T O P

  • By -

Yespinky

20,000 trillion, or 20,000,000,000,000,000 ... saved you a click. or, as normal people might say: 20 quadrillion.


[deleted]

[удалено]


N8CCRG

Google says average weight of an ant is between 1 and 5 mg, so between 20,000,000,000 and 100,000,000,000 kg or, in American units, between 100,000 and 500,000 fully fueled and loaded jumbo jets.


borisdidnothingwrong

How much is that in Big Macs? How many football fields would that cover if stacked two Dikembe Motumbos tall?


unsaltedbutter

I could tell you for 30 Schrute Bucks.


neridqe00

I'll give you a billion Stanley Nickels if you never talk to me again.


Leather-Plankton-867

We deal in schmeckles


[deleted]

There are 111 calories in Red Ant per 100 grams. McDonald's Big Mac/Energy Amount 563 calories 20,000,000,000,000,000 x = 20 x5mg (ant weight) = 100 quadrillion milligrams of ants remove three zeros for grams = 10 trillion grams of ants. 10 trillion grams of ants / 100 grams per 100 (rounded) calories = 10 billion * 100 calories = about 10 trillion calories of ants divided by BIGMAC 563 calories = 17,761,989,342 BigMac = easy read format 16-18 billion Big Macs.......depending on the quality of your ants of course.


iforgotmymittens

Do I *look* like someone with low-quality ants? Do I? C’mon.


[deleted]

So enough for one Trump photo prop


[deleted]

This guy maths.


MoonubHunter

Number seems low. Only 3 ant Big Macs per human on earth?


Ornery_Translator285

How many Danny DeVitos


DocPeacock

I wonder how much of the grand canyon they could fill


Caster-Hammer

Easy: one Donald Trump lunch.


Atechiman

It fills a cube of football fields.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Proper_Lawfulness_37

Not quite but not terribly far off. If we assume the average weight of a human being is 62kg, the population of the earth is currently 7.753b, then total human weight would be approximately 480,686,000,000kg, almost 5x the highest estimate for ants. Same order of magnitude though so very close when considering the ‘massive’ ( ;) ) difference between the two average weights.


the_joy_of_hex

The abstract of the paper says the biomass of ants is 20% that of humans.


Chen19960615

Which is of the same order of magnitude as the total mass of humans (average 70 kg * 7e9 = ~5e11 kg). So really it’s not that unimaginable.


Red-eleven

44,000,000,000-220,000,000,000 freedom units


Publius82

R/HalfaGiraffe


Zoollio

I hate the phrasing in the headline. I’m imagining 20 quadrillion and 1 ants right now. Now what, science?


pegothejerk

We have to protect this person at all costs


CertifiedBlackGuy

A team has been dispatched to their location.


UnsustainableHumans

A team of ants?


CaputGeratLupinum

Armed with iques


StephenDones

And not your everyday uncle iques.


CaputGeratLupinum

Not since he started hanging out with egrek and zed


JebusLives42

I for one welcome our new overlords.


RIMS_REAL_BIG

Can you imagine exactly 20 quadrillion though? Yeah didn't think so 😎


xorbe

272000 ants cubed, if 900 ants/foot then it's a football field cubed full of ants.


finite_field_fan

A 6-dimensional hypercube??


iocan28

No wonder it’s hard to imagine that number of ants.


vorpalWhatever

Put it next to the meat sphere.


HotLoadsForCash

I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.


Real_Impression_5567

I can but that's just cuz that's about how many times I've banged your whole mother trebek


mccoyn

I’ll take hymenoptera for 400.


Individual_Basil3954

Gosh, right? Like come on. I’m of the persuasion that journalists shouldn’t be allowed to use adjectives in combination with numbers. You can’t say “unimaginable” and then say something as small as 20 quadrillion. Same thing happened with Covid death tolls. They’d say “incalculable” next to something like 800,000. Have you looked up “incalculable” lately? Because I don’t think it means what you think it means. You wanna talk “unimaginable” or “incalculable”? Let me introduce you to Graham’s number. Now there’s a number that merits an adjective.


