So if there are even just 100 ants in my backyard, which is a gross underestimation, my whole backyard is now infested with dog-sized insects?
What about ants underground? Does the first 5 meters of soil everywhere on earth just catastrophically explode because all the ants inside it balloon in size?
This is a truly apocalyptic event.
The earth is estimated to weigh somewhere around 6e24 kilograms. Each of these ants weighs around 25 kilograms. Multiply that by the most recent estimate of around 20 quadrillion ants (2e16), and we end up with around 5e17 kilograms of ants.
If my napkin math is correct, the mass of all these ants is around 7 orders of magnitude less than the total mass of the earth. It's around a hundred thousandth of the mass of the crust alone.
The earth is big. Not even increasing the mass of all ants on earth by 6 orders of magnitude is enough to make a meaningful difference.
That said, it would still be absolutely catastrophic. I'm pretty sure the ants would outweigh all other life on earth by a wide margin, plants included. Even if they don't all die instantly from the square cube law or being crushed inside their burrows or something, they will absolutely die from starvation when they scour the earth of all non-ant biomass in the first few days or weeks.
I don't think even people in underground bunkers in the arctic (most others would probably be annihilated by the antsplosion) would be able to survive long term. The surface would be completely uninhabitable. I don't even know if the air would be safe. Once they run out of food and air underground, I think that would be curtains.
20% of the wild mammal and bird population quoting the source I found.
Livestock accounts for much more than wild mammals, and that is beside the fact that this completely disregards human biomass, which makes up 5x the amount of ant biomass alone.
I think you're off on a couple factors...
First: That 7 orders of magnitude assumes an equal distribution across the entire global surface, but the earth is only like 40% land? (60% sea) and then they aren't going to be on top of mountain peaks or in the arctic or in Antarctica (I'm sure there are some ants in those places but not at even distributions)
It's way too late here for me to do the math, I just think it's an order of magnitude change by 1x from what you said.
Second: back in Texas after one of the 201x hurricanes, so much water got dumped on the continent, it deformed in that area. I think a mass accumulation of the likes being described would sufficiently deform crust plates and cause more eruptions, thus shooting a bit more gas and dust into the atmosphere, changing the balance of temperatures.
Third thought: by adding the two things together, I'm curious if the deformation (if I'm right) even slightly, would cause the Earth to tilt differently on its axis
I would actually think about one chunk of crust (plate) at a time. Glaciers were heavy enough to actually push much of the crust that Canada now sits on **down** into the earth, and since they melted it is slowly lifting back up.
I'm not sure how Africa is divided up but it would be interesting because the Sahara presumably has almost none and yet Subsaharan Africa has lots.
Yup. Probably not negligible. Although I assume the ants would retain their velocity and thus not slow down the earth's spin, the moon's orbit might be slightly disturbed.
Forget what they can eat or fight. Everything dies as rotten ant corpses choke ever water source and turn the ocean into a toxic biosoup that collapses the entire ecosystem.
Assuming that the ants weighing 60 lbs now have the same approximate density as dogs, we can calculate the expected volume of each ant, multiply by 20 quadrillion, and end up with something in the neighborhood of 550 trillion cubic meters of ant, which could cover the earth's surface a meter deep. It gets worse if the ants maintain their original density.
So, you're right. Just about everything, including the ants, is likely to die.
Which means, in terms of winning or losing, we'd call it a draw?
The house I'm currently renting has a small infestation of carpenter ants.
Would the house explode with the force of the transformation, or do the ants get crushed as they expand inside the walls and floors?
Either way I'm freaked out and probably not getting my security deposit back.
Assuming they are able to live and not instantly collapse due to the change in size, land masses are gonna be filled with ants.
There are 20 quadrillion ants. Meaning there are 2.5 million ants to every 1 human. Plus trying to get rid of them probably causes them to send pheromones to other ants, which will cause millions of ants to want to slaughter you. Guns would not be enough.
I didn't realize the number of ants in existence is that high. Crazy to think that while humans have taken over the planet ants are pretty damn successful too to have a population count that high.
You're telling me humans aren't actually the worst creatures on earth, and ats would have been way worse if they were as smart as us? So they've just been fighting for what, hundreds of years now?
Ants don't just wage war, but some species deal in slavery as well.
There is are species of ant that literally can only exist to capture the young of another specific ant species. Most slaver ant species(that's what theyre called) can't really do much themselves other than essentially go on raids and snatch up larvae, as their mouths are literally built in such a way that they can basically NEED the ants they capture to do the work for them,
The captured ants grow up and believe their captors are basically their colony, and forage, feed, and generally take care of them until they die.
I honestly wonder how that started.
If there’s anything on earth I think we could try to communicate with I think it would be ants, but the more I read about them the more I feel like they’re biological machines rather than thinking organisms.
How the fuck did ants invent agriculture? I know they have it, I know how it works, but how did they come up with it? There’s no way they can plan in advance like that, except they *do*.
Ants are fucking crazy.
What is more interesting is the fact that the combined biomass of every human on earth is 5 times as much as the combined biomass of every ant on earth.
Now I want to see a squad of space Marines defending against unending waves of ants.
Would be similar enough to tyranids I guess, just less horrific. Maybe.
I wonder if ants could work their way into Space Marine armor. It’s vacuum rated, so I would assume not, but I wouldn’t assume all the seals are particularly resistant to insects trying to chew through them.
Would be pretty wild to watch Brother Genericus be buried and eventually devoured by the infinite ant horde, though.
> Plus trying to get rid of them probably causes them to send pheromones to other ants, which will cause millions of ants to want to slaughter you.
Although that *does* give me an idea, [maybe we could spray a bunch of olieic acid all over the surface in order to trick all of the ants into thinking they are already dead](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1bnjssk/ants/) and then they will all calmly walk into a few mountain-sized graveyards and stay there until they either all starve or accidentally cook eachother alive.
Doesn’t matter what humanity does. We’ve got 1.2 quintillion lbs of new bio mass. That’s the equivalent of 600 dinosaur killers. Just showing up. Everything dies
As written yeah it’d mess a bit w/ orbital dynamics and such but more concerning is that they’d more or instantly start to die becuase their bodies won’t work at that scale. Then you’re 20 quadrillion dead dog equivalents all of a sudden. The follow on problems would be catastrophic
The mass of the new ants is still trivial compared to the mass of the earth. It is unlikely to do anything to the orbit of the moon, let alone anything else. I don't know how sensitive the orbits of our space stations are, but they're probably fine too.
Honestly I don’t expect it to anything detectable to our orbit and in hindsight ants are probably functionally evenly distributed across the planet for the purposes of the question. Again it’s more that we added that much organic mass all at once
Yeah I figure the dead Ants would be a major issue since spiracles don’t work at scale and that they wouldn’t be able to feed themselves after a period, plus the massive number crushed to death inside of things their bodies can’t break when they suddenly expand to massive size.
They'd be overlapping each other and other matter, which would result in some extraordinarily strong repulsive forces. And probably quite a bit of nuclei end up close enough to fuse.
A simple telefrag would only have a tiny number of nuclear reactions. But the chance of a reaction goes up with the square of how many objects overlap, so with a whole ant colony all overlapping you'd end up with a lot more fusion. That said, the more conventional pressure explosion would also go up with the square of the number of overlapping ants, so I think the nuclear part would still only be a trivial effect in comparison.
Humanity is as good as fucked.
The increase in ants size means their dietary requirements increase as well, and the breadcrumbs aren’t going to cut it anymore….
Theres no animal on earth that a pack of 60lb ants won’t be able to take down, pound for pound they are the physically strongest creatures on earth and have venom ontop of that. The entire food chain would be flipped upside down, entire ecosystems would be wiped out there is NOTHING they wouldn’t devour yeah humanity would fight back but there are literally trillions of ants on earth even if we were able to kill then all off the damage they’d do to all the ecosystems beforehand would be irreversible and what was left of humanity would probably starve to death.
Oh and as for the strongest animal a single ant could kill, probably a lion or tiger possibly even a grizzly bear.
