icosahedron
decomposers turn organic material from corpses into simpler nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. for example, proteins are broken down into amino acids, which then decompose into ammonium and nitrates. these nutrients are absorbed into soil and consumed by plants
tldr: plants eat corpses after decomposers turn them into nutrients
yes, you’re definitely right. the accuracy is dubious no matter what. in the author’s words, their approach is “semi-scientific” and “guesstimating”. not once do they say their results are definitive. but if it’s the best qualified demographers can do with what we know, then there’s not much else to it
not op but i think your skepticism is justified
this seems to be where the image originally came from. the author explains the challenges with making speculations about historical populations in that post. the demographers, toshiko kaneda and carl haub, estimated 117 billion people have lived over the last 200,000 years. here’s the explanation given on the original post:
The majority of them lived very short lives: about one in two children died in the past. When conditions are so very poor and children die so quickly then the birth rate has to be extremely high to keep humanity alive; Kaneda and Haub assume a birth rate of 80 births per 1000 people per year for most of humanity’s history (up to the year 1 CE). That is a rate of births that is about 8-times higher than in a typical high-income country and more than twice as high as in the poorest countries today (see the map). The past was a very different place.
i think this is fairly reasonable, but original source is necessary. i think this is a more original source, and kaneda and haub are listed as the authors. their methodology seems to rely a lot on guessing, which makes sense. the 117 billion is probably not entirely accurate, but i’d say it’s a good attempt at estimating given what we know. there might be a more detailed paper somewhere but i didn’t really look too hard
edit: also lot of hostility from other people here… lemmy gone downhill. i think there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical of data or science, even if it’s coming from qualified experts. unless there’s a detailed paper that explains EVERY step of their process, you can’t be entirely sure where their numbers are coming from. that said, i agree with those other guys that there’s not a lot of room to be skeptical in this particular case, since the authors explicitly say it’s a rough estimate. based on what we know, it’s as accurate as we can get. but still, nothing wrong with asking for sources!
holy too thin to tap on!
mahler’s instrumentation is consistently massive but usually has normal instruments. i think only the sixth is particularly strange with the hammer, and the next weirdest symphony might be the seventh with its mandolin, guitar, cowbells, etc. his fourth could also be considered weird since it’s scored for an unusually small orchestra, especially for a mahler symphony. pretty sure he never used a bag of sticks, but yeah mahler can still be crazy. only really rivaled by strauss imo. strauss’s Alpine Symphony is probably the most insane thing i’ve ever seen performed, for me beating mahler 2 and 3 (though i still like them more overall)
had to take it before someone else on my instance got there first
i see, that makes sense. i’d say that it’s on the player playing this cleric to not use the ability in a stupid way, since it obviously has catastrophic consequences for everything nearby, but i could totally see it being used in combat to try (and fail) to shut down the encounter. do you think this could be fixed by allowing combat to continue within the dream, with the added stakes that dying in the dream means dying in real world? and of course taking damage in real world allows you to wake up. this way, even if the ability is used, those who fall unconscious still can fight for their lives against the other unconscious people while simultaneously trying to escape to return to their vulnerable bodies.