Dear Probabilistic Problem Solvers,
My dramatic daughter told us a story about the time she fell on the ground and “all the ants in the world climbed on me.” That reminded me of reading E.O. Wilson say that the biomass of the all the ants in the world was equal to that of all humans.
That means that if you put all the ants in the world on one side of a seesaw and all the humans on the other they would balance out. Other scientists disagree and say there’s no way the tiny ant can equal the much, much bigger human.
But like most BIG QUESTIONS, this is not something we can know for sure (do you have a really big teeter-totter?). All we can do is create a good method for investigating the question and then decide how likely it is to be true.
Sincerely,
Mr. Heimbuck