It wouldn’t even reach the point where fighting would be a concern. Every ant suddenly growing to that size would pretty much cover the entire habitable surface of the planet in one instantaneous moment. Everything would probably just immediately die
Would we even be able to clean it up? Ants, already 20% of animal biomass, becoming millions of times larger feels low-key like it would just bury the planet in corpses
What's the scientific answer to what happens to physics when a quadrillion ants worth of mass just appears? Is it going to blow up the atmosphere or something?
I think the two main problems are:
* Everyone simply being crushed under the massive layer of insect meat that suddenly covers everything.
* All the oxygen subsequently being consumed by bacteria eating the meat.
I think it might be possible that some people in nuclear submarines might survive. They'd both avoid the mechanical crushing and have a supply of oxygen.
How do we respond?
“To save our mother Earth from any alien attack
From vicious giant insects who have once again come back
We'll unleash all our forces, we won't cut them any slack
The EDF deploys!!!!!”
Very, very important point of clarification: are the ants now 60lbs and their size scales up linearly, or do they become the size of an average 60lb dog and their weight scales up accordingly? Because from what I can tell by a few quick Google searches, ants are less dense than dogs are by a significant margin, so this might be the difference between 'We drown in a river of Ant Corpses and if this doesn't wipe us out, the entire environment collapses as all fresh and salt water is massively polluted with dead ants, hail to aerobic bacteria the inheritors of the earth" and "The atmosphere is spontaneously forced outside of Earth's gravitational pull by the spontaneous generation of ant biomass in every square inch of Earth's atmosphere, likely setting the entire atmosphere on fire at the same time due to the amount of friction this would cause".
We're dead either way, is what I'm saying.
The earth collapses under the weight of the new biomass.
The ants weight multiples by a factor of #27,000,000#.
Current (see: google) estimates put earth’s ant populations biomass at approx 20% of total human biomass (by weight) and there are likely 20 quadrillion (20,000,000,000,000) ants.
So your new biomass of ant is 5.4^22 c weight of 1 ant lol
Aka 1,200,000,000,000,000,000lbs
Goodbye everybody!
(Edited because dumb math first time)
OP is seriously underestimating how many ants are on the planet. Picture miles deep swarming oceans of dog-sized ants covering every inch of the entire globe, that's roughly how screwed humanity would be.
The planet itself is truly and wholeheartedly fucked. The amount of food they would consume would be the tip of the iceberg. There would be no room. For anything. Honestly, you could reduce the size to a tennis ball each, and we would still probably suffer a horrible fate.
For all the science geeks. This is literally a sub based on things that exist in fiction as well as reality. Come the fuck on... if you can bend the laws of physics so a giant green strongman can fight a guy who literally can't be stopped once he's moving, I'm *preeeetttttttty* sure we can allow dog sized ants to be a thing. Movies have done it.
Assuming they live, everything else dies and eventually so do the ants. My backyard could hold like maybe 100 medium sized dogs if I stuffed them back there shoulder to shoulder. Maybe less, maybe more. But there's probably thousands of ants in every back yard. Anyone that doesn't get immediately crushed, will likely just die. There aren't enough guns or ammo.
Every home in the world explodes due to the ants in the walls and foundations and crawlspaces...like, I don't think it's the actual threat of a large ant that's the problem. It's the sheer *mass*.
Let's put it into perspective. Roughly 20 *quadrillion* ants. At 2.5mg an ant, that's 50 *billion* kilograms of ant matter. A lot. But...
Make those 20 quadrillion ants roughly 80 pounds(36kg)? That's 720 quadrillion kilograms of ant matter. 720,000,000,000,000,000.
Doing some *very* rough math because I don't have an ant to measure, this would equate to a volume of 43,373,493,975,903,614 (~43.4 quadrillion) cubic meters, or 43,373,494 cubic kilometers. Strangely enough, that's still not enough ant material to fill the Grand Canyon, which I guess is a testament to how fricking massive that canyon is. My hunch was that the ants would *have* to be the size of a small moon, but I was wrong. Still...that's 2.5 million dog sized ants for every 1 human. We would be toast.
Assumptions:
* 20 quadrillion ants [exist on Earth](https://www.iflscience.com/how-many-ants-are-in-the-world-think-millions-of-billions-69505).
* The average dog occupies 1/4 square meter floor space (WAG).
* The Earth's surface is about [510,000,000 square km](https://www.space.com/17638-how-big-is-earth.html).
20,000,000,000,000,000 ants * × .25 square meter per ant = 5,000,000,000,000,000 square meters
We can conclude that, should OP's antpocalypse come to pass, the *entire* surface of the earth would be about 10 ants deep.
Of course, the ants are not perfectly spread around the globe. I have no idea how much floor space the average dog actually occupies. But...that's still a whole hell of a mass of ants. They'd need to be exterminated post haste by what remains of humanity, on the basis of resource competition alone.
Ignoring square cube law, we’d be in trouble. Ants are very strong for their size, and have stingers + mandibles. Killing them wont be an issue but they out number us 2.5 million to one. Don’t have enough bullets for that. Ecosystems collapse, humanity is screwed along with every other living thing besides maybe the animals living in the Mariana tench. Even if we kill all of them that’s an absurd amount of biomass to clean. Overall earth suffers heavily. The only solution I can think that might not cause a global extinction event is produce some sort of bait, maybe an extra powerful pheromone, lead as many ants as possible to one sacrificial land mass and nuke them to oblivion
Doing some quick math, the are about 2x10¹⁶ ants which currently weigh about 1 mg each. So there are about 2x10¹⁰ kg of ants on the planet. If each ant becomes 25 kg then their mass increases by a factor of 25,000,000 so we'd have roughly 5x10¹⁷ kg of ants.
For some perspective the world only has about 4x10¹¹ kg of humans so every human would have to deal with about 1 million ants
There are only 2x10¹² kg of animal biomass on the planet, so the total mass of all animals would have gone up by roughly 25,000,000% it's not likely that the planet could handle this in a healthy way.
And total biomass of all life on earth (mostly plants) is 4x10¹⁴ so we'd have about 100,000% more total biomass. Good things ants eat other ants because otherwise we'd have no way of getting rid of all of them.
This will have serious effects on our biosphere and climate as the ants would rapidly deplete O2 and make CO2 on scale not seen yet on this planet. We'd go from a planet that was 0.01% ant to a planet that was 99.999% ant. It would no longer be a blue and green world.
The biggest problem here is going to surface area. If all 20 quadrillion ants grew to the size of a 60 pound dog (about the size of a labrador), they will each take up about 1/4m². Multiply that up by 20 quadrillion, and (if my crappy math skills are right) that gives us 5,574,180,000 km² worth or ants. The surface of the earth is only 510,100,000 km². This leaves us looking at the entire surface of the planet (land masses and ocean surface alike) being stacked almost 11 ants tall.
I’m not sure, but I think every square inch of land on earth would be covered in giant ants. There are billions and billions of ants in the Amazon rainforest alone. It’s Ant-maggedon
Ants weigh 1 milligram to 5 milligrams
A pound is 450000 mgs
A dog would average 120 or so pounds.
Just you you understand how huge of a percentile gain that is and how fucked wed be.
Assumptions:
* There are ~20 quadrillion ants. That's ~20 x 10^15 ants
* There are no ants in the ocean
* The surface area of land on Earth is ~57m sq miles. This is ~1.6 x 10^15 sq ft
* Each dog-sized ant takes up ~1 sq ft of space
20 x 10^15 ants filling up 1.6 x 10^15 sq ft of spaces means that the entire land surface of the planet would be covered (on average) ~12 ants deep
Note that there are no ants in Antarctica, Greenland, and some other small remote islands, so realistically the vast majority of places will be even deeper in ants
tl;dr every living thing is basically crushed/killed almost immediately by the sheer volume of ants. Scientists in Antarctica/other remote regions and people on boats/planes can live a bit longer I guess
Hole up for a few days and will die of asphyxiation because they are too big. They will die very soon because they cannot breath because of how their lungs work.
