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Are there more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way? (2016)
- lupire 2y ago(maybe, estimated)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chrisfosterelli 2y agoThis made me think "wow, maybe the universe isn't so big after all", and then I remembered there are somewhere between 200 billion and 2 trillion other galaxies out there.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dustingetz 2y agoa billion billion stars is the same order of magnitude scale as a billion billion seconds, which is about the age of the universe. Or, a billionth billionth second (one attosecind), which is the amount of time it takes for an electron to change orbitals, and also the speed of light across the diameter of a Hydrogen atom.
- Prbeek 2y ago"which is about the age of the universe" The more I think about the big bang the more it doesn't make sense because it would mean that the universe came out of nothing.
- mr_mitm 2y ago100 billion is the only number in cosmology you need to remember: stars in the milky way, galaxies in the observable universe, and age of the universe (in dog years).
- bufferoverflow 2y agoNo. The estimated number of galaxies in the observable universe is between 200 billion and 2 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy The number of stars in our galaxy is estimated between 100 and 400 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
- 3eb7988a1663 2y agoWhat's an order of magnitude between friends?
- saagarjha 2y agoClearly you’re not a cosmologist if you care about digits of accuracy ;)
- HPsquared 2y agoOr 10^10, close enough
- csomar 2y agoThat's the "observable" universe. We don't know exactly how big the universe is and whether it has a limited size in the first place.
- izzydata 2y agoWhile 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.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoStars are big but not complex or necessarily unique. A single tree had more complexity in it than every star.
- imoverclocked 2y agoReference? 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.
- andsoitis 2y agoIn terms of biological and ecological complexity, a tree is vastly more complex, as it exhibits life processes, growth, interaction with other organisms, and adaptability. 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.
- TheRealNGenius 2y ago[dead]
- CMCDragonkai 2y agoA tree could be at a higher entropic level of reality than the sun. Just like we would consider a tiger to be more "interesting" than a tree.
- mr_mitm 2y ago
- bohare1 2y agoThankful for heartwarming posts like this, especially on a day like this. Thank you, sincerely.
- Pigalowda 2y agoI couldn’t believe it either. God I hate OSU.
- Modified3019 2y agoWhat is “OSU”, and why do you hate them today?
- mcny 2y agoOhio State University won its game of American football against University of Oregon to advance to CFP semifinals.
- thehappypm 2y agoThe Ohio State University (American) football team won a big game today
- Pigalowda 2y agoHe seemed upset about today - but I’m not sure where he’s from in the world. Was he upset about the terrorist attack in the US, Ukraine war, the ME, the South Korean airline crash, AI, climate change, american politics, etc etc. So I picked a relatively benign occurrence of Ohio state winning and jokingly misinterpreted his original comment.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y agoComparing numbers of things is itself an odd thing to do. Humans poop as many poops as there are trees on the planet every year. Why not compare those to stars as well? And so what?
- LeonB 2y agoOne of the weirder types of comparisons is comparing “the number of combinations” (Eg …in a lottery game) to the quantity of a thing (e.g. grains of sand on the beach) Although: Comparing that type of comparison to the general case of comparing quantities of different countable objects (“trees on earth versus stars in our galaxy”) is itself a different type of comparison that is even weirder. Maybe?
- wizzwizz4 2y agoComparing comparisons at different meta-comparison depths is, I would agree, weirder, though comparing comparisons that do not compare themselves is weirdest of all.
- psychoslave 2y agoNow we can wonder how many quantified comparison were either done, and how many categories of quantified comparison we could produce out of it.
- MrVandemar 2y ago... for how much longer? Population pressure and agriculture and industry means that land is continually being cleared. I urge anyone with the ability, plant a tree this year — maybe even a couple! You'll feel good about it, and it may well outlive you. The birds and insects and other life will be happy about it. The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago; the second best time is right now.
