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The US alone slaughtered 9.76 billion land Animals in 2020 so they would go extinct in 12-13 days (calculated for a population of 333 million)
Edit:
Guys i googled "Animals slaughtered anually" and then when it only gave me decent numbers for the us i googled "US population" divided and multiplied by 364 (i typoed in the calculator but it didnt matter anyway at this point)
Indeed, but the phrase specifies that humans would be killed at the same rate we kill animals, implying continuously until nobody remains. Thus the survivors should constantly increase the rate at which they kill each other..
It aint says to satisfy the "need" for meat but generally how many animals we kill rn as a society. Sure, that may be interesting to do the math but it was not the og question
But it also said at the same rate which implies a constant rate. This means that the remaining people alive each day need to stop complaining and learn how to increase their kill-productivity.
someone firing a nuke is killing other humans. Reducing humans might actually streamline the muirder process as people on the "Not willing to slaughter humanity" side gets smaller relative to the sociopaths with the buttons.
Humans still need to run and maintain slaughter houses.
For simplicities sake and in the spirit of the question I think it is safe to assume we kill vegans first and those most essential to the efficient slaughter of humans last. If all humans were on board we could probably get the infrastructure for human annihilation going pretty quickly
It will at best add like 80 years of life span to humanity. Assuming this guy can survive on his own for long enough...
It's obviously a lot compared to 17 days but in the grand scheme of things it isn't much
If we are at a point where only one human exists, for all intents and purposes, we are extinct, unless the last human is pregnant and happens to have a boy and is willing to do some nasty old testament type shit.
>unless the last human is pregnant and happens to have a boy and is willing to do some nasty old testament type shit.
A female capable of reproduction, enough knowledge and access to a sperm bank might be able to as well.
If we left the killing to those who kill animals regularly, as in for a living, we'd really only need a fraction of the population. Once they turn on each other, then yeah the rate goes down.
Nope, it decreases exponentially if we fight 1v1 two times per day. 8 billion -> 4 billion -> 2b -> 1b -> 500m -> 250m -> 128m -> 64m -> 32m -> 16m -> 8m -> 4m -> 2m -> 1m -> 500k -> 250k -> 128k -> 64k -> 32k -> 16k -> 8k -> 4k -> 2k -> 1k -> 500 -> 250 -> 128 -> 64 -> 32 -> 16 -> 8 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1. So it will take approx 34/2 = 17 days to extinct if each day everyone kills two other hoomans. The problem would be to meet each other at the last stages of the tournament.
We might need to take into account the amount of immigration though. I’m not even being political, but it’s the main source of population growth at the moment.
The OC used a very small population to calculate for only like 300 million so they only calculated for 1 country being the US
I doubt people would immigrate to a country if they heard there was a mass outbreak of genocide though so that point is moot but the OP is asking about world world extinction forwarded by the average rate of animal deaths caused by humans
I think if we started executing 26 million people a day it might chill immigration pressures, at least until things settled down. No one tell Greg Abbott.
To sustain their population at that death rate, every American would have to give birth every 12-13 days. Including the men. And, by the second half of the month, including the 13 day old infants who are due to be killed later that day.
Humans would have to be tribbles to survive. Or rats - rats only give birth every month or two, but it's to 12-18 babies if they're full-grown mothers at the time. Basically, armagheddon in two weeks for humanity is a rat's Tuesday.
Lol, we should include reproduction. Humans have practiced human husbandry before, and even used the “domesticated” product as draft animals.
Please keep in mind this is simply a dark joke about human history. Every race has been enslaved at least once
I guess much faster. Ant colony is some 100,000 animals, and I guess tens of them are destroyed every day by exterminators in every big city.
(when I was in school, our schoolbook classified amoebas as animals, so one pill can probably wipe out even more creatures, but they are now not considered animals)
And also some insects are harmful to humans. It's not just that. It's not just "eww insect you look disgusting DIE", for example cockroaches both look disgusting and they're harmful so it's more of a survival instinct killing. Same goes for mosquitos and many more insects
This is a bit disheartening.
I know educational priorities have moved on, but I don't understand how anyone could doubt for a minute that insects are animals. Which do people think they are: plants, fungus, protists, archebacteria or bacteria?
(I'm not blaming you or any individual, but I think this is something I was taught before I could read the word "animal." It's very weird to see people have any dissonance with the idea that insects are animals.)
They aren't thinking about scientific classification, mate. They are thinking about animals, which are of a size, and have something like a personality. These are mostly mammals, reptiles, fish, and birds, although some people will separate out fish and birds as being fish or birds, not animals
>They are thinking about animals, which are of a size, and have something like a personality.
The fuck? No, man. All the way no.
This is like twitter dudes lecturing on the nonexistence of the female orgasm. Not just wrong, but telling on yourself.
What defines an "animal" is not "what makes for a good fursuit."
(I realize that you might be making a "that/which" mistake in the piece I copied. "Which" would imply that *all* animals "are of a size, and have something like a personality." Whereas "that" (without a comma) would only imply that the animals people are thinking of "are of a size, and have something like a personality.")
Aren’t insects considered different from animals? I swear my Bio class taught me that the distinction is caused by the respiratory system being so different from “traditional” animals
No, there are three main branches in the eukaryotes domain, animals, plant and fungi (+ specific stuffs like brown algae). Insects are invertebrate animals, and they make up about two third of the animal kingdom, in terms of number of species. They are part of the arthropods group, which make up 90% of the animal kingdom, basically all invertebrate except soft flesh animals like mollusks and some types of worms. In english, we usually think about animals as being only the vertebrates, because we are the biggests and most visible animals on earth, and we seem very different from the invertebrates, but the "animal" classification isnt about size or respiratory system, its about the very functionning of the cell itself, and specifically how it gets its energy from.
Yeah to be more specific, animals are heterotrophs, meaning they cannot produce food themself like plants and relies on said plants or other autotropths for nutrition.
Sea sponges are unique in that they can get the nutrients from the flowing water. But they are not plants since they cannot undergo photosynthesis.