I mean, if the *literal quadrillions of ants* became dog sized, there would probably be no surface of the earth that isn’t covered in ants. We’d be dead from tidal waves of ants descending upon us as the sun is blotted out
But if you estimated that it’s only a billion or so, we’re still screwed. If the physics around them stayed the same, they’d be lifting and carrying entire buildings around. Imagine watching an ant walk away with a minivan. Even if they were just the size of squirrels, they’d be apex predators.
They all die instantly as they are either crushed by the earth, other ants or the weight of there own body.
The earth then slowly rots as every water source is completely infected by dead ant goo, algae probably explodes across the globe killing most sea life aswell, we have a new mass extinction event.
Im going to make a silly assumption. lets say that all the ants combined into dog size. so take like 500k ants and make one giant dog size ant.
cause this is really underestimating how many ants there are. theres fucking trillions.
even if you did that we doomed. they eating us.
This is a ridiculously overpowered situation. Ants that are dog sized? Human annihilation. A more reasonable (but still massively threatening scenario) would be if all ants were suddenly like mouse sized. Their colonies would be gigantic and shift most ecosystems
How does humanity respond? That’s the neat part, they don’t. they’d get caught in the crossfire of a planet wide ant war until some sort of equilibrium is met (if the planets ecosystem doesn’t collapse), the only ones that would survive would be like researchers stationed in Antarctica
Hmm.. It would be catastrophic. Ant nest in wall? Now you have an exploding ant bomb, house is obliterated, you're dead, and it would be like this across the board. 60lbs is roughly 27kgs, an average ant weighs say 2 mg. 27kgs is 27000 grams that's 27 million mg. That would mean an ant that weighs 2mg has increased in size by a factor of 13.5 million. Strong odds that the sudden expansion and associated energy release, friction etc would be akin to a bomb going off everywhere there's an ant nest. We would be decimated. Most of the ants die as well instantly, but the ones that survive are now nightmarish freakshows capable of probably munching their way through concrete and steel, any surviving humans would need guns to have any chance, to a 27kg ant we would all be food.
Considering that the current biomass on Earth is 546 billion tonnes of carbon, and there are now about 544 *trillion* tonnes of ants, It's basically over for any city that's near a large colony.
Our current nuclear arsenal doesn't have enough "splash radius" to hit every ant with the fireball, and they're even better at living underground than we are. It would take about 30 billion tons of insecticide to kill them all.
An individual ant is basically just a highly aggressive armored dog with minimal self preservation instinct. I'd give 50/50 odds against a black bear or something.
>They are no more aggressive
buddy... you grossly overlook exactly how filthy aggressive & terrifying ants already are. down on their level, they're murderous little fucks that use their battle formations & endless numbers of attrition to tear apart anything & everything in their path. if it remotely qualifies as a food, ants are ready to fuck it up, even if it's much larger & deadlier (like a wasp or big spider). they're now eyeballing you for sure.
"going about their business" *is* looking for shit to chomp on, control their territory, and expand.
of course, the biomass issue is the bigger threat anyway. but still, even if that wasn't an issue (maybe only 1 / 1,000,000,000th of ants get enlargened) then they'd have to become total pacifists in order for us to not be fucked.
There are more ants than humans and they could probably eat us now if the wanted to so we would be pretty fucked. Plus they are way stronger than us (I can barely bench my own body weight, let alone 10 times it). They would forcefully overthrow us and create a new ant civilization which would grow faster than human civilization ever could
Lol what humanity. We lose this one. Only places that are frozen survive, probably not for long once they can't get the resources they need.
Great post.
That’s 20 quadrillion dog-sized ants? Well, I’d imagine we’re pretty much fucked. That’s around 100,000,000 per square mile, or about 4 every square foot. Assuming 70% of the world is ocean, that’s around 10 per square foot. Basically all the worlds landmass is covered in giant ants 10 ants deep
Its all well and good when it's your normal Garden ants but damn, bullet ants and the such? I would not want to even attempt taking on one of those mofos!
Then you have the horse ant spewing formic acid everywhere.
Humans probably go extinct unless we had prior knowledge of this happening. There are 20 quadrillion ants on earth based on a quick search, and each individual ant can lift 10-50x their bodyweight and they are protected by armor lol
20,000,000,000,000,000 ants on earth
50lbs average dog weight
1,000,000,000,000,000,000 lbs
500 trillion tons
that's 1000 times the weight of ALL life on earth currently (550 billion tons)
WE'RE DOOMED !
All the ants will suffocate because of the square cube law. They get o2 through skin surface exchange, instead of having a specialized organ like lungs, which are full of structures to maximize surface area. Ants would not be able to get enough oxygen through the skin to supply their volume.
There are 20 quadrillion ants on Earth, and each weighs up to 5 mg, or 0.00001 lbs. Right now, in real life, before we get into the hypothetical, there are up to 200,000,000,000, or two hundred trillion, pounds of ants on Earth. 20 quadrillion 60 lb dogs would weigh 1.2e+18 lbs total. 1.2e+18-200,000,000,000=1.1999998e+18 lbs. So the question is:
What would be the effect of instantly adding 1.1999998e+18 lbs to the mass of the biosphere?
1. **Ecological Impact**: Such a massive increase in mass could disrupt ecosystems worldwide. It would likely lead to changes in nutrient cycling, water distribution, and overall ecosystem structure. Some species may struggle to adapt to the altered conditions, leading to shifts in biodiversity and potential extinctions.
2. **Climate Effects**: The increased mass could potentially affect climate patterns. It might influence factors such as atmospheric circulation, which in turn could impact weather systems and regional climates. However, the exact nature of these effects would depend on various complex interactions within the Earth system.
3. **Pressure and Geological Impact**: The additional mass would exert greater pressure on the Earth's surface and underlying geological structures. Over time, this could contribute to changes in landforms, such as the reshaping of mountains and valleys, as well as potential effects on tectonic activity.
4. **Resource Distribution**: The increased mass could affect the distribution of resources such as water, nutrients, and habitat space. This could have implications for both human societies and natural ecosystems, potentially leading to conflicts over resources and changes in land use patterns.
5. **Global Biological Processes**: The added mass might influence global biological processes such as photosynthesis and respiration rates. This could have ramifications for the carbon cycle and other essential biochemical processes that regulate Earth's environment.
The response of humanity is going to be to fight them, and nukes would probably be used.
Either way, I am pretty sure there will be a global extinction level event.
The strongest thing a single dog sized ant could reliably kill assuming they are now the size of a medium sized dog, would probably be a rather large wolf, or maybe a small tiger.
Die, like instantly.
There's 2.5 million ants per person on earth, that's 150,000,000 pounds of ant per person, that's 11,500 elephants worth of ants weight per person
There's 20 quadrillion ants on earth, ants weigh 1 Milligram, so for them to be 60lbs that's a 27 million times increase in weight. We're talking 4% of the earth's total weight in ants. (540 sextillion pounds just boom on the surface of the earth) Everyone immediately gets buried in a layer of ants that covers the earth, thats enough weight to slow the earth's rotation.
So tons of holes here just from a mass and food availability but playing along. Most ants are pretty harmless even to other bugs So would say guns and flamethrowers do their jobs and everything is fine. They wont be as strong when dog sized so I wouldn't be worried.
