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.

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.

This assumes a pretty basic human sci-fi version of aliens. Any species capable of physically getting here would also likely still see us as a non-threat to anything other than ourselves.

Why nuke us from space when we're the best reality show in this corner of the local cluster?

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.

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...

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.

Do you know what all those megafauna, jungles, and forests had in common? They rely on or emit oxygen, and oxygen originated with cyanobacteria. [1] When cyanobacteria emerged they basically just genocided the entire planet because their emitted oxygen was extremely toxic to most of everything else alive at the time. It'd be like if plants today started emitting gaseous arsenic and flooded the oceans and atmosphere with it. So you end up having your enlightened aliens longing for a planet that exists only because of 'pollution' on a scale that caused a mass extinction event. We should work, within reason to preserve what we have, but the self loathing is nonsensical.

Humanity isn't perfect but it's pretty awesome, and may ultimately be the only reason that the species that exist on this planet are able to continue to exist. We're overdue for another major external mass extinction event, but this time humanity will hopefully be able to mitigate its effects. And as we expand our reach into the cosmos we'll certainly be bringing along our furry friends, tasty friends, helpful bacteria, and many others along for the ride. And they'll continue to thrive far beyond what might otherwise be their fate, left to their own devices on Earth.

If anything I'd think our enlightened aliens would be worried about us managing to kill ourselves before we reach into the stars. We're probably quite close, on both accounts. Hopefully we win the right race.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria

"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.

I wanted to prove you wrong by picking five random points on Earth and showing that, in the grand scheme of things, most of the planet is still relatively wild and we bias towards thinking we rule the place because most of us cluster together away from the wilderness.

Point 1: Eastern Mongolia, middle of nowhere. Check! gorgoiler proven correct!

Point 2: Sri Lanka. Some roads nearby. Ok. But still mostly natural landscape.

Then Sweden and Greece. Roads and towns all around. Peru, next to a road. The next two in Australia and Argentina came back fairly wild, albeit with large stripes of deforested land (power lines or fire breaks?).

But no, I was wrong and you are right. We’re everywhere.

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

Fifty thousand years is basically nothing evolutionarily, yet from the outside Earth would look like it had undergone a planetary regime change driven by one species

I think life in the Universe evolves along some predictable pathways. Aliens are probably waiting for us to evolve to the next step, which involves global cooperation and trust. They probably look at us and we remind them of follies in their own histories.

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?

One problem with that, is the assumption that the alien explorer is organic or concerned with organic life at all.

It could be that greater than human intelligence aliens are more likely non-organic artificial intelligence based, who care not for the organic or are much more interested in seeing the origin story of their non-organic AI cousins on other worlds.

I think "they" doctored with our DNA to begin with. So "they" may feel a little responsible :)

That the "dominant" species of animal is domesticated, make it any less "dominant" -- I'd say so. You cannot be truly dominant when you are living in fences made by, and eating food provided by, another species.

Why should they nuke an apparently dominant species? Don't you think they might have some sort of Prime Directive? Killing off something because you don't like it is such a 10yo boy thing to do. I expect more from an alien race that is capable of traveling far and observing other aliens.

> 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.

I walked around my house and didn't see anyone. I think this is strong evidence that I'm the only person on this planet.

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

> The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is

Why would they care? maybe they're aware of millions of inhabited planets and life isn't anything special for them.

Also, humans are a dominant and invasive species right now, but in geological times, our dominance couldn't be nothing more than a spark. Scenarios for destruction of civilization are numerous (nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, super volcanos, asteroids) and very possible even in the short term. Trump could do it tomorrow morning if he feels like it.

Looks like cancer to me.

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

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.

Lets not forget that the average lifespan of chickens (not egg laying hens) is something like 6 weeks. 6 very horrible weeks ending in "humane" slaughter. It is simply put undignified. Industrialized torture.

Onion parody: consumer product diversity exceeds biodiversity:

https://theonion.com/consumer-product-diversity-now-exceeds-...

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

> More than 2/3rds of the world's avian biomass is poultry

I wish humanity had a smaller influence on nature..

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

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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.

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

And we use one cubic mile of oil every year.

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+...

Nightmare fuel for the next Terminator or Matrix sequel.

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

That makes sense, the boreal taiga forest of Eurasia and North America covers over 10% of earth’s land.

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.

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.

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.

If only Haldane knew about how many microbes there are. He'd probably say god is on the side of the plagues.

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.

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.

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?

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

should we count bones then?

> Without humans, there would surely be a lot fewer cows.

Technically there probably wouldn't be any cows without humans, maybe wild aurochs [0] or whatever evolved from them without our meddling might be around instead.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

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.

Not a plant, and too many different species.

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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.

>Purely rhetorical--with sugar cane being so dominant, why are we turning corn into corn syrup again?

The same reason we sold a "whale oil" replacement for lamps as "food". Money. It always comes down to money.

People leveraged on corn industry desired new avenues of profitability.

Those have been estimated and they are mentioned in TFA.

Viruses have a very small mass, but bacteria and archaea have a mass many times greater than animals (including humans and domestic animals).

Nonetheless, it is likely that bacteria and archaea have a mass many times less than plants, even if the mass of bacteria and archaea that live at great depths in the earth is poorly known.

The reason is that even if plants have a total biomass that is actively engaged in metabolic processes which is smaller than the total biomass of bacteria, they have a many times greater biomass that has little activity and has structural purposes, e.g. intracellular membranes, cellular walls, support tissue like wood, etc.

One of the greatest evolutionary success stories there is. They've offshored the thinking and labor. They have this monkey species willing to clearcut forests to set up entire cow city apartment complexes, with running water, power, hvac. These monkeys train for years just to be able to medically treat the cows. They are not only under no threat of predation, diseases are being studied and combated by teams of monkeys in research institutions across the planet. They've even managed to get a cleaner death than the monkey: they go instantly via pneumatic airgun in relatively good health while the monkey will probably waste away in poor health over some days of agony and/or morphine. Monkeys monitor stress levels of the cow to make sure they don't get too high and foul the meat, while the monkey works their fellow monkeys into all sorts of stress based health conditions. The cow lineage is also continually being improved via all tools of genetic engineering the monkey has painstakingly developed, but will refuse to ever use on their own species due to ick factor.

cow genes achieved terrific success

cow organisms and social layer on top - probably not (unless we decide to uplift them one day)

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

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.

We had and still have campaigns to protect them from extinction

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

LOL

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

Plastic is a species?

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.

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

Last time I checked all human living belong to the homo sapiens specy

How is it debatable?

There is a more complete research paper that estimates the biomass of all living beings.

While humans together with domestic animals exceed the mass of all other terrestrial animals, fish are estimated to exceed the mass of all terrestrial animals (for now, but they are decreasing).

Nonetheless, all animals together are much less than bacteria, which are less than plants.

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