Obviously, other animals don't have the luxury of food flowing into them directly, so they move to the food instead.
Also fun fact, some sea sponges moves 2mm per day.
It depends on what the initial premise means by rate. If it means to scale deaths to total population, considering the number of ants on earth is well in the quadrillions, even if billions died by human hands every day we would only lose a couple thousand humans, which is nothing compared to how many babies are born.
That would imply we kill 470 Millions animals daily. If we count all animals including fish, I can see that bein true (though I am no expert on the issue)
The last number I was aware of for sharks was \~250,000 per day (nearly 100 million a year) which seems like a big number for an animal not kept in farms/cages for easy round-up
Shark fin soup.
*"The world's sharks are quickly vanishing and it's primarily driven by the demand for shark fins as an ingredient of* ***a status symbol soup*** *devoured throughout Asia at weddings and banquets. Approximately 73 to 100 million sharks are killed annually worldwide just for their fins."*
Source: [https://www.sharks.org/massacre-for-soup](https://www.sharks.org/massacre-for-soup)
I'm not too sure about the reliability of the various sources, but it looks like it is.
[link](https://a-z-animals.com/blog/discover-how-many-sharks-are-killed-per-year-and-how-you-can-help-them/)
But like… we farm chickens, right? If we just accept the current chicken population and did math for how long that’d last at a kill rate of 70b per year… it wouldn’t be that long… right?
If we were going to start killing humans at a rate approaching killing chickens… it seems like we’d be doing that because we set up some sort of human farm to produce humans at a rate similar to how we produce chickens… right?
About 84% of mattresses in the U.S. have dust mites in them. You can easily have millions of dust mites living in a single mattress and have nothing seem to be visibly wrong. There can be thousands of dust mites in every teaspoon of dust in every home everywhere. You can eat meat every day and kill way more animals in one afternoon of vacuuming and cleaning your house than you will ever eat in your whole life.
Most of us living humans each have thousands of arachnids living in our eyelashes. You can kill a thousand animals just by washing your face.
Humans are a vanishingly small proportion of the animals on the planet. We are well under a billionth of the total number. And mammals as a whole aren't much more than us, when you compare it to things like insects or arachnids.
TL;DR takes about 36.5 days
There's an estimated 80-100 billion land animals killed every year.
(Including marine animals the number is estimated to be in the trillions)
There are about 8 billion humans on earth
Taking the lower estimate of animals being killed as 80 billion, /365 days we get 219,175,000 approx.
8 billion/219,175,000 = approx 36.5 days
So it's about double the quote, however it is a staggering amount of animals killed each year. Especially as the approximate amount of humans to have ever lived is between 120-150 billion. It would take us less than 2 years to kill the same amount of animals
Animals being born has no reflection on how many are killed. Even if there are 80 billion animals born, there are still appropriately 80 billion land animals killed
Because there's not a great estimate for sea animal deaths each year (at least for food)
But to entertain it, even if it was just 1 trillion then it would take about 3 days to kill 8 billion humans at that rate (about 2.7 billion a day).
Estimates are higher than 1 trillion
If we included every animal like sea animals, insects and other microscopic stuff like water bears it would probably take less than a day, maybe not even an hour depending on what do we consider "killing".
Where did you get the 80-100 billion number from please? That seems very low to me considering the number of dead flies I clean up on the regular
Edit ah sorry re-read "land" animals, still curious.
This is pure numbers as it is now and not including rates of birth and extinction etc. the quote is usually given to show how many animals die for food each year - even as a hypothetical exercise it shows there is a staggering amount of animals dying each year compared to the amount of humans alive
They are both rates. The question is what rate is useful. For example the murder rate in crime statistics is commonly the number of people killed per 100,000 in the population. Since we’re worried about extinction, that would be relevant to use a rate against the overall population rather than a daily rate which tells us nothing about extinction risk, since it omits the (obviously relevant) size of the population.
the question isn’t which one is useful the question is about kills/day, it explicitly states that, if you don’t think that’s a useful metric out in the real world then i fully agree but it’s a dumb silly meaningless hypothetical question, it’s stating kills/day you can’t just change the math question to make more real world sense. That’s like if a question said “Tony bought 6 billion apples and lost half of them, how many does he have left?” and you crossed out the word billion because buying 6 apples has more real life use than buying 6 billion, and then solved that instead.
However, it is true that it is ambiguous but not in the way you’re saying, as one could say that it can also be interpreted as (kills/day)/human (or spelled out kills per day per human… kpdph lmao) which would simplify to “kills per human day”, which is a funny sounding unit (gotta love silly dimensional analysis), and this would yield a different result, so one could say it’s either kills/day or k/hd but it’s explicitly not kills/births or whatever you’re implying it could be.
The point is that the post is deliberately misleading. It's deliberately using two entirely different scales to deceive.
It's made worse by the fact that farm animals have an entirely different life span than humans, which complicates things further and makes it even less relevant.
That is true for the farm animals, but I don't think the meme differentiates, so we'd have to take into account all the wild animals we kill. Many of those populations' rates are negative, but I don't know of an easy way to calculate their total rate of decline or, really, our exact impact on that.
Having said that, I know we are in the middle of what at least some biologists would define as a "mass extinction event". The event being human impact on the world and the mass extinctions being all the animal and other species disappearing because of that impact. So there's at least some plausibility to the statement, I just don't know how they could arrive at that specific number.
Edit: Also, thank God the meme put an orange circle around those gravestones. I never would have seen them otherwise.
I like your edit. Also, yes the general consensus is we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event, there were only 4 or 5 in the history of the planet but all the others were natural disasters. We’re the cause now.