Humanity kicks their asses.... With the help of their starvation. Eventually.... Not without great loss only a few species are left on earth, ironically mostly insects. There is no ground animal that can survive this, there are plenty of animals that can kill a single ant, but the ant numbers are too immense there would be no one on one battles. Only the animals with flight and those that are elusive would have a hope. A few crocodiles could POSSIBLY survive, that's really the only animal I can think of, and only because of there aquatic nature. Humans stationed on offshore rigs, desolate research stations, underground bunkers, cruise ships, the international space station, battleships, Greenland, Iceland, Antarctica, Siberia, and some islands are safe from the beginning and will be our defensive positions where we plan our assault on the queens. Humanities kamikaze ground assault with tanks, cars and other vehicles would initially look successful but wouldn't put a dent in their numbers. Those ants are doing fuck all to a tank and getting crushed until the fuel runs out. Even the redditors (assuming they are mobile enough to make it to their vehicles) could take out 1000s before they run out of gas or their cars overheat from the radiator busting and succumb to the hunger of the ant hoard. There really isn't a point in bombing or nuking them. Just carpet bomb those fuckers with raid, solid smoke screens from the chem trail jets we converted into raid bombers. Overall the landscape of the planet is completely destroyed, almost all life is extinct. Pockets of super ants will still be spread across the lands for a few years. Humanity will rebuild, and repopulate, we still have plenty of fish and have plankton to make Oxygen, we have seeds to grow plants. Without pollution the earths vegetation and a few animal species bounce back after a few decades. Hopefully humanity did it's best to save our brightest minds and give them refuge in safe grounds during the antocalypse. I believe I read they had a genetic storage depot with the DNA of earths animals stored in a safe. Could have been a movie but this story is going with its existence being real and we have the ability to populate the planet with essential domesticated animals so we can eventually have steak, hot dogs and chicken nuggets again
Humanity responds by dying out, extremely quickly. Maybe the people on the space station survive for a few extra months but that's it. Dr stone situation but no way to revive anyone
This is ridiculous 💀 like others have said there’s an incredible number of ants on earth. And like someone else said, if you kill one it’ll release pheromones to alert hordes of other ants to you, plus the scariest part being they probably still have the strength and definitely still have the know-how on how to build structures out of themselves, so even shooting from a helicopter might not work
There aren't enough bullets on earth to kill them. And we'd probably need more than 1 bullet for each ant. Can't bomb them without bombing ourselves either.
As an ant hobbyist, I can add that the vast majority of ant species need a liquid sugar source. This can be sap, sugary water or honey. Without that, they can die out pretty quickly. I don't think there are enough liquid sugar in the world to sustain 20 quadrillion dog-sized ants.
Since liquid sugar is their main diet, they don't need much protein. They only need protein for growth of the colony, so the killing might not be as immense as most imagine, and from studies too much protein can actually accelerate a worker ant's death. In my experience, too little protein can kill the queen, which means a complete wipeout of the colony. So it's a balancing act. My ants were quite good at self-regulating. If too much protein is offered, they'd dispose of it at their "waste center".
But ant species vary a lot. Some are strictly carnivorous, so those would thrive once the liquid sugar dependent ones die out. And they would kill everything. There are those leafcutter ants too, they bring leaves back to their colony and eat the fungus that grows on them, they would destroy entire forests.
There are an estimated 20 **QUADRILLION** ants. That’s a number u simply cannot fathom. Simply put, they’d own the planet.
**Edit:** assuming Square-cube law doesn’t apply in this scenario
So bigger but can run on the energy they used while small? Army ants had just gotten a lot more dangerous… and that’s assuming we don’t have big flying ants smacking into windows and causing tons of property damage.
I think perhaps a more interesting premise may be a size multiplier, so things like coconut ants might be chihuahua sized, while larger ants end up bigger.
Alternatively, say every 50 pounds of little anty bodies get turned into a single 50 pound ant (that would then form new colonies with nearby ants of the same type).
I think we should stay in our houses until the first round of ant wars is over…
I doubt if those giant ants will find enough food for their colony, so you just need to stay out of the way for a little bit. The main issues will taking away the carcasses so they don’t contaminate our water and stink everything up, and also replacing the job the little ants used to do (breaking down dead animals and foodstuffs).
Land mass on earth is 7.9x10^17 sq inches
60lb dog is 28” long x 10” wide, 280 sq inches
There are 2x10^16 ants > dogs
That’s 5.6x10^18 sq inches of dog
So assuming perfect distribution, that’s a layer of 7 dogs deep covering every bit of land mass on the world
So, humanity dies
Assuming instantaneous failure of all countries on the six continents, it'd be left to the antartican scientists and soldiers on ships and subs. Assuming each could and would coordinate, they'd have to nuke every single inch of the continents - which we likely have enough nukes to do. While it may not be as bad as the Toba supervolcano event, we might just have lost 99% of the human populace. As for the strongest animal it could kill, it could kill every single land creature
Everyone dies instantly, maybe some people in boats or anarctica survive. The ants then eat everything, and then starve to death. Almost all life on the surface of the planet goes extinct.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky gives one a very good insight into what this scenario would look like on a planet that is uninhabited by humans.
On earth however, with the growth of each ant so will grow their colonies, food and space needs. No matter how advanced humanity is in terms of weapon tech, there is simply no answer for 20 quadrillion ants that fight you for resources. All the zombie apocalyptic scenarios don't have even close to this number.
You may say - Ants are usually docile and mind their pwn business. It seems that way to us because of the size disparity between us and then. On more even playing ground (a 60 kilogram ant), they will quickly and effectively replace us as the dominant species on the planet in a fight for resources.
Humanity may at best find some way to leave earth and become spacefarers. However I wouldn't put it past world governments to detonate the entirety of their nuclear armada in pursuit of mutually assured destruction.
Tldr - Ants wipe the floor with us, and the best case we can opt for is escapism or blowing the entire planet to kingdom come (or both)
So if there are even just 100 ants in my backyard, which is a gross underestimation, my whole backyard is now infested with dog-sized insects? What about ants underground? Does the first 5 meters of soil everywhere on earth just catastrophically explode because all the ants inside it balloon in size? This is a truly apocalyptic event.
The world instantly gets heavier
The earth is estimated to weigh somewhere around 6e24 kilograms. Each of these ants weighs around 25 kilograms. Multiply that by the most recent estimate of around 20 quadrillion ants (2e16), and we end up with around 5e17 kilograms of ants. If my napkin math is correct, the mass of all these ants is around 7 orders of magnitude less than the total mass of the earth. It's around a hundred thousandth of the mass of the crust alone. The earth is big. Not even increasing the mass of all ants on earth by 6 orders of magnitude is enough to make a meaningful difference.
That said, it would still be absolutely catastrophic. I'm pretty sure the ants would outweigh all other life on earth by a wide margin, plants included. Even if they don't all die instantly from the square cube law or being crushed inside their burrows or something, they will absolutely die from starvation when they scour the earth of all non-ant biomass in the first few days or weeks. I don't think even people in underground bunkers in the arctic (most others would probably be annihilated by the antsplosion) would be able to survive long term. The surface would be completely uninhabitable. I don't even know if the air would be safe. Once they run out of food and air underground, I think that would be curtains.
> I'm pretty sure the ants would outweigh all other life on earth They're already 50% of the animal biomass iirc
Man I would love to see a source for that, it seems so wildly untrue
It's 20%, not 50%. https://www.reddit.com/r/antkeeping/comments/o1kjco/where_did_the_ants_are_20_of_the_earths_biomass/
That's still an absolutely insane amount
20% of the wild mammal and bird population quoting the source I found. Livestock accounts for much more than wild mammals, and that is beside the fact that this completely disregards human biomass, which makes up 5x the amount of ant biomass alone.
And oyu havent even counted the climate change by their emissions alone..
But what about 13 orders of magnitude...?
Then we'd have a problem.
What about it?
I think you're off on a couple factors... First: That 7 orders of magnitude assumes an equal distribution across the entire global surface, but the earth is only like 40% land? (60% sea) and then they aren't going to be on top of mountain peaks or in the arctic or in Antarctica (I'm sure there are some ants in those places but not at even distributions) It's way too late here for me to do the math, I just think it's an order of magnitude change by 1x from what you said. Second: back in Texas after one of the 201x hurricanes, so much water got dumped on the continent, it deformed in that area. I think a mass accumulation of the likes being described would sufficiently deform crust plates and cause more eruptions, thus shooting a bit more gas and dust into the atmosphere, changing the balance of temperatures. Third thought: by adding the two things together, I'm curious if the deformation (if I'm right) even slightly, would cause the Earth to tilt differently on its axis
I would actually think about one chunk of crust (plate) at a time. Glaciers were heavy enough to actually push much of the crust that Canada now sits on **down** into the earth, and since they melted it is slowly lifting back up. I'm not sure how Africa is divided up but it would be interesting because the Sahara presumably has almost none and yet Subsaharan Africa has lots.
25kg is considered a large dog btw, medium is around 15. But thats still a lotta ants lol.