- bluedino 2y agoI wonder how many trees were on earth a couple hundred years ago before mass deforestation
- brabel 2y agoThe number of trees (assuming it's correlated with the "green" area of the planet) has grown significantly in the last few decades[1]. Only a small part of the overall land of most countries is used by agriculture[2], normally less than 30%. Cultivated lands add up to 17,235,800sqkm, "other lands" add up to 131,701,100sqkm. You seem extremely pessimist given the actual numbers. [1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/co2-is-making-earth-greenerfor-now/ https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/co2-is-making-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
- FabHK 2y agoAround 15 bn trees are felled each year.
- thinkingemote 2y agoTrees will plant themselves in most places if we give them the space and time to do so. Small bits of land can be changed by man to be hospitable to trees and here planting by hand would be the only way. Usually tree planting efforts are for man, not nature. There are some good activities where we can help by watering, weeding around seedlings and protecting from pests which goes beyond planting. Tree planting feels and is good and engages ourselves with nature. Nature itself can do nature stuff without our help.
- domoregood 2y agoHow long before Snopes debunks this Snopes article?
- twothamendment 2y agoThat is kinda crazy to think about. I see the milky way and a lot of trees where I'm at. How big does the tree have to be to be counted as a tree? In spring we had a carpet of Douglas fir trees starting. I could put my hand down and cover 20 or so! I spoke to the forester yesterday about the plans to thin. They are all marked out now and I'm the spring it goes to auction. And IF for some reason it isn't stopped by legal action, it will get cut in the next 1-5 years! My property borders the public land in question and we'd love to see the fire risk reduced and stronger, healthier trees remain. I can't believe how long it takes and that people might want to stop this. We can thin it and take care of it or watch it all burn.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brundolf 2y ago> One popular fact included on numerous list of "science facts that sound wrong" Amazing
- 1zael 2y agoThis is an analysis of 3-dimensional space. I'm waiting for the 4-dimensional analysis, which I'm sure will push it by orders of magnitude more
- grahamj 2y agoNeat! I wouldn't have guessed we had that many trees.
- dataflow 2y agoRemember it's a lot easier to visualize these numbers if you take the cube or square root. A trillion is 10^12 which is 10^4 cubed or 10^6 squared. That means a cube with 10,000 items along each dimension, or a square with a million items on each dimension.
- psychoslave 2y agoI think you overestimate a bit human average level in cognitive visualization capacities, if 10,000 items is to be considered as easy to hold as a clear image in mind. :’D There’s a reason a myriad that initially really mean 10,000, is also associated with a countless number or multitude.
- HPsquared 2y ago1000 in a line is okay (millimetres on a metre stick, or pixels on a screen) but 10,000 is too much.
- dxdm 2y agoI think you can still get an intuition. 10000 people standing next to each other so that each person has half a meter to themselves will give you a line of 5 kilometers (just over 3 miles). That's a relatable distance - for example, the length of Central Park is 2.5 miles, apparently. It's not perfect, but gets you somewhere. Squaring and cubing makes it less relatable, but it's still a lot better than a completely abstract number IMO. Thinking about this just now made me realize both how long a line of 10000 people can be and how densely you can pack them in a square - or how many people (theoretically) fit into 5x5 kilometer area.
- HPsquared 2y agoOr as a timescale, 10,000 seconds is about 2h46m, the length of Dune 2.
- HPsquared 2y agoAnd a metre stick with millimetre or centimetre divisions works well for the different side lengths. Like a billion is a cube of length 1 metre, made of cubes 1mm wide. You can also roughly scale down by factors of 3 (square root of 10, roughly) by considering a 30cm ruler in place of the metre stick.
- deadbabe 2y agoIt’s crazy that we don’t think of wood being so much more precious than gold considering how long it takes for the universe to produce the amount of wood we have on earth compared to gold which has just always been around
- ralfd 2y agoFun fact: We dont know where the Gold in the Universe is coming from. https://www.space.com/where-did-gold-come-from.html https://www.space.com/where-did-gold-come-from.html
- adrian_b 2y agoMore correctly, we know where the Gold in the universe comes from, in the sense that we know what kind of nuclear reactions generate gold atoms and where such nuclear reactions may happen. The problem is that with our current models about the probability of such nuclear reactions and about the celestial bodies where such reactions occur, the predicted amount of gold in the universe is less than the observed amount. So there is something wrong in the theoretical models or additional observations must be made, until theory will match with observations.