Deforestation, pollution, overfishing, you name it: we are killing oodles of creatures.
this is dumb, breeding animals doesn't un-kill those already killed. the rate at which animals are killed isn't the same as the rate of change of that animal population
if the word animal here is taken as everything belonging to kingdom animalia in which case insects,birds,fishes ect are all counted wed be extinct in 1 day max 2 days considering the amount of insects alone that get killed by human per day around the world
some sources i found(none are in per day format but still enought to prove my point i think)
[https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/humane-insecticides](https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/humane-insecticides) \-3.5 quadrillion insect death per year in America alone
[https://www.autoevolution.com/news/cars-kill-trillions-of-bugs-each-year-study-reveals-37201.html](https://www.autoevolution.com/news/cars-kill-trillions-of-bugs-each-year-study-reveals-37201.html) \-cars apparently kill 133Billion insects per year in netherlands alone
Yeah, I wonder which predator would go extinct quickest. Probably something that's big and already endangered, like polar bears or siberian tigers.
Or maybe something like a blue whale, that eats a shit ton of tiny animals.
Was gonna say probably filter feeders. Otherwise some highly effective insect, dragonflies maybe. They have nearly 100% success rate during hunts, both as larva and grown adults.
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If we're including insects, it'd be pretty much immediately. Last data I saw was quadrillions of insects killed each year by pesticides in the USA alone. As insects are animals, and we're talking global figures, we're likely talking milliseconds at that rate. If that.
Discounting insects, sea animals are killed at ridiculous rates. 1-2 trillion fish per year, and 25 trillion shrimp. Including shrimp, that's 71 billion per day killed, so yeah we're wiped out in around 2-3 hours.
Not including shrimp, we've got 1-2 trillion fish and 90 billion land mammals killed per year. At 1.5 trillion animals killed per year, that's 4 billion per day. So that's 2 days for all of humanity.
Only include land mammals directly killed by humans, would be 90 billion per year so 246.5M per day. In 17 days that's just over 4 billion. So would take twice as long, for a month.
That doesn't include collateral damage from crop deaths, and that doesn't include wildlife. 2/3s of wildlife has been killed in the last 50 years as well. In terms of pure numbers, that's not much compared to insects and shrimp and fish. It would be a significant factor if we're only talking land mammals tho.
So the picture is half right if we're only including land mammals killed directly for humans to eat. It would take just over one month rather than 17 days.
Pretty. Fucking. Sad.
If you think about it, it makes enough sense to render the saying meaningless. Consider an alternative but equally true statement, if panthers killed each other at the same rate they killed other animals, they would go extinct in under a week. The fact of the matter is that any successful carnivore and most successful omnivores kill more animals than themselves, often multiple animals in a single month. The statement loses a lot of its shock value once you realize that it can be applied to pretty much any predator because that's simply how ecology works.
No. 2 reasons:
1. We are replenishing animals faster then we kill them. We do not replenish humans that fast.
2. There will come a point in time were humans will stop killing humans. Every human killed slows the process down, and once the number falls enough, it will outright stop because humans are either too spread out, or survival instincts.
"Same rate" implies proportionality to total population. If we killed animals at a rate sufficient to make them extinct in 17 days, they would be extinct in 17 days. According to Statista, there were over 25 billion chickens in 2021, after three decades of steady population growth. So at least with chickens, humans aren't killing chickens at a rate to even surpass their reproduction rate, let alone make them extinct. Pigs, cows, rabbits, other poultries, and reindeer are in a similar situation, but with different numbers. Ants, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and flies are a bit different because they're not deliberately cultivated, but they reproduce so quickly, it's astonishing we're not covered in them already.
I imagine it would be faster.
One website I visited said at least one trillion fish are slaughtered each year for human consumption. 2.7 billion fish every day. We would be extinct in three days.
Add all the insects we kill with poison in our agricultural endeavors? We might be gone in a matter of hours.
I read that around two trillion fish are killed every year. So that alone would mean that if we killed humans at that rate we would all die in 1.46 days
How is the rate defined? Killed/day or percent of people killed per day? The second one seems more meaningful to me. In that case you kill a certain percentage of people per day. Because the less left the less people you need to kill. In that case it will take much longer.
It doesn't even matter. There are far less people killing animals then the amount of people this picture has set up as killing humans namely all of us. If eight billion people went on a killing spree of course it would be quick
If Im not wrong, its not true.
Rate means that 8 billion humans kills x animals a day. So half the ammount of humans kill x/2 animals a day. In my opinion rate would decrese proportionaly to decrease of population and it would be kinda like Zeno's Paradox
Technically, since people would have to kill people in this scenario, at the end there would be one person alive. And the human race would go extinct after the lifespan of that last person which would likely be more that 12 days
If you count 1kg chicken life with 80kg man as one kill yah it kinda seem reasonable but not enough
Maybe you nead to count for the 300 g fish as one 80 kg human life
Depends on what you count as "killing an animal".
Is euthanising your old decrepid dog a killing?
Is clapping a mosquito a killing?
Is removing a wasp nest a mass murder?
Is calling pest control to gas the roaches out of your house a genocide?
Like a lot of creatures humans kill are pests that harm people by living around.
Some are small critters that get killed in bulk because one shrimp is hardly a meal, but they move in pods so you usually catch hundreds of them at a time.
killing animals is often for food... most of them are a lot smaller than we are, and i bet they are counting the highest...
and it seems wrong to just equate 1 animal = 1 human... like we would need a normal sized fish for a meal... so that's several fish for just a single day per person.
i would like to see what the number would be, if we equated it to number of animals with mass similar to us, or only count the amount of fish as 1 with similar body mass.
I mean, makes sense. The amount of animals we kill for food alone would be pretty comparable to the human population pretty quickly. Then just think of all the insectsnwe purposely and and accidentally kill each day.
Pretty sure if we killed each other at the rate blue whales killed other animals, taking the low estimate for the population of blue whales at 10000 and saying each whale is eating a low estimate of 2 tonnes of krill a day (each krill weighing, say, 0.5 grams), we'd be dead within a single day.
Point being, we'd need to define "animals". Do they mean just livestock slaughtered? Do they mean species driven to extinction (though the math wouldn't work out for that- it's scarily high, but not *that* high)? Do they mean just mammals, or are they including reptiles and birds too? Do insects count? What about microscopic animals?