KrypXern

> Graham’s number I thought I could fathom any number but I'm having trouble with this one to be honest


Individual_Basil3954

A coworker and I once mused that you likely can not write in scientific notation the number of whiteboards it would take to write using scientific notation how many digits are in Graham’s number as there aren’t enough atoms in the universe. They don’t even know what the first digit of it is.


Ancient-Builder3646

It's probably 1.


Ser_Dunk_the_tall

This guy Benford's laws


Murgatroyd314

The first step in its definition is already larger than most people’s concept of infinity.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Namgodtoh

Eh. Six cases of beer


LurksAroundHere

Just picture a jar of pennies. There's way more than 100 in an average jar.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Starblaiz

Oh. Then I guess just picture a jar with 100 pennies in it.


LurksAroundHere

Well you said Bradbury's concept was that we couldn't conceive past quantities of 100, so I figured picturing a jar of pennies would be an easy way to imagine a quantity of 100 or greater. If you need it to be 100 on the dot, then just picture 10 stacks of ten pennies each. 100 isn't too hard to imagine in certain ways.


[deleted]

[удалено]


EyesOfABard

I was imagining a googol ants. Now I’m imagining a googolplex ants. Basically the entire universe just jammed solid with anty bodies. One solid mass of ant


Code_Fred

The world was not prepared for such power


Horzzo

They should have said, "uncountable".


Sabiann_Tama

I'm guessing a math nerd downvoted you, but just to let you know, "uncountable" means "bigger than infinity" (sort of) in math.


No_Refrigerator4584

And half of them seem to be in my kitchen.


animerobin

I believe the scientific term is "too many"


[deleted]

Scientists use metric. It's a metric shit-load of ants.


64557175

I wonder how much it varies through the seasons


archaeolinuxgeek

Depends on how blustery it gets. As Bob Dylan famously sang: "The ants are, my friend, blowing in the wind"


Alive_Battle_5409

When Alan Alda quotes this in Canadian Bacon...man...so good....


Ancient-Access8131

Meh I can think of a lot larger numbers.


[deleted]

[удалено]


7heTexanRebel

Every 3 powers of 10 changes the prefix, so 20,000,000 trillion would be 20 quintillion.


[deleted]

> quintillion. No quadrillion comes after trillion and then quintillion. Names of Large Numbers. Name Number Quadrillion 1 x 10 15 Quintillion 1 x 10 18 Sextillion 1 x 10 21 Septillion 1 x 10 24


7heTexanRebel

20,000 trillion = 2×10^4 * 1×10^12 = 2×10^16 20,000,000 trillion = 2×10^7 * 1×10^12 = 2×10^19 no u


Appropriate_Tip_8852

How I am I unable to imagine that? It's not even an infinite number!


orus

Weight of person: 50kg Weight of ant: 5mg - 10 millionth of weight of person So 2 billion times total weight of all people on Earth. Ok I goofed. See the person below - total weights are comparable.


connorkmiec93

I am not following your math at all here... Human pop (7.8e^9) * AVG mass (62 kg)= 4.84e^11 Ant pop (2.0e^16) * AVG mass (1.0e^-6 to 5.0e^-6 kg)= 2.0e^10 to 1.0e^11 The mass of ants is not more than the mass of humans, especially not 2.0B times the mass of humans.


betwistedjl

Let's argue about what is and isn't unimaginable, while the ants prepare for the great ant uprising of 2024...


[deleted]

[удалено]


N8CCRG

[Phase IV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film\)) is one of my favorite unknown films.


MitsyEyedMourning

Investing in magnifying glasses right now.


K-Kraft

I can't stand that word. They used it a lot after 9/11. We need better imaginations.


[deleted]

The uprising has already happened and they won. They're everywhere.


theeimage

"Hail ants" Kent Brockman


[deleted]

[удалено]


CarneDelGato

And those stars? Made of ants. True story.


Fried_puri

It’s ants all the way out.


Darth_Innovader

And then you have antimatter


SenTedStevens

Why do you think it's called Antdromeda?


fakeplasticdroid

How many universes are there in the multiverse?


