than a hypersphere, but I don't subscribe to that school of thought.
Doesn't make sense to me. How can you consider each cell to be its own universe? Cells contain molecular machinery and their own metabolism, but I don't see how to draw this connection.
NOTE: I am just a layman when it comes to biology and physics.
When you use the second meaning of word universe: "a particular sphere of activity or experience." Your body is an universe, your room is a universe, everything that has some border and activity inside can be an universe with this definition. Original poster is expressing awe in complexity of biological cells.
But there's probably way more cells or cell-like things in the rest of the universe with quadrillions of planets than the one planet on which we happen to be (unproven, but simply very likely if you think about it given that ours managed to appear)
System of systems of systems... might be more accurate, i.e. the ecosphere is a system of living beings that are systems of organs that are a systems of cells... as a first, simple approximation.
Now count all hairs on planet Earth. There’re more hairs in the universe than stars. Each hair is a universe of its own. Also not bad? Now repeat for everything else that’s meaningless.
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.
https://www.britannica.com/science/biomass