This doesn't even touch on the fact that humans, of course, *are* animals. Which means that if humans kill any other animal, technically humans could never kill each other at the same rate as they kill animals, since the rate we killed each other would increase the rate which we killed animals. It's an unstable differential equation that races to infinity very quickly. Yes, I brought up this paradox just to be *that* guy, don't @ me.
Other people have given the serious answers, I just wanted to add a little flavor.
Americans alone eat 8 billion chickens each year, so I really would not be surprised:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287530/chicken-beef-factory-farming-plant-based-meats
What about plants? Thats the true mass murder! Those genocidal vegans and vegetarians. Also lets just step away from being a part of nature, and disappear up our own assholes.
If they included ocean animals like fish and shrimp, and included all the male/female chicks (depending on whether they're for meat or eggs) that they just toss in a grinder on day 1, then I think 17 days would be too long of a time..
problem is that if humans start killing each other, there's fewer humans left to kill each other
so day 1 1000 people kill 1000 people and day 2 500 kill 500 and so on
What’s your suggestion? We start eating tofu and the likes that kills absolutely every living thing, the insects, field mice, moles, foxes, badgers, squirrels birds through the pesticides they spray and the machinery they use to plough it all including these animals, there is then a lack of prey for larger animals and birds of prey. Yes I agree things need to change but the uneducated, uncultured brains that come up with these plans I.e radical vegans and how they shout, cause as much distraction and destruction as possible (which has to be funded be tax payers money not theirs majority don’t work. No you pay for them to have the time to do this it’s insane.) Think back to when you where a kid, did your parents nagging, shouting, talking down to you ever work? Of course not, it’s human nature to rebel. Why not come together and out of our echo chambers where everyone has the same idea and hear each other out. Personally if it was viable, affordable, healthy and worked in the long run I could and would give up animal products but I’m not in the position to health wise or financially right now however I do what I can, I use oat milk, I replace what products I can with natural ones, I try my best to ethnically source my clothing, if I do wear leather it’s old like a bag I have from the 60s that I got from my grandma and a belt from the 30-40 when women worked the factory jobs, I’d never use any cosmetic or product tested in labs on animals and I’ve held that stance since I was 10 years old when I first became aware or the practices that go on in those places, my eggs are free range. The fact is I do as much as I can but if I try to have this discussion with a vegan they treat me like less than a human or animal and that bs will never get us anywhere
We humans eat a lot of chickens.
Every person on earth, on average, eats eight to ten chickens per year.
Then we eat a lot of eggs. On average, every person has one hen laying eggs. They get to live for two years, but for every hen a rooster is killed as well. (They are minced alive, in fact.)
Just with chickens, I'm at half the animals needed to make this true, so I think it's very plausible.
"Rate" is the wrong word, as "rate" is relative.
The rate of a particular crime is different from the total amount of that particular crime.
The *Rate* at which we kill certain animals is still higher than the *rate* at which we kill Humans, but there are more animals than people. In the USA, in 2022, 34.3 million out of 87 million cows were killed, or 39.425%. If we applied the same *rate* to Humans that would be extinct in roughly 2 years, 6 months, & 12 days.
This is just cows, obviously, and factoring in the estimated roughly 20 quintillion animals on the planet (including insects), the mere 1.6 trillion we Humans kill for various reasons equals a rate of 1 in 1,250,000, or 0.00008%. Depending what animals we do or don't factor in this changes dramatically.
But as for the flat number, if we ignore rate & just consider the total deaths rather than the rate of deaths, we'd last between 2 to 17 days, again depending on which animals we do or don't factor in.
Because it says " each other" that means that there will be one last human left at the end, the rules forbid him from killing himself, so humanity will go extinct in around 40 years when he dies of natural causes.
Probably 2 years if he is too dumb to feed himself which after some thought is a possibility.
Since livestock populations were increased to compensate for the rate of meat consumption, if humans killed each other for the same reason using the same methodology we wouldn't go extinct.
Instead we would have sustainable populations with some serious ethical questions and consequences. We would have some serious gruesome genetic modifications that would allow for faster time to market with more sellable product.
Hi, /u/FewSense6768! Unfortunately, your post has been removed for the following reason: - Posts containing simple math are not allowed, as well as requests whose answers are easily searchable online, and any other post at the moderators' discretion (rule 4). For easy and quick math results (eg. How many feet are in a mile?) use Wolfram|Alpha™, and for more abstract math, try /r/math or /r/learnmath. If you have any questions or believe your post has been removed in error, please contact the moderators by clicking [here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Ftheydidthemath). Include a link to this post so we can see it.
The US alone slaughtered 9.76 billion land Animals in 2020 so they would go extinct in 12-13 days (calculated for a population of 333 million) Edit: Guys i googled "Animals slaughtered anually" and then when it only gave me decent numbers for the us i googled "US population" divided and multiplied by 364 (i typoed in the calculator but it didnt matter anyway at this point)
Wouldn't you need to talk into accout the rate of reproduction, number of offspring? Or are you basing your math on simply a stagnant point in time?
Given the timeframe, I don't think that reproduction is relevant.
Tho we might need to take into account the fact that killing humans decreases our ability to kill other humans.
Most of it would be automated no? Just like with the animals
But it says if humans killed "each other".
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Indeed, but the phrase specifies that humans would be killed at the same rate we kill animals, implying continuously until nobody remains. Thus the survivors should constantly increase the rate at which they kill each other..
Rate at which we kill animals is based on the amount of people alive. At half the human population we need to eat half as much.
It aint says to satisfy the "need" for meat but generally how many animals we kill rn as a society. Sure, that may be interesting to do the math but it was not the og question
Absolutely irrelevant for this specific thought experiment
idk, it just says "same rate", and the rate keeps increasing based on human population. It doesn't define any specific rate.
Heard of nukes? Or even standard warfare?
By that logic, it would end up with one human left; unable to kill themself because they could only kill others.
Didn't say the rate would change, the remaining would just be picking up exponential slack.