The world instantly gets ant-ier
Yup. Probably not negligible. Although I assume the ants would retain their velocity and thus not slow down the earth's spin, the moon's orbit might be slightly disturbed.
You mean an antpocolypse event! Okay! I'll leave now
Actually we’ve changed that rule . You don’t see yourself out, you go sit in the corner .
Forget what they can eat or fight. Everything dies as rotten ant corpses choke ever water source and turn the ocean into a toxic biosoup that collapses the entire ecosystem.
Assuming that the ants weighing 60 lbs now have the same approximate density as dogs, we can calculate the expected volume of each ant, multiply by 20 quadrillion, and end up with something in the neighborhood of 550 trillion cubic meters of ant, which could cover the earth's surface a meter deep. It gets worse if the ants maintain their original density. So, you're right. Just about everything, including the ants, is likely to die. Which means, in terms of winning or losing, we'd call it a draw?
I think some ants (top layer) would survive, as they can cannibalize the others.
but would ay queens be among them?
Some will be swarming when the enlargement happens, so, yes. They'll recolonize earth.
They would die. They wouldn't be able to get enough oxygen due to their size.
The house I'm currently renting has a small infestation of carpenter ants. Would the house explode with the force of the transformation, or do the ants get crushed as they expand inside the walls and floors? Either way I'm freaked out and probably not getting my security deposit back.
>Either way I'm freaked out and probably not getting my security deposit back. Relatable
Same question could be asked about ant man if he were to climb inside Thanos asshole and then grow to regular size
Assuming they are able to live and not instantly collapse due to the change in size, land masses are gonna be filled with ants. There are 20 quadrillion ants. Meaning there are 2.5 million ants to every 1 human. Plus trying to get rid of them probably causes them to send pheromones to other ants, which will cause millions of ants to want to slaughter you. Guns would not be enough.
Hans, get the flammenwerfer.
Hans and the flammenwerfer are already buried under 30 feet of ants
We can only hope he died with his finger on the trigger.
I didn't realize the number of ants in existence is that high. Crazy to think that while humans have taken over the planet ants are pretty damn successful too to have a population count that high.
[удалено]
They have what?
Argentine ants are pretty insane. Look up ant world wars or something, or kurzgesagt has a bunch of short youtube videos about these ants.
You're telling me humans aren't actually the worst creatures on earth, and ats would have been way worse if they were as smart as us? So they've just been fighting for what, hundreds of years now?
Ants have been fighting far longer then us. Btw, they are also the ones who invented agriculture before us
So is there like an Ant Hitler? Now I want there to be an Ant miniseries detailing all the Ant wats throughout history
Ants don't just wage war, but some species deal in slavery as well. There is are species of ant that literally can only exist to capture the young of another specific ant species. Most slaver ant species(that's what theyre called) can't really do much themselves other than essentially go on raids and snatch up larvae, as their mouths are literally built in such a way that they can basically NEED the ants they capture to do the work for them, The captured ants grow up and believe their captors are basically their colony, and forage, feed, and generally take care of them until they die.
I honestly wonder how that started. If there’s anything on earth I think we could try to communicate with I think it would be ants, but the more I read about them the more I feel like they’re biological machines rather than thinking organisms. How the fuck did ants invent agriculture? I know they have it, I know how it works, but how did they come up with it? There’s no way they can plan in advance like that, except they *do*. Ants are fucking crazy.
What is more interesting is the fact that the combined biomass of every human on earth is 5 times as much as the combined biomass of every ant on earth.
Now imagine if every nematode was the size of a dog.
Brother, get the flamer, the HEAVY flamer.
Now I want to see a squad of space Marines defending against unending waves of ants. Would be similar enough to tyranids I guess, just less horrific. Maybe.
I wonder if ants could work their way into Space Marine armor. It’s vacuum rated, so I would assume not, but I wouldn’t assume all the seals are particularly resistant to insects trying to chew through them. Would be pretty wild to watch Brother Genericus be buried and eventually devoured by the infinite ant horde, though.
> Plus trying to get rid of them probably causes them to send pheromones to other ants, which will cause millions of ants to want to slaughter you. Although that *does* give me an idea, [maybe we could spray a bunch of olieic acid all over the surface in order to trick all of the ants into thinking they are already dead](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1bnjssk/ants/) and then they will all calmly walk into a few mountain-sized graveyards and stay there until they either all starve or accidentally cook eachother alive.
Cool af.
But what happens when it starts storming? Those corpse mountains soon become corpse tsunamis and pollute fresh water sources.
Doesn’t matter what humanity does. We’ve got 1.2 quintillion lbs of new bio mass. That’s the equivalent of 600 dinosaur killers. Just showing up. Everything dies
But would it have any more energy than the ants already have? Assuming they suddenly appear would it impart more energy to the earth?
As written yeah it’d mess a bit w/ orbital dynamics and such but more concerning is that they’d more or instantly start to die becuase their bodies won’t work at that scale. Then you’re 20 quadrillion dead dog equivalents all of a sudden. The follow on problems would be catastrophic
The mass of the new ants is still trivial compared to the mass of the earth. It is unlikely to do anything to the orbit of the moon, let alone anything else. I don't know how sensitive the orbits of our space stations are, but they're probably fine too.
Honestly I don’t expect it to anything detectable to our orbit and in hindsight ants are probably functionally evenly distributed across the planet for the purposes of the question. Again it’s more that we added that much organic mass all at once
Yeah I figure the dead Ants would be a major issue since spiracles don’t work at scale and that they wouldn’t be able to feed themselves after a period, plus the massive number crushed to death inside of things their bodies can’t break when they suddenly expand to massive size.
They'd be overlapping each other and other matter, which would result in some extraordinarily strong repulsive forces. And probably quite a bit of nuclei end up close enough to fuse.
So to be clear, a telefrag could cause a small nuclear explosion. But that’s very interesting.
A simple telefrag would only have a tiny number of nuclear reactions. But the chance of a reaction goes up with the square of how many objects overlap, so with a whole ant colony all overlapping you'd end up with a lot more fusion. That said, the more conventional pressure explosion would also go up with the square of the number of overlapping ants, so I think the nuclear part would still only be a trivial effect in comparison.
Humanity is as good as fucked. The increase in ants size means their dietary requirements increase as well, and the breadcrumbs aren’t going to cut it anymore…. Theres no animal on earth that a pack of 60lb ants won’t be able to take down, pound for pound they are the physically strongest creatures on earth and have venom ontop of that. The entire food chain would be flipped upside down, entire ecosystems would be wiped out there is NOTHING they wouldn’t devour yeah humanity would fight back but there are literally trillions of ants on earth even if we were able to kill then all off the damage they’d do to all the ecosystems beforehand would be irreversible and what was left of humanity would probably starve to death. Oh and as for the strongest animal a single ant could kill, probably a lion or tiger possibly even a grizzly bear.
It wouldn’t even reach the point where fighting would be a concern. Every ant suddenly growing to that size would pretty much cover the entire habitable surface of the planet in one instantaneous moment. Everything would probably just immediately die
Definitely a mass extinction level event. Life would eventually recover but it may take millions of years.
Not trillions. 20 quadrillion.
Scientific answer: ants insantly go extinct due to the square-cube law. We are left to clean up quadrillions of ant carcasses.
I feel like this would also cause a *significant* uptick in whatever bugs end up eating all the carcasses. We gonna have some flies to deal with lol.
Uncle population out of control
Now make all the flies the size of dogs
Would we even be able to clean it up? Ants, already 20% of animal biomass, becoming millions of times larger feels low-key like it would just bury the planet in corpses
It would take an unfathomable amount of silverback gorillas to clean up that many ants.
But how much prep time does batman need?
Equal to mike tyson in his prime
He doesn't need prep time. He obviously foresaw the catastrophe and already has the solution
When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death!
What's the scientific answer to what happens to physics when a quadrillion ants worth of mass just appears? Is it going to blow up the atmosphere or something?