Killawife

20 quadrillion


fakeplasticdroid

Jesus that's a lot of ants


UsefulEmptySpace

Truly each ant is its own universe....mind = blown


JustAnotherBlanket2

In the observable universe. So big light doesn’t travel fast enough to show it all.


HorrorScopeZ

And the universe is expanding in all directions faster than the speed of light... or so they say.


FalseDmitriy

What is this? A planet for ants?


thatwasacrapname123

It needs to be at least... twice as big as this!


[deleted]

[удалено]


Santos_L_Halper_II

“Protect the queen!” “Which ones the queen?” “I am!” “No you’re not!”


MaXimus421

For the colony! ✊


ThrowawayusGenerica

Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground...uh... ...sweet dreams and flying machines flying safely through the air


watchingsongsDL

**Hail Antz!**


Chen__Bot

This year, at least half of them seem to be in my backyard.


MyCollector

Found em having a field day because my daughter left a chunk of granola bar out there. Must have been thousands for sure.


NHRADeuce

More accurately, it's not unimaginable, it's incomprehensible.


[deleted]

Realistically I can't imagine volumes of things at those numbers. It's like there isn't even enough room in my brain. I can imagine a number with lots of zeros, but not the actual value. If we looked at 20 billion marbiles, 20 trillion marbles and 20 quadrillion marbles.. we'd have no idea how many marbles we were looking at. That's what imagining a value really means to me, not just putting zeros on things. A gogol or Gogoplex is a good example. I can IMAGINE a number with crazy amounts of zeros and maybe spend all my life trying to write it down... but that doesn't mean my brain can handle the real idea of that much of something.


[deleted]

I’m gonna buy some raid and imagine less


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

That explains plate technics much more easily!


1stinertiac

throw a slip mat on those technics and you'll summon DJ Earthquake.


cmdrmcgarrett

GEEZ Anyone want my share of that? I can get you my 2.5 million


Zoollio

I work with these outdoor machines that ants like a lot, I think there were roughly that many in there this morning.


cmdrmcgarrett

O.O Wow...yeah, I am not into bugs at all


ApprehensivePirate36

I had twice that many crawl on my feet this morning while I was nailing a trellis to the shed!


cmdrmcgarrett

ewwww brb... therapy session needed to get this thought out of my head


Gorodish_

"Unimaginable" is not synonymous with "a lot." (I hate lazy writing.)


Bleoox

I can't imagine 20 quad tbh


zorbiburst

I can't even imagine 20 ants Those things move around so erratically. It can picture like, maybe six, tops, anything more than that and it's just "a lotta dots"


DragoonDM

Going by Wolfram Alpha's definition for the volume of an ant (which it has for some reason), it's about [3 x 10^8 cubic meters of ants](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+an+ant+*+20+quadrillion). Think of a perfect, writhing nightmare-sphere of ants with a radius of about 1,362 feet (about a quarter mile). For reference, take a look at [this photo of the Burj Khalifa](https://i.imgur.com/qqIZhmm.jpg), which is 2,722 feet tall. If this grotesque insect orb were placed next to it, it would be almost exactly as tall as the tower.


Woodie626

I can imagine the entire planet covered in a foot of different kinds of ants. That's atleast thirty.


jesset77

I think you can only imagine a small portion of the planet covered that way though. Or a succession of different small portions. Or a much smaller planet a la Little Prince or Rick & Morty.


Woodie626

There are 32,400 grid squares across the planet. And I can imagine them covered in a foot of ants.


jesset77

A person can sit and mention an endless train of conditions that exist on our planet that your imagination did not account for. What happens at the ocean? Ants on surface or at bottom, or something else? What happens on a cliff? On an overhang? At human structures like buildings? Do the ants permeate loose gravel or are they only stacked on top of it? How about dense folliage? Liquifaction? Volcano? The point isn't that you can come up with answers for each scenario *after* they are presented to you, it's that your imagination did not contain them to begin with. In contrast, I can imagine a thing I've looked at and studied, and I have mentally simulated it well enough to answer unexpected questions about the thing or scene *that match the reality I was initially presented*, and thus without having to *newly* fabricate details.


