Life And Death At 48 GHz
It is estimated that there are about 200 million insects for every human on the Earth. A recent census of human population has pegged our numbers at about 7.5 billion.
The math is simple: 200,000,000 insects per person x 7,500,000,000 people gives you about 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 insects (1.5 quintillion insects).
That's a lot of insects and if you have ever camped in northern Canada in the springtime you would not doubt these numbers.
[Stupid aside: I was camping with a group of friends one year in Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada at one of the regulated camp sites where you can drive in and set up your tent, start a fire and have a nice camping experience. The people about ten camping sites down from me had set up a bug zapper in their camping site. It was basically non-stop bugs being zapped all night that night. A bug zapper in a Canadian park in the spring time is as useless as a screen door on a submarine. Okay, let's get back to the post.]
I do not know how the estimate of 200 million insects per person was arrived at and I do not know if it is even accurate but for the sake of argument let us assume that it is.
The are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a year and 365 days in a non-leap year. This means that there are 31,536,000 seconds per year.
Let us assume that insects live for a year or so. This means that every year, 1.5 trillion insects are born and 1.5 trillion insect die. Dividing 1.5 trillion insects by 31.536 million seconds per year means that about 47.5 billion insects are born every second and also die every second on average.
A kilohertz (kHz) is 1 thousand cycles per second, a megahertz (MHz) is 1 million cycle per second and a gigahertz (GHz) is 1 billion cycle per second.
This means that just accounting for the insect kingdom things are born at about 48 gigahertz (48 GHz). They are also dying at about 48 gigahertz (48 GHz). To get a feel for this number, that frequency is about 12 times faster than the clock cycle on a high end CPU these days.
Thinking about it another way, when humans are young they can hear frequencies as high as 20,000 Hz. Let a standalone speaker emitting a tone at this frequency represent 20,000 insects being born or dying per second (each cycle in the sine wave being emitted by the speaker represents an insect either dying or being born).
To represent 48 billion insects dying every second you would therefore need about 2.4 million speakers all emitting a 20 kHz tone. Each cycle in the tone for each speaker represents a bug being born or dying. I suspect that this many speakers would probably completely cover a large football stadium.
The racket those speakers would make would be enormous.
Closing Words
I thing that this image of 2.4 million speakers all emitting a 20 kHz tone help to give you a feel for the number of living things there are on this planet and how many of them are being born (and dying) each and every second.
The rates of birth and death calculated above are only averages over the year. The rates of birth will be far higher in the Spring and the rates of death will be far higher in the Fall (especially the first frost of the year).
However you think about it, the numbers are truly staggering. It is even worse when you realize there are far more viruses and bacteria than there are insects but that would be an estimate for another day.
Thank you for reading my post.
Post Sources
https://www.answers.com/Q/Ratio_of_insects_to_people_on_earth
https://superbeefy.com/how-many-insects-are-therefor-every-person-on-earth/
https://www.census.gov/popclock/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
This reminded me of Charles and Ray Eames Power of Ten short film. Its all about scales. Zoom out enough and human lives are but blips on the cosmic time scale. One wonders why we argue so much about arbitrary views, such as religion, countries, etc.
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Wow, blast from the past. Going to watch it right now.
I think that these number of insects are partial positive, because first of all they are the first step of the food chain and if they are present the keep this chain alive; at the same time they represent a great portion on biodiversity and they ae able to make a lot of nature processes (for example the honeybees).
On the other hand insects are the biggest problem about diseases transmission. In a lot of States in Africa it is a really big problem for the health of the population.
100% upvote for the well considered and argued comment.
Ironically I was watching a bird this evening chase and eat insects. It looked very happy doing so.
Yes, bugs are indeed one of the first steps in the food chain. If you like all that variety in grocery stores then bugs are partly responsible.
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That's a lot of insects! :D
Once you do the math it is a true eye opener (except to campers).
Holy crap!