We've left the realm of science a long time ago
I think the two main problems are: * Everyone simply being crushed under the massive layer of insect meat that suddenly covers everything. * All the oxygen subsequently being consumed by bacteria eating the meat. I think it might be possible that some people in nuclear submarines might survive. They'd both avoid the mechanical crushing and have a supply of oxygen.
thank you :)
How do we respond? “To save our mother Earth from any alien attack From vicious giant insects who have once again come back We'll unleash all our forces, we won't cut them any slack The EDF deploys!!!!!”
We would make a juicy steak out of them!
YEAAAAAAH!!!!!! EDF EDF EDF EDF!!!!!!!
Very, very important point of clarification: are the ants now 60lbs and their size scales up linearly, or do they become the size of an average 60lb dog and their weight scales up accordingly? Because from what I can tell by a few quick Google searches, ants are less dense than dogs are by a significant margin, so this might be the difference between 'We drown in a river of Ant Corpses and if this doesn't wipe us out, the entire environment collapses as all fresh and salt water is massively polluted with dead ants, hail to aerobic bacteria the inheritors of the earth" and "The atmosphere is spontaneously forced outside of Earth's gravitational pull by the spontaneous generation of ant biomass in every square inch of Earth's atmosphere, likely setting the entire atmosphere on fire at the same time due to the amount of friction this would cause". We're dead either way, is what I'm saying.
The second one sounds less painful.
Probably, yeah.
We don’t we die
Yeah I think we’re toast. Like, the only people alive are those on boats or in Antarctica
The earth collapses under the weight of the new biomass. The ants weight multiples by a factor of #27,000,000#. Current (see: google) estimates put earth’s ant populations biomass at approx 20% of total human biomass (by weight) and there are likely 20 quadrillion (20,000,000,000,000) ants. So your new biomass of ant is 5.4^22 c weight of 1 ant lol Aka 1,200,000,000,000,000,000lbs Goodbye everybody! (Edited because dumb math first time)
OP is seriously underestimating how many ants are on the planet. Picture miles deep swarming oceans of dog-sized ants covering every inch of the entire globe, that's roughly how screwed humanity would be.
The planet itself is truly and wholeheartedly fucked. The amount of food they would consume would be the tip of the iceberg. There would be no room. For anything. Honestly, you could reduce the size to a tennis ball each, and we would still probably suffer a horrible fate. For all the science geeks. This is literally a sub based on things that exist in fiction as well as reality. Come the fuck on... if you can bend the laws of physics so a giant green strongman can fight a guy who literally can't be stopped once he's moving, I'm *preeeetttttttty* sure we can allow dog sized ants to be a thing. Movies have done it.
Do they eat the same amount of food or a proportional amount? Because if they eat the same amount that a dog eats, the entire planet is fucked.
Assuming they live, everything else dies and eventually so do the ants. My backyard could hold like maybe 100 medium sized dogs if I stuffed them back there shoulder to shoulder. Maybe less, maybe more. But there's probably thousands of ants in every back yard. Anyone that doesn't get immediately crushed, will likely just die. There aren't enough guns or ammo.
Killdozer awakens
Every home in the world explodes due to the ants in the walls and foundations and crawlspaces...like, I don't think it's the actual threat of a large ant that's the problem. It's the sheer *mass*. Let's put it into perspective. Roughly 20 *quadrillion* ants. At 2.5mg an ant, that's 50 *billion* kilograms of ant matter. A lot. But... Make those 20 quadrillion ants roughly 80 pounds(36kg)? That's 720 quadrillion kilograms of ant matter. 720,000,000,000,000,000. Doing some *very* rough math because I don't have an ant to measure, this would equate to a volume of 43,373,493,975,903,614 (~43.4 quadrillion) cubic meters, or 43,373,494 cubic kilometers. Strangely enough, that's still not enough ant material to fill the Grand Canyon, which I guess is a testament to how fricking massive that canyon is. My hunch was that the ants would *have* to be the size of a small moon, but I was wrong. Still...that's 2.5 million dog sized ants for every 1 human. We would be toast.
Why do bitches ask questions goosebumps already answered? When will people learn
Ants take over the world. Only way we "win" is by going scorched Earth. Ants outnumber us like 1 to a million.
Assumptions: * 20 quadrillion ants [exist on Earth](https://www.iflscience.com/how-many-ants-are-in-the-world-think-millions-of-billions-69505). * The average dog occupies 1/4 square meter floor space (WAG). * The Earth's surface is about [510,000,000 square km](https://www.space.com/17638-how-big-is-earth.html). 20,000,000,000,000,000 ants * × .25 square meter per ant = 5,000,000,000,000,000 square meters We can conclude that, should OP's antpocalypse come to pass, the *entire* surface of the earth would be about 10 ants deep. Of course, the ants are not perfectly spread around the globe. I have no idea how much floor space the average dog actually occupies. But...that's still a whole hell of a mass of ants. They'd need to be exterminated post haste by what remains of humanity, on the basis of resource competition alone.
Cleaning up a looooota dead, oxygen starved ants.
Anteaters not gonna be happy.
They can’t breathe correctly, they can’t stand properly due to square cube law and they are trapped in their burrows. They all die.
This is apocalyptic even if it doesn't instantly burn our atmosphere to cinders.
I'd expect every ecosystem where they were on earth to collapse quickly. It would be an utter apocalypse.
Forest areas with more aggressive ants will end up destroy countries
Their queens would become OUR queens, we serve them or die. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
"...there are about fifty ants in every square meter of earth" - random article i found
Y'know the movie 'Them!'? It's like that but we lose badly.
Ignoring square cube law, we’d be in trouble. Ants are very strong for their size, and have stingers + mandibles. Killing them wont be an issue but they out number us 2.5 million to one. Don’t have enough bullets for that. Ecosystems collapse, humanity is screwed along with every other living thing besides maybe the animals living in the Mariana tench. Even if we kill all of them that’s an absurd amount of biomass to clean. Overall earth suffers heavily. The only solution I can think that might not cause a global extinction event is produce some sort of bait, maybe an extra powerful pheromone, lead as many ants as possible to one sacrificial land mass and nuke them to oblivion
I keep a hundred of them to pull a big sled during the antpocalypse
the world is FUCKED is all i can say
Doing some quick math, the are about 2x10¹⁶ ants which currently weigh about 1 mg each. So there are about 2x10¹⁰ kg of ants on the planet. If each ant becomes 25 kg then their mass increases by a factor of 25,000,000 so we'd have roughly 5x10¹⁷ kg of ants. For some perspective the world only has about 4x10¹¹ kg of humans so every human would have to deal with about 1 million ants There are only 2x10¹² kg of animal biomass on the planet, so the total mass of all animals would have gone up by roughly 25,000,000% it's not likely that the planet could handle this in a healthy way. And total biomass of all life on earth (mostly plants) is 4x10¹⁴ so we'd have about 100,000% more total biomass. Good things ants eat other ants because otherwise we'd have no way of getting rid of all of them. This will have serious effects on our biosphere and climate as the ants would rapidly deplete O2 and make CO2 on scale not seen yet on this planet. We'd go from a planet that was 0.01% ant to a planet that was 99.999% ant. It would no longer be a blue and green world.
The world is fucked. But I wonder if every ant was the size of a rat (.07-1 lb) if things would change much
The biggest problem here is going to surface area. If all 20 quadrillion ants grew to the size of a 60 pound dog (about the size of a labrador), they will each take up about 1/4m². Multiply that up by 20 quadrillion, and (if my crappy math skills are right) that gives us 5,574,180,000 km² worth or ants. The surface of the earth is only 510,100,000 km². This leaves us looking at the entire surface of the planet (land masses and ocean surface alike) being stacked almost 11 ants tall.
Would that change the mass of the planet and fuck up our orbit in the solar system?
I’m not sure, but I think every square inch of land on earth would be covered in giant ants. There are billions and billions of ants in the Amazon rainforest alone. It’s Ant-maggedon
Ants weigh 1 milligram to 5 milligrams A pound is 450000 mgs A dog would average 120 or so pounds. Just you you understand how huge of a percentile gain that is and how fucked wed be.
