Remember 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Meanwhile, there are estimated to be possibly a quadrillion individuals of bristlemouth species in the genus Cyclothone... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothone
I'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?
This 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.
a 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.
"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.
100 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).
"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."
It seems totally arbitrary to compare the two. Is the national debt of smaller countries (with higher debt/gdp) OK because they’re below the number of stars and trees?
I guess it’s is in the spirit of the original article though…
If you think like that, then everything is arbitrary. Even the rules of logic are "arbitrarily" chosen. Sometimes you have to fix some notions to gain anything at all.
Not exactly. Only for quanta that are not inherently countable.
Let's not lose track of what this tread is about, shall we? It's "what is larger, the number of stars in the milky way or the national debt?" One of those values is countable. How many stars? The other one isn't. How many debts? That question doesn't make sense. You need to introduce a unit, and the choice of that unit is arbitrary.
Any State can unilaterally decide it will withdraw all debts it has ever contracted, and ta-da, no-one changed the definition of a debt but there is no debt anymore (which most likely wouldn’t be free of social consequences though).
On the other hands, if a group of humans want to declare that there is no tree or no star in the universe, the only trick they can leverage on to shrink the count is to change the definition of these words (ta-da, good bye Pluto).
Say 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.
Well 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?
Another pair of traders, Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga, had more success cornering the onion futures market [1]. It caused such a crisis in the price of onions (and significant onion spoilage) that Congress passed a law specifically banning the trade of onion futures contracts. One of the most bizarre trading stories and regulatory actions I’ve ever seen!
That 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.
While 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.
> 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...
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.
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).
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.
In 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.
Another point of view: it took over ten billion years for the first tree to form in the universe. The first stars were present only after a couple hundred million years.
There is no way to know this, universe can be chock full of trees of some form on certain type and position of the planet. Later than first stars for sure, but thats about it with our current knowledge
Our current knowledge points to the first planets appearing around one billion years after the big bang (heavy elements need to be bred in stars in sufficient quantities first and be ejected in super novae), and evolution taking another billion years to produce eucaryotic life, then another three billion for plants to form.
So while obviously we can't say for sure, I stand by my original statement when speaking in terms of orders of magnitudes. I think it's a sensible argument.
If we substitute something else in this argument, we can see that it’s trivially not true for arguing complexity:
You can have stars without lead, but you can’t have lead without stars; Lead (the element) is produced by stars but is itself not more complex than a star.
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.
He 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.
It’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
More 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.
Starting 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.
> 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.
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.
The 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.
Trees 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.
Comparing 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?
One 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?
Comparing comparisons at different meta-comparison depths is, I would agree, weirder, though comparing comparisons that do not compare themselves is weirdest of all.