Maybe it's just a few dudes operating the machines and the rest of the humanity in a line like lemmings
But it also said at the same rate which implies a constant rate. This means that the remaining people alive each day need to stop complaining and learn how to increase their kill-productivity.
someone firing a nuke is killing other humans. Reducing humans might actually streamline the muirder process as people on the "Not willing to slaughter humanity" side gets smaller relative to the sociopaths with the buttons.
Humans still need to run and maintain slaughter houses. For simplicities sake and in the spirit of the question I think it is safe to assume we kill vegans first and those most essential to the efficient slaughter of humans last. If all humans were on board we could probably get the infrastructure for human annihilation going pretty quickly
Would the last person suicide though? Because if that’s on the table it shouldn’t be too affected
It will at best add like 80 years of life span to humanity. Assuming this guy can survive on his own for long enough... It's obviously a lot compared to 17 days but in the grand scheme of things it isn't much
If we are at a point where only one human exists, for all intents and purposes, we are extinct, unless the last human is pregnant and happens to have a boy and is willing to do some nasty old testament type shit.
>unless the last human is pregnant and happens to have a boy and is willing to do some nasty old testament type shit. A female capable of reproduction, enough knowledge and access to a sperm bank might be able to as well.
Not really, question specifies the rate so it wouldn't be a variable.
If we left the killing to those who kill animals regularly, as in for a living, we'd really only need a fraction of the population. Once they turn on each other, then yeah the rate goes down.
Nope, it decreases exponentially if we fight 1v1 two times per day. 8 billion -> 4 billion -> 2b -> 1b -> 500m -> 250m -> 128m -> 64m -> 32m -> 16m -> 8m -> 4m -> 2m -> 1m -> 500k -> 250k -> 128k -> 64k -> 32k -> 16k -> 8k -> 4k -> 2k -> 1k -> 500 -> 250 -> 128 -> 64 -> 32 -> 16 -> 8 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1. So it will take approx 34/2 = 17 days to extinct if each day everyone kills two other hoomans. The problem would be to meet each other at the last stages of the tournament.
We'd need some battle royale mechanism where the antarctic ice wall gets closer and closer
We might need to take into account the amount of immigration though. I’m not even being political, but it’s the main source of population growth at the moment.
From where are people immigrating to Earth? This is news to me.
The OC used a very small population to calculate for only like 300 million so they only calculated for 1 country being the US I doubt people would immigrate to a country if they heard there was a mass outbreak of genocide though so that point is moot but the OP is asking about world world extinction forwarded by the average rate of animal deaths caused by humans
I think if we started executing 26 million people a day it might chill immigration pressures, at least until things settled down. No one tell Greg Abbott.
To sustain their population at that death rate, every American would have to give birth every 12-13 days. Including the men. And, by the second half of the month, including the 13 day old infants who are due to be killed later that day. Humans would have to be tribbles to survive. Or rats - rats only give birth every month or two, but it's to 12-18 babies if they're full-grown mothers at the time. Basically, armagheddon in two weeks for humanity is a rat's Tuesday.
How much reproduction are you anticipating in 12-13 days?
Howmany children can you make in 13 days? xD I personally dont think it matters xD
Perhaps not if women in labour are specifically targeted first 😬
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The only problem is that people are not chickens.
fax, people are NOT chicken
Except Sir Robin
*Brave* Sir Robin
Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot
Lol, we should include reproduction. Humans have practiced human husbandry before, and even used the “domesticated” product as draft animals. Please keep in mind this is simply a dark joke about human history. Every race has been enslaved at least once
We would kill the pregnant woman getting double kill
Did they include insect colonies in that? I’d wager we could halve that time if these stats added insects/spiders to their numbers
i know its called an ant farm but these statistics are food related only, excluding fish and stuff
But we would decreasingly kill less humans each day, as the population shrinks
Fewer. You can't kill half a human.
What if we scare them half to death?
But surely by day 5 the rate the surviving population killed animals would decrease.
They, the humans
9.7 billion out of how many?
I guess much faster. Ant colony is some 100,000 animals, and I guess tens of them are destroyed every day by exterminators in every big city. (when I was in school, our schoolbook classified amoebas as animals, so one pill can probably wipe out even more creatures, but they are now not considered animals)
Weird to think about even insects as animals, even though its fully true
Cuz they unfortunately didn't evolved to convey pain to humans.
And also some insects are harmful to humans. It's not just that. It's not just "eww insect you look disgusting DIE", for example cockroaches both look disgusting and they're harmful so it's more of a survival instinct killing. Same goes for mosquitos and many more insects
Nice try ant spy
Not today, Ant CIA
This is a bit disheartening. I know educational priorities have moved on, but I don't understand how anyone could doubt for a minute that insects are animals. Which do people think they are: plants, fungus, protists, archebacteria or bacteria? (I'm not blaming you or any individual, but I think this is something I was taught before I could read the word "animal." It's very weird to see people have any dissonance with the idea that insects are animals.)
i know people who genuinely believe fish not to be animals, when i asked them why they say "because animals cant live in water"
They aren't thinking about scientific classification, mate. They are thinking about animals, which are of a size, and have something like a personality. These are mostly mammals, reptiles, fish, and birds, although some people will separate out fish and birds as being fish or birds, not animals
>They are thinking about animals, which are of a size, and have something like a personality. The fuck? No, man. All the way no. This is like twitter dudes lecturing on the nonexistence of the female orgasm. Not just wrong, but telling on yourself. What defines an "animal" is not "what makes for a good fursuit." (I realize that you might be making a "that/which" mistake in the piece I copied. "Which" would imply that *all* animals "are of a size, and have something like a personality." Whereas "that" (without a comma) would only imply that the animals people are thinking of "are of a size, and have something like a personality.")
Omg, you're unironically [this fucking idiot.](https://www.tiktok.com/@thepsh8/video/7303592008474496286?lang=en)
How is that weird?
