• Question: how many microbes are there in the whole planet?

    Asked by coolragz to Bob, Katie, Nisha, Sallie, Vee on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Bob Bonwick

      Bob Bonwick answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Goodness knows. There are 1 trillion cells in your body, there are one hundred trillion bateria in and on your body too. There are 7 billion people. So the human count alone is a massive number, that doesn’t include, animals, insects, air, water, ground, ice and other sources of bacteria. So the number is massive.

    • Photo: Vee Mitchell

      Vee Mitchell answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      I don’t think there is a number big enough for you to even imagine how many there are. They are all around us, on us and in us – fortunately only a few in comparison are harmful to us.

    • Photo: Katie McDonald

      Katie McDonald answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      To quote the QI research elves (@qikipedia on Twitter if you want to follow – brilliant facts): “There are about a nonillion (1 followed by 30 zeros) microbes in the Earth’s oceans; they weigh as much as 240 billion African elephants”! This was tweeted just the other day; funny you asked the question now 🙂 That’s only the ocean though, so there’s plenty more around! Another fun fact I learned at medical school: you poo your own weight in bacteria every year. Nice.

    • Photo: Sallie Baxendale

      Sallie Baxendale answered on 1 Jul 2012:

      There are some numbers that we just can’t imagine … Like the number of microbes on the planet and the number of stars in the universe. It’s just impossible for our brains to comprehend the enormity of these numbers because they are completely outside our everyday experience.

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