- Sniffnoy 2y agoMeanwhile, there are estimated to be possibly a quadrillion individuals of bristlemouth species in the genus Cyclothone... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothone
- K0balt 2y agoThat is wild.
- Asraelite 2y agoI've seen this claim multiple times and I don't believe it. It seems to be based on a single study where researchers sampled one small part of the ocean and then extrapolated wildly. Multiple sources also claim that there are around 3 trillion fish in the world in total. How exactly do you reconcile that?
- forgingahead 2y agoAh, the "drag right in Excel" method. Can get infinite anything.
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago> an estimate for the number of trees on Earth of 3.04 trillion We still need more trees to fight climate change in the 21st century and according to the United Nations since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
- Archelaos 2y agoWhat counts as a tree in the behind-a-paywall Nature study? Also each little sapling? What about these very tiny artic trees, like salix herbacea?
- FabHK 2y agoThat’s in the linked paper: > Following almost all of the collected data sources, we define a tree as a plant with woody stems larger than 10 cm diameter at breast height (DBH).
- K0balt 2y agoI wonder how that compares to the number of transistors we have made so far.
- amai 2y agoThe national debt of the USA stands at 30 trillion dollars. This is more than stars in the milky way and all trees on earth combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...
- amai 2y ago"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." -- Richard Feynman
- psychoslave 2y agoSure but a currency unit is somehow arbitrary, at least when it’s not backed by something at which you can point to, like weight of gold in a vault. You can point to a star or a tree. Or even a coin or a banknote. But you can’t point to an abstract amount such as a national debt.
- amai 2y agoSo the price for gold is about 80000 $ per kg. So the debt is equal to 375000 metric tons of gold. Estimates say that in all history about 244,000 metric tons have been found: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world So the USA couldn't pay back its debt now even if it had all gold in the world.
- vardump 2y agoSay USA had 375k metric tons of gold and wants to use it for paying the debt. This would just crash the gold price and the debt would be nowhere near serviced.
- chongli 2y agoWell if the US had all the gold in the world then it will have cornered the market in gold. This would cause the price of gold to skyrocket and the US could trickle some gold into the market for immense profit. In this way the national debt could be serviced easily. Who cares about paying off the principle in a lump sum when you have a guaranteed revenue stream like that with gold?
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoOn land, most biomass is in trees. In the oceans, it's mostly in arthropods and fish! (Bacteria aside, that is...) Biomass distribution of Earth estimates: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 Trees outweigh everything else, and: A worldwide census of the total number of trees (32), as well as a comparison of actual and potential plant biomass (17), has suggested that the total plant biomass (and, by proxy, the total biomass on Earth) has declined approximately twofold relative to its value before the start of human civilization. The total biomass of crops cultivated by humans is estimated at ≈10 Gt C, which accounts for only ≈2% of the extant total plant biomass (17). Humans haven't yet put such a dent into fish biomass, but we're getting there.
- shireboy 2y agoStarting with 3 trillion trees, the reduction needed to reach 400 billion trees is 3,000,000,000,000−400,000,000,000=2,600,000,000,000 trees. Given that 15 billion trees are lost each year, the number of years required is 15,000,000,000 / 2,600,000,000,000 =173.33 years. Therefore, it would take approximately 173 years to reduce the number of trees to 400 billion if no new trees are added and 15 billion are lost annually. Of course trees are added, and it’s not clear if the 15 billion number is net loss. Assuming not, the number of years could stretch to infinity.
- drzaiusx11 2y agoReminds me of a realization I had in undergrad with some back of the envelope math: There are more unique combinations [1] of a 16x16 1-bit grid/bitmap than there are: * Cells in your body (10^13) * Stars in the known universe (10^24) * Atoms that make up our solar system (10^56) 1. 2^256 == ~1.2x10^77