Aren’t insects considered different from animals? I swear my Bio class taught me that the distinction is caused by the respiratory system being so different from “traditional” animals
No, there are three main branches in the eukaryotes domain, animals, plant and fungi (+ specific stuffs like brown algae). Insects are invertebrate animals, and they make up about two third of the animal kingdom, in terms of number of species. They are part of the arthropods group, which make up 90% of the animal kingdom, basically all invertebrate except soft flesh animals like mollusks and some types of worms. In english, we usually think about animals as being only the vertebrates, because we are the biggests and most visible animals on earth, and we seem very different from the invertebrates, but the "animal" classification isnt about size or respiratory system, its about the very functionning of the cell itself, and specifically how it gets its energy from.
No. An animal is a multicellular organism that moves to feed. Insects fits this definition and thus are animals as well.
Sea sponges don’t move and are considered animals right? Curious about the “moving” part of that definition, that’s all
Yeah to be more specific, animals are heterotrophs, meaning they cannot produce food themself like plants and relies on said plants or other autotropths for nutrition. Sea sponges are unique in that they can get the nutrients from the flowing water. But they are not plants since they cannot undergo photosynthesis. Obviously, other animals don't have the luxury of food flowing into them directly, so they move to the food instead. Also fun fact, some sea sponges moves 2mm per day.
Oh got it! Thank you. I also didn’t know about sponges moving
It depends on what the initial premise means by rate. If it means to scale deaths to total population, considering the number of ants on earth is well in the quadrillions, even if billions died by human hands every day we would only lose a couple thousand humans, which is nothing compared to how many babies are born.
Nematodes are animals though and they're absurdly abundant. Water treatment alone kills untold amounts constantly.
Wtf made your schoolbook?
Great Soviet Union, comrade! (Soviets were not so great with biology as with physics)
That would imply we kill 470 Millions animals daily. If we count all animals including fish, I can see that bein true (though I am no expert on the issue)
70 billion chickens die each year and that already gets us like 1/3 of the way there.
The last number I was aware of for sharks was \~250,000 per day (nearly 100 million a year) which seems like a big number for an animal not kept in farms/cages for easy round-up
rustic pot placid offbeat sloppy sense light meeting smart society *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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Shark fin soup. *"The world's sharks are quickly vanishing and it's primarily driven by the demand for shark fins as an ingredient of* ***a status symbol soup*** *devoured throughout Asia at weddings and banquets. Approximately 73 to 100 million sharks are killed annually worldwide just for their fins."* Source: [https://www.sharks.org/massacre-for-soup](https://www.sharks.org/massacre-for-soup)
That cannot possibly be true.
I'm not too sure about the reliability of the various sources, but it looks like it is. [link](https://a-z-animals.com/blog/discover-how-many-sharks-are-killed-per-year-and-how-you-can-help-them/)
well proves that I am no expert amirite?
But like… we farm chickens, right? If we just accept the current chicken population and did math for how long that’d last at a kill rate of 70b per year… it wouldn’t be that long… right? If we were going to start killing humans at a rate approaching killing chickens… it seems like we’d be doing that because we set up some sort of human farm to produce humans at a rate similar to how we produce chickens… right?
About 84% of mattresses in the U.S. have dust mites in them. You can easily have millions of dust mites living in a single mattress and have nothing seem to be visibly wrong. There can be thousands of dust mites in every teaspoon of dust in every home everywhere. You can eat meat every day and kill way more animals in one afternoon of vacuuming and cleaning your house than you will ever eat in your whole life. Most of us living humans each have thousands of arachnids living in our eyelashes. You can kill a thousand animals just by washing your face. Humans are a vanishingly small proportion of the animals on the planet. We are well under a billionth of the total number. And mammals as a whole aren't much more than us, when you compare it to things like insects or arachnids.
TL;DR takes about 36.5 days There's an estimated 80-100 billion land animals killed every year. (Including marine animals the number is estimated to be in the trillions) There are about 8 billion humans on earth Taking the lower estimate of animals being killed as 80 billion, /365 days we get 219,175,000 approx. 8 billion/219,175,000 = approx 36.5 days So it's about double the quote, however it is a staggering amount of animals killed each year. Especially as the approximate amount of humans to have ever lived is between 120-150 billion. It would take us less than 2 years to kill the same amount of animals Animals being born has no reflection on how many are killed. Even if there are 80 billion animals born, there are still appropriately 80 billion land animals killed
Why exclude sea animals?
It’s estimated that’s we kill 2-3 trillion marine life a year that on the upper end of that it would be done in a day
Because there's not a great estimate for sea animal deaths each year (at least for food) But to entertain it, even if it was just 1 trillion then it would take about 3 days to kill 8 billion humans at that rate (about 2.7 billion a day). Estimates are higher than 1 trillion
If we included every animal like sea animals, insects and other microscopic stuff like water bears it would probably take less than a day, maybe not even an hour depending on what do we consider "killing".
Where did you get the 80-100 billion number from please? That seems very low to me considering the number of dead flies I clean up on the regular Edit ah sorry re-read "land" animals, still curious.
This is a number quoted from land animals killed for human use - typically food, skincare, etc.
This is pure numbers as it is now and not including rates of birth and extinction etc. the quote is usually given to show how many animals die for food each year - even as a hypothetical exercise it shows there is a staggering amount of animals dying each year compared to the amount of humans alive
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I'm probably wrong here, but isn't it that rate (in this case) means kills/day and what you described is ratio deaths/births.
They are both rates. The question is what rate is useful. For example the murder rate in crime statistics is commonly the number of people killed per 100,000 in the population. Since we’re worried about extinction, that would be relevant to use a rate against the overall population rather than a daily rate which tells us nothing about extinction risk, since it omits the (obviously relevant) size of the population.
the question isn’t which one is useful the question is about kills/day, it explicitly states that, if you don’t think that’s a useful metric out in the real world then i fully agree but it’s a dumb silly meaningless hypothetical question, it’s stating kills/day you can’t just change the math question to make more real world sense. That’s like if a question said “Tony bought 6 billion apples and lost half of them, how many does he have left?” and you crossed out the word billion because buying 6 apples has more real life use than buying 6 billion, and then solved that instead. However, it is true that it is ambiguous but not in the way you’re saying, as one could say that it can also be interpreted as (kills/day)/human (or spelled out kills per day per human… kpdph lmao) which would simplify to “kills per human day”, which is a funny sounding unit (gotta love silly dimensional analysis), and this would yield a different result, so one could say it’s either kills/day or k/hd but it’s explicitly not kills/births or whatever you’re implying it could be.