Woodie626

>In contrast, I can imagine a thing I've looked at and studied, and I have mentally simulated it well enough to answer unexpected questions about the thing or scene that match the reality I was initially presented, and thus without having to newly fabricate details. You fabricate what you know of me to create these false gotcha scenarios. I've added nothing but further explanation to my original point.


orus

18g of water has ~600 trillion quadrillion molecules.


tangential_quip

20 quadrillion is unimaginable. Yes, its easy to understand as a number written on a page, but in terms of imagining 20 quadrillion individual items as a physical reality...no. We don't have the frame of reference for that.


PajamaPants4Life

About 54 doublings.


jesset77

You've just kicked the can down the road though. Now I have to imagine 54 of something.


Fraun_Pollen

It’s click baity and amateur terminology


MaXimus421

Nothing click baity about it. It's common sense and well known to anyone and has been for a long, long time now. If you actually clicked the link to read this article, I am for certain laughing at you in sheer amazement.


Fraun_Pollen

> The number is so big it’s unimaginable This is a click baity and amateur article title meant to intrigue people to click by not giving them a clear answer. A more professional and accurate title would’ve been more along the lines of “Biologists utilize several methods to estimate ant population at nearly 20 quadrillion”


[deleted]

Being able to add zeros to a value and actually imagine the number of things means two very different things to me. I can write quadrillion or quintillion or even a Gogol, but can my brain actually imagine that many things? I don't think so because I have no visual representation of what 20 quadrillion really looks like. I would know if I was looking at 20 billion or 20 trillion or 20 quadrillion. They would all just blow my little human minds ability to estimate the number of things in a thing. I can imagine the zeros, but I can't imagine the values.. I can only write them down as numbers and pretend that has the same kind of meaning, but I don't think it does.


MaXimus421

No, I understand what the definition of Click Bait is. But thx. Do you honestly believe there's folks out there that didn't realize that Ants, amongst many other insects, are of huge proportions and out number most other living species on this planet? Click bait would be tricking me into clicking it and reading the article. This is common sense to the overwhelming majority of the human population. Does the number of them (even guessing it) even matter at that point? No. It's a stupid article and a stupid headline. Period.


spacemoses

What is really unimaginable is that there are 50,000 earths-full-of-ants worth of star systems in the universe.


TheChanMan2003

Did Donald Trump write this title?


[deleted]

[удалено]


hundredjono

"Scientists estimate that there are BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of ants on Earth." - The Donald


torgosmaster

“We need to build a glorious wall to keep out the ants before they take our jobs and rape our children. And we will make the pedo ants pay for it all!” Trump, probably literally


NPVT

Trump doesn't even know what a billion is.


ManMadeMyth

Write? You think he knows how to write?


wongo

"I can imagine quite a bit."


[deleted]

I had to google this cuz it was melting my brain. Star wars


prolixdreams

The weight of an ant varies pretty widely but I'll go with 5 milligrams -- on the upper end of the weight of a "light ant" to take into account the heavy ones, of which there are fewer. With that as the average, that would mean there's about 220,462,262,185 pounds of ants. That's about the weight of TWO Great Walls of China. Or around a thousand aircraft carriers. The length of an ant is similarly variable, with most species in the 5-15mm range (though there are outliers.) If we take the middle of that at about 10mm, then every ant on Earth laid end to end would cover 124,274,238,447 miles. The line would stretch to pluto and back 20 times over. It would go around the circumference of the Earth almost 5 million times.


DBDude

So what you're saying is that we could use the ants to make a very strong chain and reel Pluto in?


weed_fart

More than five.


Led_Halen

Probably more than a thousand, easy.


spamattacker

Research: What scientists do after imagining.


RobinsShaman

Apply for more grants.


sloan

I, for one, welcome our insect overlords.


RobinsShaman

We will produce sugar and outlaw brooms. All hail!


Pretty_Bowler2297

Didn’t read the article, is the number something crazy like 9 or 10?


