Viriiiiiii

[garote]

Viruses are very very small, and so numerous that their quantity is beyond all hope of human understanding.

Consider the ocean:

There are 10 nonillion viruses in the ocean. That's a 10 with 30 zeroes after it.

That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 viruses sloshing about.

Let's play around with that number a bit just to understand how we, as mere humans, cannot actually ever understand it:

• There are 100 billion times more viruses in the oceans than there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches.
• If you put the viruses of the oceans together on a scale, they would equal the weight of 75 million blue whales. (There are currently less than 10,000 blue whales on the entire planet.)
• If you placed all the viruses in the ocean next to each other in a straight line, that line would stretch for 42 million light years.

The good news for humans is, only a minute fraction of the viruses in the ocean can infect us. Some infect fish and other marine animals, but their most common target is bacteria and other single-celled microbes.

Marine viruses are incredibly good at infecting their chosen targets. In the ocean, with every second that passes, one hundred billion trillion microbes are newly invaded by a virus. Every 24 hours, viruses kill between 15 and 40 percent of all the bacteria in the world's oceans. Those that survive, reproduce... And the next day another 15 to 40 percent are murdered by viruses. Over and over again, every day, this war rages as the ocean churns.

Paraphrased from A Planet Of Viruses, 3rd Edition

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Wow. What a life (I kind of sympathize with bacteria, what a life they have). But viruses, the only reason they can survive is that they consume all those bacteria, all the time. After that they basically just disappear, having reproduced. What a life.