3 ms·

Its a mostly made-up number, until all of them are actually identified.

bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
It's made up, but definitely a better estimate than both 2^100 and the current number of known species. I imagine one way to obtain a coarse estimate would be fitting the number of known species over time to a curve like N-e^-kt curve and then using N as the estimate. Coarse, but not terrible if you can quantify the expected error.
- pompino 3y ago
  People have come up with vastly different answers to this question. That to me heavily implies "i don't know" is the only right answer at this time. "Researchers have come up with wide-ranging estimates for how many species there are. As May points out, this ranges anywhere from 3 to well over 100 million – many orders of magnitude of difference. Some more recent studies estimate that this figure is as much as one trillion." https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there
bo1024 3y ago
Of course any estimates that scientists make are "made up". But estimating the number of unseen species is a very old problem in statistics with a lot of rigorous research, including an important approach by Alan Turing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_species_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_species_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_estimation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_... For intuition of how this is possible, imagine you sample k butterflies independently and all of them come from different species. By the birthday paradox, if there were less than k^2/2 different species, you would expect to see at least one pair from the same species, so you can estimate that there are more than k^2/2 different species.
- deleted 3y ago
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- pompino 3y ago
  With statistics you can estimate anything and everything, in multiple ways. I'll start giving due importance to this approach when the 9 million number is shown to be accurate. Until then, color me skeptical.

It's made up, but definitely a better estimate than both 2^100 and the current number of known species. I imagine one way to obtain a coarse estimate would be fitting the number of known species over time to a curve like N-e^-kt curve and then using N as the estimate. Coarse, but not terrible if you can quantify the expected error.

pompino 3y ago
People have come up with vastly different answers to this question. That to me heavily implies "i don't know" is the only right answer at this time. "Researchers have come up with wide-ranging estimates for how many species there are. As May points out, this ranges anywhere from 3 to well over 100 million – many orders of magnitude of difference. Some more recent studies estimate that this figure is as much as one trillion." https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there

bo1024 3y ago

Of course any estimates that scientists make are "made up". But estimating the number of unseen species is a very old problem in statistics with a lot of rigorous research, including an important approach by Alan Turing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_species_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_species_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_estimation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good%E2%80%93Turing_frequency_... For intuition of how this is possible, imagine you sample k butterflies independently and all of them come from different species. By the birthday paradox, if there were less than k^2/2 different species, you would expect to see at least one pair from the same species, so you can estimate that there are more than k^2/2 different species.

deleted 3y ago
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pompino 3y ago
With statistics you can estimate anything and everything, in multiple ways. I'll start giving due importance to this approach when the 9 million number is shown to be accurate. Until then, color me skeptical.