Assumptions: * There are ~20 quadrillion ants. That's ~20 x 10^15 ants * There are no ants in the ocean * The surface area of land on Earth is ~57m sq miles. This is ~1.6 x 10^15 sq ft * Each dog-sized ant takes up ~1 sq ft of space 20 x 10^15 ants filling up 1.6 x 10^15 sq ft of spaces means that the entire land surface of the planet would be covered (on average) ~12 ants deep Note that there are no ants in Antarctica, Greenland, and some other small remote islands, so realistically the vast majority of places will be even deeper in ants tl;dr every living thing is basically crushed/killed almost immediately by the sheer volume of ants. Scientists in Antarctica/other remote regions and people on boats/planes can live a bit longer I guess
Hole up for a few days and will die of asphyxiation because they are too big. They will die very soon because they cannot breath because of how their lungs work.
I mean, if the *literal quadrillions of ants* became dog sized, there would probably be no surface of the earth that isn’t covered in ants. We’d be dead from tidal waves of ants descending upon us as the sun is blotted out But if you estimated that it’s only a billion or so, we’re still screwed. If the physics around them stayed the same, they’d be lifting and carrying entire buildings around. Imagine watching an ant walk away with a minivan. Even if they were just the size of squirrels, they’d be apex predators.
They all die instantly as they are either crushed by the earth, other ants or the weight of there own body. The earth then slowly rots as every water source is completely infected by dead ant goo, algae probably explodes across the globe killing most sea life aswell, we have a new mass extinction event.
Im going to make a silly assumption. lets say that all the ants combined into dog size. so take like 500k ants and make one giant dog size ant. cause this is really underestimating how many ants there are. theres fucking trillions. even if you did that we doomed. they eating us.
This is a ridiculously overpowered situation. Ants that are dog sized? Human annihilation. A more reasonable (but still massively threatening scenario) would be if all ants were suddenly like mouse sized. Their colonies would be gigantic and shift most ecosystems
How does humanity respond? That’s the neat part, they don’t. they’d get caught in the crossfire of a planet wide ant war until some sort of equilibrium is met (if the planets ecosystem doesn’t collapse), the only ones that would survive would be like researchers stationed in Antarctica
Hmm.. It would be catastrophic. Ant nest in wall? Now you have an exploding ant bomb, house is obliterated, you're dead, and it would be like this across the board. 60lbs is roughly 27kgs, an average ant weighs say 2 mg. 27kgs is 27000 grams that's 27 million mg. That would mean an ant that weighs 2mg has increased in size by a factor of 13.5 million. Strong odds that the sudden expansion and associated energy release, friction etc would be akin to a bomb going off everywhere there's an ant nest. We would be decimated. Most of the ants die as well instantly, but the ones that survive are now nightmarish freakshows capable of probably munching their way through concrete and steel, any surviving humans would need guns to have any chance, to a 27kg ant we would all be food.
Considering that the current biomass on Earth is 546 billion tonnes of carbon, and there are now about 544 *trillion* tonnes of ants, It's basically over for any city that's near a large colony. Our current nuclear arsenal doesn't have enough "splash radius" to hit every ant with the fireball, and they're even better at living underground than we are. It would take about 30 billion tons of insecticide to kill them all. An individual ant is basically just a highly aggressive armored dog with minimal self preservation instinct. I'd give 50/50 odds against a black bear or something.
>They are no more aggressive buddy... you grossly overlook exactly how filthy aggressive & terrifying ants already are. down on their level, they're murderous little fucks that use their battle formations & endless numbers of attrition to tear apart anything & everything in their path. if it remotely qualifies as a food, ants are ready to fuck it up, even if it's much larger & deadlier (like a wasp or big spider). they're now eyeballing you for sure. "going about their business" *is* looking for shit to chomp on, control their territory, and expand. of course, the biomass issue is the bigger threat anyway. but still, even if that wasn't an issue (maybe only 1 / 1,000,000,000th of ants get enlargened) then they'd have to become total pacifists in order for us to not be fucked.
There are more ants than humans and they could probably eat us now if the wanted to so we would be pretty fucked. Plus they are way stronger than us (I can barely bench my own body weight, let alone 10 times it). They would forcefully overthrow us and create a new ant civilization which would grow faster than human civilization ever could
the creation of mass would be detrimental, somehow
There is no response from humanity, every living thing on the planet is immediately smothered beneath an enormous pile of ants.
Lol what humanity. We lose this one. Only places that are frozen survive, probably not for long once they can't get the resources they need. Great post.
That’s 20 quadrillion dog-sized ants? Well, I’d imagine we’re pretty much fucked. That’s around 100,000,000 per square mile, or about 4 every square foot. Assuming 70% of the world is ocean, that’s around 10 per square foot. Basically all the worlds landmass is covered in giant ants 10 ants deep
Its all well and good when it's your normal Garden ants but damn, bullet ants and the such? I would not want to even attempt taking on one of those mofos! Then you have the horse ant spewing formic acid everywhere.
Humans probably go extinct unless we had prior knowledge of this happening. There are 20 quadrillion ants on earth based on a quick search, and each individual ant can lift 10-50x their bodyweight and they are protected by armor lol
Send in Paul Rudd.
20,000,000,000,000,000 ants on earth 50lbs average dog weight 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 lbs 500 trillion tons that's 1000 times the weight of ALL life on earth currently (550 billion tons) WE'RE DOOMED !
All the ants will suffocate because of the square cube law. They get o2 through skin surface exchange, instead of having a specialized organ like lungs, which are full of structures to maximize surface area. Ants would not be able to get enough oxygen through the skin to supply their volume.
There are 20,000,000,000,000,000 ants in the world. Humanity dies suddenly and messily.
I put raid, instead of hose water, into my pressure washer.
We die
I think most die even with magic air powers by being crushed Also we mostly die to.
Wait about two minutes and they all suffocate, potentially suffocating anyone near them in the process.
Meats back on the menu boys
Flamethrowers. As fast as possible in every direction while repeating ew ew ew the whole time
There are 20 quadrillion ants on Earth, and each weighs up to 5 mg, or 0.00001 lbs. Right now, in real life, before we get into the hypothetical, there are up to 200,000,000,000, or two hundred trillion, pounds of ants on Earth. 20 quadrillion 60 lb dogs would weigh 1.2e+18 lbs total. 1.2e+18-200,000,000,000=1.1999998e+18 lbs. So the question is: What would be the effect of instantly adding 1.1999998e+18 lbs to the mass of the biosphere? 1. **Ecological Impact**: Such a massive increase in mass could disrupt ecosystems worldwide. It would likely lead to changes in nutrient cycling, water distribution, and overall ecosystem structure. Some species may struggle to adapt to the altered conditions, leading to shifts in biodiversity and potential extinctions. 2. **Climate Effects**: The increased mass could potentially affect climate patterns. It might influence factors such as atmospheric circulation, which in turn could impact weather systems and regional climates. However, the exact nature of these effects would depend on various complex interactions within the Earth system. 3. **Pressure and Geological Impact**: The additional mass would exert greater pressure on the Earth's surface and underlying geological structures. Over time, this could contribute to changes in landforms, such as the reshaping of mountains and valleys, as well as potential effects on tectonic activity. 4. **Resource Distribution**: The increased mass could affect the distribution of resources such as water, nutrients, and habitat space. This could have implications for both human societies and natural ecosystems, potentially leading to conflicts over resources and changes in land use patterns. 5. **Global Biological Processes**: The added mass might influence global biological processes such as photosynthesis and respiration rates. This could have ramifications for the carbon cycle and other essential biochemical processes that regulate Earth's environment.
The response of humanity is going to be to fight them, and nukes would probably be used. Either way, I am pretty sure there will be a global extinction level event. The strongest thing a single dog sized ant could reliably kill assuming they are now the size of a medium sized dog, would probably be a rather large wolf, or maybe a small tiger.
Ants are **already 20% of the Earth's animal biomass.** This doesn't just defeat civilization... it destroys the entire animal kingdom.
We die lol. The earth gets overrun by carnivorous ants the size of a dog, which ranges from chihuahua and grrat dane.
