Why would they be surprised? They'll have evolved from some previously unremarkable animal, and presumably have also caused habitat damage.

It's possible we're an extraordinary species somehow, but it's rather more likely we're unremarkable, and the aliens will just think we have particularly bad taste in television.

Does that strike you as an unusual path for an intelligent species to become space faring? We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.

I would expect any civilization to exterminate or at least cull the creatures that pose a threat and to cultivate those that are tasty or useful.

Add to that, the previous species you identified as a particularly clever pack animal formed a relationship with the monkeys and now looks like this:

https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/200...

At a bare minimum, yeah, you quarantine that whole fucking species.

For a funny take on this, read With Friends Like These by Alan Dean Foster. Aliens are scared to death of humans, and with good reason. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35128.With_Friends_Li...

Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.

Reminds me of the Simpson’s episode where Lisa grows a society.

By definition, evolution selects for species that are good at making more of themselves. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that intelligent species tend to overcome that evolutionary tendency to spread fast enough for us to be weird.

Do we really want to make contact with meat?

Or the aliens did the same thing we did?

"The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy."

Or they are cybernetic lifeforms and are applauding our current trajectory.

More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best... and that's if anyone's looking for the faintest of faint traces.

The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.

So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.

And the birds suffer the whole time in giant sheds with no daylight, and then the majority of that entire 2/3rds biomass is slaughtered in a very distressing way every 6 weeks or so.

People then eat chicken and feed the remaining 1/3rd seeds on a bird feeder in their garden.

I didn't know they had Panda Expresses in the wild

Aren't there more just about any retail store than pandas?

Land mammal biomass: https://xkcd.com/1338/

There was a great post on this subject by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...

I usually say if every human being on the planet were placed in Texas, it would be less dense than Paris as an argument against an area being "too crowded", but this is an even more jarring comparison.

Dimensional analysis like this is a weird way to think about a large number of people. It depends a bit on what the average weight of a human, but yeah, that's at least pretty close to true.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%280.5+miles%29+%5E+...

that sounds absurd, what about air conditioning and sewage systems at such population densities?

And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.

Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.

There is a Discworld joke about this. After being introduced to the God of evolution, God shows off the magnum opus he has been developing, the cockroach.

I read somewhere that some scientists now think there may be more species of wasps than beetles. Not least because many species of beetle seem to have a species of wasps that prey on them.

This is because when they would lay a sheet on the ground and shake the branches of a tree, they would often find more species of beetles than anything else. However, they may have been extrapolating a bit far from the few places they tried this.

English words like "goodbye" are contracted from longer expressions after centuries of common use[0]. Reading your phrase "gave human written" made me wonder how this phrase would contract if it were still in use centuries from today.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2ew2UHaCuY

funny that i didn’t think about it till i read your comment. and then realized i read the entire thing. checks out.

on the other hand i don’t think I’m physically capable of reading the AI landing pages of every new product on HN.

That was actually covered by Randall Munro of XKCD:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/80/

Supposedly, at its peak, all the covid viruses on Earth amounted to about half a teaspoon's worth.

Grasses mentioned in the article: rice, wheat, maize and sugar cane. I think all of them likely beat the bamboos because there are too many different bamboo species, not a single dominant one.

It's talking about species that currently exist. As far as we know there is only one currently existing species in the genus Homo.

If the dead cells were shed, I might agree! But they're not.

This is like counting the dead skin cells that are still attached, which (sure enough!) does count toward animal biomass.

It serves an important structural purpose for them. Similar to corals.

A lot of the wood is used for transporting water - vital to keeping the trees alive high up in the branches. And it is structural - so should we subtract 70% of the bone weight from a mammal since it is non-living structural support?

Individual whales are large, but there aren’t that many individuals.

I wonder if populations have fully recovered from the whale-oil era.

Giant squid may be a bigger part of biomass than people think. I saw some estimates on sperm whale catches of giant squid and they may be eating thousands. There are far more of them than you might think, and they have a 3D living space. Sperm whale may be designed to hunt them.

LOL

It’s nice to see he separated the sheep and the goats.

I'm not sure what cubic volume vs 2D surfaces means to you, but these comparisons are by mass, not volume. Plus, anaerobic bacteria would only come up on top if you counted all of them as one species, which they are not.

Why is that group inherently more massive than waterborne bacteria?

I think the limiting factor in the amount of cellular mass that a volume can contain is probably either carbon content or nitrogen content.

Both maximize in the oceans near to shorelines, with smaller local maxima near some vents.

On land, I'd expect a gradient in both, decreasing with depth, but there's probably more CO2 100-m down in water than in rock.

The same argument could be had for fish, since they inhabit the volume of water, instead of the thin land surface of earth.

Bristlemouths are a family, made up of 32 distinct species. The question is dominant species...