[Request] Ants vs Humans

I'll have a go at this with some back-o-the-ragged-envelope calculations. Spoiler: Ants win.

From Biomantling and Bioturbation by Colonies..., they note the colonies under study displace and amount of soil when building colonies that equates to a layer, if spread evenly on the surface over the area of the colony to ~0.45cm/1000y, or about 4.3 x 10-6 m/y. Seems tiny, but wait for the numbers to add up...

Ants have been around for ~120 million years. We'll get conservative again and figure that only 1% of the time is spent doing earth-moving/construction.

Let's assume they inhabit only 1% of arable land (conservative, imo), of which there is 13962000000000m2.

So, 4.3 x 10-6 x 120000000y/100 x 13962000000000/100m2 = 7.2 x 1011 m of earth moved/piled up on to that 1% of arable land.

Spreading that back over all arable land results in a layer of displaced earth of 7.2 x 109 m over all of the Earth's arable land.

That's about 4.5 million miles of thickness, obviously wildly exceeding the volume of all human construction, I'd think.

The ants noted are not even the most prodigious earth movers in the study, they note others with much greater rates.

Even if we say 1/1000000 of all ants do such an amount, it's still beyond comprehension we'd equal it - we've not been here long enough and there's not enough of us to compete, imo.

There's a quote about the Ocean grinding rocks into sand over millennia that eludes me at the moment, but this is a analogous situation.

/r/theydidthemath Thread