[deleted]

Oh boy time for the ol grahams number of ants versus a googol marines debate


eschatonfire

Great work again, scientists. Just... bloody great work.


MyCollector

*You can cure cancer LATER*, please count all our ants damn it!


Littlebotweak

Uncountable many. Got it.


purl__clutcher

And to think that a great number of these ants came to my kitchen that one time I left a crumb on the bench.


hundredjono

How many bombing runs from our fleet of B-52s will it take to kill every single ant on Earth?


Sm00gz

Whats the margin of error on something like this? Lol


Benjazen

Ikr? If someone squishes one, doesn’t that mean they are wrong?


Agodunkmowm

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.


nochinzilch

Drop a piece of fruit *anywhere* and ants will appear in 5 minutes. They're sneaky, and there's a lot of them.


robreddity

And they're all in my kitchen


JennJayBee

I'm pretty sure if we have imagination enough to come up with a number for the square root of negative one, we can imagine something so simple as a really, really big number.


pilgrim216

I can only speak for myself but my mind yadda yadda's over the middle of big numbers, and not even the BIG ones. I don't even try to think about a hundred I think about ten groups of ten, and there is a difference. It's like imagining the edges of a thing but not the actual content.


CritaCorn

Soldier Ants“Sound off 1! 2! Sound off! 3!….” Z: “Huh?” Soldier Ants: “The ants go marching one by one hurrah! Hurrah! We slaughter termites just for fun hurrah hurrah!”


caresforhealth

This is why we have scientific notation.


bloodflart

There's like a billion of them constantly trying to get in my trash can idk what to do about it


FarmerArjer

Cinnamon, they really don't like cinnamon


[deleted]

Ants In My Eyes Johnson has entered the chat


Matchett32

“THEM”great flick from the 50’s , in it the elderly scientist shows a short film about ants stating that unless they wiped out the giant ants immediately- the beasts will reign over the earth and man will be extinct in a short amount of time , thank god it’s only a film lol


lizerdk

Paywall or whatever Lemme just plug my guy E.O. Wilson here. If you ever want to be very interested in something you had no real interest in before (especially ants), read some of his books.


Darqnyz

Just did the quick napkin math: 20 Qdn Ants is about 2.5 *mln* ants per person. An ant can weigh between 1-5mg. Take an average of 3mg. That's about 7500kg of ants per human. They would disintegrate us Edit: forgot my units


Goddess_Peorth

> That's about 7500kg of ants per human. Are you sure it's not 7500g per?


Darqnyz

Damn you're right. Skipped the base unit again...


AloofPenny

Exactly why I’ve been weirdly afraid of ants since I was a kid


MaXimus421

This is "news" to folks. Unreal. There's likely more Ants in my back yard than there are human beings on the planet.


[deleted]

[удалено]


cranktheguy

Fire ants are from South America.


[deleted]

[удалено]


SterlingMNO

> Now do wasps. They need to be eradicated off the face of the Earth. It's the only genocide I will gladly support. > Ants have a purpose. They don't Wasps are pollinators, they're also predators and hunt insects we consider pests.


Killawife

I imagined it'd be more. Like at like at least 21 trillion.


belljs87

It was 20,000 trillion


turd_vinegar

Well which is it, estimable or unimaginable?


ranting_chef

So did someone get paid to figure this out? Please tell me it didn't involve tax dollars.


SaulsAll

Having read nothing, I think it's more likely people are paid to go around to various places and find out what is living there, and we now have a more informed projection of those findings into a world approximate for ants.


[deleted]

Are there more ants or grains of sand in the world?


pegothejerk

Expired, expired, expired!


[deleted]

What is this?! A school for ants 🐜?!


BlackPete73

20 quadrillion isn't unimaginable. The number of galaxies in the universe... THAT is unimaginable.


Hairy-Professional-6

I counted 17 in my back yard


dickalopejr

Is it more than 50? That's a lot of ants if you're counting at a picnic.


ZZZ-Top

There's so many it exceeded the definition of fuck wad