The title makes me immediately think of the question "How many ants live off of Earth?".
How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#22At an average length of 3.7mm, that's around 46 billion miles of ants, if they march end to end. more than 10x the distance to Pluto for reference. Please check my math! (and if you want something crazy, do the same math for all of the bacteria on earth...)
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#23They are also a speciies capable of Teamwork , Farming , engineering , Forming governing system , Building sky scrapers . No other animals come close to that. What if they would be considered as Non Human Intelligence?
Certainly they are. So when Karl Nell says "a higher form of Non Human Intelligence" is interacting with humanity, I doubt he means ants. When Tim Gallaudet says "advanced non human intelligence" are interacting with our assets in the oceans - I doubt he means dolphins. Tho both are undoubtedly NHI. The actual "tech civilizational level" NHI are often described as insectoid. Interesting to consider that a collectivel…
I think you'd enjoy Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#24This number doesn't surprise me. I live within the Arctic circle and there are a lot of wood ants [0] in my area. Among the various reasons wood ants are fascinating (aphid farming, formic acid spitting/squirting) is that they live in very large mounds that can reach several feet high. Each of these mounds are estimated to have a population ranging from 100,000 to over one million and there can be dozens of them with…
Growing up in an area with big ant hills, I just can't wrap my head around the fact that there are more ants by weight than all other mammals combined. Because I can imagine a small forest with multiple of these ant hills which undoubtedly have millions of ants, but at the same time an apartment building with a few humans in it would surely outweigh all of those ants. So where are all the ants hiding?
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#25The title makes me immediately think of the question "How many ants live off of Earth?".
Well, don't leave us hanging. How many do live off of Earth?
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#26This number doesn't surprise me. I live within the Arctic circle and there are a lot of wood ants [0] in my area. Among the various reasons wood ants are fascinating (aphid farming, formic acid spitting/squirting) is that they live in very large mounds that can reach several feet high. Each of these mounds are estimated to have a population ranging from 100,000 to over one million and there can be dozens of them with…
Growing up in an area with big ant hills, I just can't wrap my head around the fact that there are more ants by weight than all other mammals combined. Because I can imagine a small forest with multiple of these ant hills which undoubtedly have millions of ants, but at the same time an apartment building with a few humans in it would surely outweigh all of those ants. So where are all the ants hiding?
They specify wild mammals. Humans are like 600 megatons I think.
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#27The title makes me immediately think of the question "How many ants live off of Earth?".
Well, don't leave us hanging. How many do live off of Earth?
I don't know — that's my question! Anybody know?
I sort of recall some ant experiments going to the ISS, but are they still there?
All spacecraft that I know of are well-cleaned before launch, and there's not much for food sources, but have any gotten into a survivable location on an inhabited module?
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#28We're lucky they haven't banded together against us, I'm not sure we could win against those shear numbers!
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#29All of them!
Re: How many ants live on Earth? (2022)
#30They are also a speciies capable of Teamwork , Farming , engineering , Forming governing system , Building sky scrapers . No other animals come close to that. What if they would be considered as Non Human Intelligence?
The ants in a colony has mostly identical DNA.
So you can think of it as a single organism that has a "distributed" body.
From that perspective, the individual ants correspond to cells or organs, and it becomes both less and more fantastic :)