this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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Cosmic Horror
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Hmmm its got me thinking. How many mommoths does it take to fill up my car? How much biomass was it before it turned into oil?
Like maybe 10 mammoths? Maybe just 1? Or maybe 1000?!
Maybe we can use dead people to start making new oil? I mean, grave yards usually take up very valuable real estate anyway, and they are growing in size exponentially all the time. We need to start being realistic about the dead. How long does it take for someone to turn into gas anyway? Like 1000 years?
Relevant xkcd https://what-if.xkcd.com/101/
It's not dinosaurs, oil is mostly sea stuff like plankton and algae. Coal is mostly land vegetation, trees.
Dinosaurs didn't really contribute much to this pool.
Still, people can be good for Soylent Green though.
Edit: /s
I guess maybe not by comparison, but imagine all the millions of years and millions of generations of gaint (and small) dinosaurs that lived lived and died. Thats a Hella Lotta biomass biodegrading.
Compared to algae and plants it's a rounding error.
I think it’s more plants than animals.
Oh?? Well how many trees does it take to fill up my car? Like is it like 1000 trees, and half a mommoth? Maybe 100,000 fully mature 50 foot tall trees? Im very curious about this now..
I don’t know the answer. But somehow I feel like someone on the internet has attempted this calculation.
i think it was mostly plankton
Your use of the word “exponentially” triggered my inner math teacher: no, the growth is not exponential but more than linear since the industrial revolution.
Is it not exponential? Dont human births exponentially increase? And if thats the case, dont death increase exponentially?
Or am I wrong about births too?
If a couple have 2 children, then in an ideal condition the population is constant, so the death/birth is linear. Human birth can be exponentially if every couple have more than 2 children and they also have more than 2 and so on in this ideal scenario with no early deaths.
In reality you need 2+some fraction to balance out the early deaths, other couples with no children, unmarried, etc.
Plus with limited resources, population can't grow a lot because you'll start having a lot of death due to starvation, conflicts, accidents, etc.
Problem is due to industrialization, we can now support higher number of humans compared to the past, and due to vaccines and medicines we have smaller numbers of early deaths, so we have a population growth problem. But as we hit our limits it'll stabilize, or if we overshoot, it'll go down.
There is an additional element to it: along human history the birth rate has been usually significantly higher than 2, but that was compensated by a significantly higher death rate too. So the number of deaths definitely did not increase a huge lot over the last hundred years.
Couldn’t anything O() of linear be modeled as exponential?
Exponential would be O(x^n) for any n. X^2 is O(x) but not exponential.