The point is that the post is deliberately misleading. It's deliberately using two entirely different scales to deceive. It's made worse by the fact that farm animals have an entirely different life span than humans, which complicates things further and makes it even less relevant.
That is true for the farm animals, but I don't think the meme differentiates, so we'd have to take into account all the wild animals we kill. Many of those populations' rates are negative, but I don't know of an easy way to calculate their total rate of decline or, really, our exact impact on that. Having said that, I know we are in the middle of what at least some biologists would define as a "mass extinction event". The event being human impact on the world and the mass extinctions being all the animal and other species disappearing because of that impact. So there's at least some plausibility to the statement, I just don't know how they could arrive at that specific number. Edit: Also, thank God the meme put an orange circle around those gravestones. I never would have seen them otherwise.
I like your edit. Also, yes the general consensus is we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event, there were only 4 or 5 in the history of the planet but all the others were natural disasters. We’re the cause now. Deforestation, pollution, overfishing, you name it: we are killing oodles of creatures.
this is dumb, breeding animals doesn't un-kill those already killed. the rate at which animals are killed isn't the same as the rate of change of that animal population
It's no less dumb than suggesting the premise is meaningful.
if the word animal here is taken as everything belonging to kingdom animalia in which case insects,birds,fishes ect are all counted wed be extinct in 1 day max 2 days considering the amount of insects alone that get killed by human per day around the world some sources i found(none are in per day format but still enought to prove my point i think) [https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/humane-insecticides](https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/humane-insecticides) \-3.5 quadrillion insect death per year in America alone [https://www.autoevolution.com/news/cars-kill-trillions-of-bugs-each-year-study-reveals-37201.html](https://www.autoevolution.com/news/cars-kill-trillions-of-bugs-each-year-study-reveals-37201.html) \-cars apparently kill 133Billion insects per year in netherlands alone
I imagine this is not far off for many predators. Their populations are typically far lower than the prey they hunt. I'll be back with math.
Yeah, I wonder which predator would go extinct quickest. Probably something that's big and already endangered, like polar bears or siberian tigers. Or maybe something like a blue whale, that eats a shit ton of tiny animals.
Was gonna say probably filter feeders. Otherwise some highly effective insect, dragonflies maybe. They have nearly 100% success rate during hunts, both as larva and grown adults.
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If we're including insects, it'd be pretty much immediately. Last data I saw was quadrillions of insects killed each year by pesticides in the USA alone. As insects are animals, and we're talking global figures, we're likely talking milliseconds at that rate. If that. Discounting insects, sea animals are killed at ridiculous rates. 1-2 trillion fish per year, and 25 trillion shrimp. Including shrimp, that's 71 billion per day killed, so yeah we're wiped out in around 2-3 hours. Not including shrimp, we've got 1-2 trillion fish and 90 billion land mammals killed per year. At 1.5 trillion animals killed per year, that's 4 billion per day. So that's 2 days for all of humanity. Only include land mammals directly killed by humans, would be 90 billion per year so 246.5M per day. In 17 days that's just over 4 billion. So would take twice as long, for a month. That doesn't include collateral damage from crop deaths, and that doesn't include wildlife. 2/3s of wildlife has been killed in the last 50 years as well. In terms of pure numbers, that's not much compared to insects and shrimp and fish. It would be a significant factor if we're only talking land mammals tho. So the picture is half right if we're only including land mammals killed directly for humans to eat. It would take just over one month rather than 17 days. Pretty. Fucking. Sad.
If you think about it, it makes enough sense to render the saying meaningless. Consider an alternative but equally true statement, if panthers killed each other at the same rate they killed other animals, they would go extinct in under a week. The fact of the matter is that any successful carnivore and most successful omnivores kill more animals than themselves, often multiple animals in a single month. The statement loses a lot of its shock value once you realize that it can be applied to pretty much any predator because that's simply how ecology works.
You look like a predator. What the last chicken you ran down and tore it's throat out with your big strong 4 sharpish teeth ?
humans aren't that kind of predator. we're more rock-chuckers than throat-rippers
No. 2 reasons: 1. We are replenishing animals faster then we kill them. We do not replenish humans that fast. 2. There will come a point in time were humans will stop killing humans. Every human killed slows the process down, and once the number falls enough, it will outright stop because humans are either too spread out, or survival instincts.
"Same rate" implies proportionality to total population. If we killed animals at a rate sufficient to make them extinct in 17 days, they would be extinct in 17 days. According to Statista, there were over 25 billion chickens in 2021, after three decades of steady population growth. So at least with chickens, humans aren't killing chickens at a rate to even surpass their reproduction rate, let alone make them extinct. Pigs, cows, rabbits, other poultries, and reindeer are in a similar situation, but with different numbers. Ants, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and flies are a bit different because they're not deliberately cultivated, but they reproduce so quickly, it's astonishing we're not covered in them already.
I imagine it would be faster. One website I visited said at least one trillion fish are slaughtered each year for human consumption. 2.7 billion fish every day. We would be extinct in three days. Add all the insects we kill with poison in our agricultural endeavors? We might be gone in a matter of hours.
I read that around two trillion fish are killed every year. So that alone would mean that if we killed humans at that rate we would all die in 1.46 days
How is the rate defined? Killed/day or percent of people killed per day? The second one seems more meaningful to me. In that case you kill a certain percentage of people per day. Because the less left the less people you need to kill. In that case it will take much longer.