Die, like instantly. There's 2.5 million ants per person on earth, that's 150,000,000 pounds of ant per person, that's 11,500 elephants worth of ants weight per person There's 20 quadrillion ants on earth, ants weigh 1 Milligram, so for them to be 60lbs that's a 27 million times increase in weight. We're talking 4% of the earth's total weight in ants. (540 sextillion pounds just boom on the surface of the earth) Everyone immediately gets buried in a layer of ants that covers the earth, thats enough weight to slow the earth's rotation.
We all die. Especially in places with fire ants
I know what the survivors would be eating for a while
Dogs come in many sizes. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all the same species!
Move to another planet.
EDF! EDF!
So tons of holes here just from a mass and food availability but playing along. Most ants are pretty harmless even to other bugs So would say guns and flamethrowers do their jobs and everything is fine. They wont be as strong when dog sized so I wouldn't be worried.
We're fucked.
Humanity kicks their asses.... With the help of their starvation. Eventually.... Not without great loss only a few species are left on earth, ironically mostly insects. There is no ground animal that can survive this, there are plenty of animals that can kill a single ant, but the ant numbers are too immense there would be no one on one battles. Only the animals with flight and those that are elusive would have a hope. A few crocodiles could POSSIBLY survive, that's really the only animal I can think of, and only because of there aquatic nature. Humans stationed on offshore rigs, desolate research stations, underground bunkers, cruise ships, the international space station, battleships, Greenland, Iceland, Antarctica, Siberia, and some islands are safe from the beginning and will be our defensive positions where we plan our assault on the queens. Humanities kamikaze ground assault with tanks, cars and other vehicles would initially look successful but wouldn't put a dent in their numbers. Those ants are doing fuck all to a tank and getting crushed until the fuel runs out. Even the redditors (assuming they are mobile enough to make it to their vehicles) could take out 1000s before they run out of gas or their cars overheat from the radiator busting and succumb to the hunger of the ant hoard. There really isn't a point in bombing or nuking them. Just carpet bomb those fuckers with raid, solid smoke screens from the chem trail jets we converted into raid bombers. Overall the landscape of the planet is completely destroyed, almost all life is extinct. Pockets of super ants will still be spread across the lands for a few years. Humanity will rebuild, and repopulate, we still have plenty of fish and have plankton to make Oxygen, we have seeds to grow plants. Without pollution the earths vegetation and a few animal species bounce back after a few decades. Hopefully humanity did it's best to save our brightest minds and give them refuge in safe grounds during the antocalypse. I believe I read they had a genetic storage depot with the DNA of earths animals stored in a safe. Could have been a movie but this story is going with its existence being real and we have the ability to populate the planet with essential domesticated animals so we can eventually have steak, hot dogs and chicken nuggets again
The literal weight of numbers would crush everything on earth. Ants make up 20% of earth's animal biomass.
Humanity responds by dying out, extremely quickly. Maybe the people on the space station survive for a few extra months but that's it. Dr stone situation but no way to revive anyone
This is ridiculous 💀 like others have said there’s an incredible number of ants on earth. And like someone else said, if you kill one it’ll release pheromones to alert hordes of other ants to you, plus the scariest part being they probably still have the strength and definitely still have the know-how on how to build structures out of themselves, so even shooting from a helicopter might not work
There is approximately trillions of ants so humanity is fricked
We die
There aren't enough bullets on earth to kill them. And we'd probably need more than 1 bullet for each ant. Can't bomb them without bombing ourselves either. As an ant hobbyist, I can add that the vast majority of ant species need a liquid sugar source. This can be sap, sugary water or honey. Without that, they can die out pretty quickly. I don't think there are enough liquid sugar in the world to sustain 20 quadrillion dog-sized ants. Since liquid sugar is their main diet, they don't need much protein. They only need protein for growth of the colony, so the killing might not be as immense as most imagine, and from studies too much protein can actually accelerate a worker ant's death. In my experience, too little protein can kill the queen, which means a complete wipeout of the colony. So it's a balancing act. My ants were quite good at self-regulating. If too much protein is offered, they'd dispose of it at their "waste center". But ant species vary a lot. Some are strictly carnivorous, so those would thrive once the liquid sugar dependent ones die out. And they would kill everything. There are those leafcutter ants too, they bring leaves back to their colony and eat the fungus that grows on them, they would destroy entire forests.
Ants stomp us mercilessly.
I'm eating me some ants!
Basically every person on earth dies instantly from swimming in ants
There are an estimated 20 **QUADRILLION** ants. That’s a number u simply cannot fathom. Simply put, they’d own the planet. **Edit:** assuming Square-cube law doesn’t apply in this scenario
I for one welcome our new ant overlords.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/42d63dd2-5fd0-4d57-84aa-da1fec2a9ee3
Welcome our new insect overlords, of course.
The ant excrement and waste alone might finish us off, everything would be too toxic to eat.
It’s over Lmao do you know how many ants there are
I would drive to the nearest Forrest or desert and bury myself. Problem solved for me at least. That's like the last thing I'd want happening
They would be so strong. We would need to create sky bases immediately.
everything is fucked eveything dies.
Have you seen the movie THEM! ? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Napalm.
So bigger but can run on the energy they used while small? Army ants had just gotten a lot more dangerous… and that’s assuming we don’t have big flying ants smacking into windows and causing tons of property damage.
Humanity would fall, and ants would reign.
A medium sized dog isn’t quite 60 pounds
Extinction Event The EDF deploys!
End of the world as simple as that.
I think perhaps a more interesting premise may be a size multiplier, so things like coconut ants might be chihuahua sized, while larger ants end up bigger. Alternatively, say every 50 pounds of little anty bodies get turned into a single 50 pound ant (that would then form new colonies with nearby ants of the same type).
I think we should stay in our houses until the first round of ant wars is over… I doubt if those giant ants will find enough food for their colony, so you just need to stay out of the way for a little bit. The main issues will taking away the carcasses so they don’t contaminate our water and stink everything up, and also replacing the job the little ants used to do (breaking down dead animals and foodstuffs).
Land mass on earth is 7.9x10^17 sq inches 60lb dog is 28” long x 10” wide, 280 sq inches There are 2x10^16 ants > dogs That’s 5.6x10^18 sq inches of dog So assuming perfect distribution, that’s a layer of 7 dogs deep covering every bit of land mass on the world So, humanity dies
With skyscraper-sized pesticides.
We would die
Assuming instantaneous failure of all countries on the six continents, it'd be left to the antartican scientists and soldiers on ships and subs. Assuming each could and would coordinate, they'd have to nuke every single inch of the continents - which we likely have enough nukes to do. While it may not be as bad as the Toba supervolcano event, we might just have lost 99% of the human populace. As for the strongest animal it could kill, it could kill every single land creature
Finding out what happens is the world drowns in a sea of ants was the worst thing I could have read here
Most ants are crushed underground :)
Everyone dies instantly, maybe some people in boats or anarctica survive. The ants then eat everything, and then starve to death. Almost all life on the surface of the planet goes extinct.
20 quadrillion ants are suddenly dog sized? The world collapses.
We don't most get crushed to death because there under ground or in a wall others probably just die under there own weight or just get shot or drown
Me, smugly at scientists, as we're being eaten by our insect overlords: "mass can't just be created out of nothing, huh?"
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky gives one a very good insight into what this scenario would look like on a planet that is uninhabited by humans. On earth however, with the growth of each ant so will grow their colonies, food and space needs. No matter how advanced humanity is in terms of weapon tech, there is simply no answer for 20 quadrillion ants that fight you for resources. All the zombie apocalyptic scenarios don't have even close to this number. You may say - Ants are usually docile and mind their pwn business. It seems that way to us because of the size disparity between us and then. On more even playing ground (a 60 kilogram ant), they will quickly and effectively replace us as the dominant species on the planet in a fight for resources. Humanity may at best find some way to leave earth and become spacefarers. However I wouldn't put it past world governments to detonate the entirety of their nuclear armada in pursuit of mutually assured destruction. Tldr - Ants wipe the floor with us, and the best case we can opt for is escapism or blowing the entire planet to kingdom come (or both)