5 ms·
> 200 billion stars is still quite a bit more impressive than 3 trillion trees. That assessment itself seems rather arbitrary, too. It is indeed fun to think
by sshine 2y ago
> 200 billion stars is still quite a bit more impressive than 3 trillion trees.
That assessment itself seems rather arbitrary, too.
It is indeed fun to think about these things.
Like how the number of fungal species on Earth keeps growing the better we get at counting them: conservative estimates of the past were at 500.000, and current estimates are at 2.2 to 3.8 million species: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/microbiolspec.funk-0052-2016 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/microbiolspec.funk-0052...
Or that Norway's coastline is arbitrarily long depending on your ruler's precision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
- BurningFrog 2y agoThe number of species also depends a lot on what you count as a separate species.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoWhich is largely dependent on how many PhD students we mint.
- sshine 2y agoCertainly. There’s a story from an old Joe Rogan interview with Paul Stamets about one species that mycologists had got wrong because of the way they sampled it: another species was “chasing” it, and sampling had hit the chaser. Who knows, maybe some fungi chase themselves!
- BurningFrog 2y agoWhat does "chasing" mean here?
- sshine 2y agoI have no idea, I'm not a mycologist. But what I understood was that one fungus was trying to consume another. It's episode #1035 at around 1h53m: https://www.youtube.com/live/mPqWstVnRjQ?si=AgxlSe4pXB4Fe9lT&t=6822 https://www.youtube.com/live/mPqWstVnRjQ?si=AgxlSe4pXB4Fe9lT... https://podscribe.app/feeds/http-joeroganexpjoeroganlibsynprocom-rss/episodes/712d60d43eda458a666176421dc7a7c8 https://podscribe.app/feeds/http-joeroganexpjoeroganlibsynpr... It starts a discussion about how the FDA is incompetent to make rulings about cordyceps mushrooms because the thousands of peer-reviewed articles about them predate a more precise sampling method that uncovers that there are multiple species (or anamorph strands of the same species, I'm unsure).