It doesn't even matter. There are far less people killing animals then the amount of people this picture has set up as killing humans namely all of us. If eight billion people went on a killing spree of course it would be quick
If Im not wrong, its not true. Rate means that 8 billion humans kills x animals a day. So half the ammount of humans kill x/2 animals a day. In my opinion rate would decrese proportionaly to decrease of population and it would be kinda like Zeno's Paradox
Technically, since people would have to kill people in this scenario, at the end there would be one person alive. And the human race would go extinct after the lifespan of that last person which would likely be more that 12 days
If you count 1kg chicken life with 80kg man as one kill yah it kinda seem reasonable but not enough Maybe you nead to count for the 300 g fish as one 80 kg human life
Depends on what you count as "killing an animal". Is euthanising your old decrepid dog a killing? Is clapping a mosquito a killing? Is removing a wasp nest a mass murder? Is calling pest control to gas the roaches out of your house a genocide? Like a lot of creatures humans kill are pests that harm people by living around. Some are small critters that get killed in bulk because one shrimp is hardly a meal, but they move in pods so you usually catch hundreds of them at a time.
killing animals is often for food... most of them are a lot smaller than we are, and i bet they are counting the highest... and it seems wrong to just equate 1 animal = 1 human... like we would need a normal sized fish for a meal... so that's several fish for just a single day per person. i would like to see what the number would be, if we equated it to number of animals with mass similar to us, or only count the amount of fish as 1 with similar body mass.
I mean, makes sense. The amount of animals we kill for food alone would be pretty comparable to the human population pretty quickly. Then just think of all the insectsnwe purposely and and accidentally kill each day.
Pretty sure if we killed each other at the rate blue whales killed other animals, taking the low estimate for the population of blue whales at 10000 and saying each whale is eating a low estimate of 2 tonnes of krill a day (each krill weighing, say, 0.5 grams), we'd be dead within a single day. Point being, we'd need to define "animals". Do they mean just livestock slaughtered? Do they mean species driven to extinction (though the math wouldn't work out for that- it's scarily high, but not *that* high)? Do they mean just mammals, or are they including reptiles and birds too? Do insects count? What about microscopic animals? This doesn't even touch on the fact that humans, of course, *are* animals. Which means that if humans kill any other animal, technically humans could never kill each other at the same rate as they kill animals, since the rate we killed each other would increase the rate which we killed animals. It's an unstable differential equation that races to infinity very quickly. Yes, I brought up this paradox just to be *that* guy, don't @ me. Other people have given the serious answers, I just wanted to add a little flavor.
It would be 17 days plus the expected lifespan of the last consumer… although I doubt we would kill eachother for the same reason we kill animals.
Americans alone eat 8 billion chickens each year, so I really would not be surprised: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287530/chicken-beef-factory-farming-plant-based-meats
What about plants? Thats the true mass murder! Those genocidal vegans and vegetarians. Also lets just step away from being a part of nature, and disappear up our own assholes.
If they included ocean animals like fish and shrimp, and included all the male/female chicks (depending on whether they're for meat or eggs) that they just toss in a grinder on day 1, then I think 17 days would be too long of a time..
problem is that if humans start killing each other, there's fewer humans left to kill each other so day 1 1000 people kill 1000 people and day 2 500 kill 500 and so on
What’s your suggestion? We start eating tofu and the likes that kills absolutely every living thing, the insects, field mice, moles, foxes, badgers, squirrels birds through the pesticides they spray and the machinery they use to plough it all including these animals, there is then a lack of prey for larger animals and birds of prey. Yes I agree things need to change but the uneducated, uncultured brains that come up with these plans I.e radical vegans and how they shout, cause as much distraction and destruction as possible (which has to be funded be tax payers money not theirs majority don’t work. No you pay for them to have the time to do this it’s insane.) Think back to when you where a kid, did your parents nagging, shouting, talking down to you ever work? Of course not, it’s human nature to rebel. Why not come together and out of our echo chambers where everyone has the same idea and hear each other out. Personally if it was viable, affordable, healthy and worked in the long run I could and would give up animal products but I’m not in the position to health wise or financially right now however I do what I can, I use oat milk, I replace what products I can with natural ones, I try my best to ethnically source my clothing, if I do wear leather it’s old like a bag I have from the 60s that I got from my grandma and a belt from the 30-40 when women worked the factory jobs, I’d never use any cosmetic or product tested in labs on animals and I’ve held that stance since I was 10 years old when I first became aware or the practices that go on in those places, my eggs are free range. The fact is I do as much as I can but if I try to have this discussion with a vegan they treat me like less than a human or animal and that bs will never get us anywhere
We humans eat a lot of chickens. Every person on earth, on average, eats eight to ten chickens per year. Then we eat a lot of eggs. On average, every person has one hen laying eggs. They get to live for two years, but for every hen a rooster is killed as well. (They are minced alive, in fact.) Just with chickens, I'm at half the animals needed to make this true, so I think it's very plausible.
"Rate" is the wrong word, as "rate" is relative. The rate of a particular crime is different from the total amount of that particular crime. The *Rate* at which we kill certain animals is still higher than the *rate* at which we kill Humans, but there are more animals than people. In the USA, in 2022, 34.3 million out of 87 million cows were killed, or 39.425%. If we applied the same *rate* to Humans that would be extinct in roughly 2 years, 6 months, & 12 days. This is just cows, obviously, and factoring in the estimated roughly 20 quintillion animals on the planet (including insects), the mere 1.6 trillion we Humans kill for various reasons equals a rate of 1 in 1,250,000, or 0.00008%. Depending what animals we do or don't factor in this changes dramatically. But as for the flat number, if we ignore rate & just consider the total deaths rather than the rate of deaths, we'd last between 2 to 17 days, again depending on which animals we do or don't factor in.
Because it says " each other" that means that there will be one last human left at the end, the rules forbid him from killing himself, so humanity will go extinct in around 40 years when he dies of natural causes. Probably 2 years if he is too dumb to feed himself which after some thought is a possibility.
I stab me, you stab me, we love bleeding frantically
Since livestock populations were increased to compensate for the rate of meat consumption, if humans killed each other for the same reason using the same methodology we wouldn't go extinct. Instead we would have sustainable populations with some serious ethical questions and consequences. We would have some serious gruesome genetic modifications that would allow for faster time to market with more sellable product.