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xkcd #3283: Size and Lifespan (europe.pub)
submitted 2 months ago by [B] to c/xkcd@lemmy.world
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xkcd #3283: Size and Lifespan

Title text:

With their 13 years recording and performing together and two humans worth of mass, the White Stripes are sandwiched neatly between gray wolves and blue whales.

Transcript:

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3283/

explainxkcd for #3283

With their 13 years recording and performing together and two humans worth of mass, the White Stripes are sandwiched neatly between gray wolves and blue whales.
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[–] 28 points 2 months ago (10 children)

The linear pattern of the things plotted here weirds me out. Is there really such a clear life-time / size trend? Or were specific things chosen to be listed because they follow a roughly linear trend on the log-log plot?

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  • [–] 69 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Somebody already posted the famous phrase in another thread:

    Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    You know, I was going to say that tetration or busy beaver numbers would counter that argument, but then again I guess they’d pretty much just look like vertical lines if the stroke weight of the marker was enough to cover the curved behavior around zero.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

    I can at least think of a few counterexamples:

    • Cats live longer than dogs.
    • Small stars live longer than large stars (by dramatic amounts).
    • Black holes larger than the ~10^10 kg mark shown here live a lot longer than any other object with the same mass. A hypothetical moon mass black hole can most likely outlive every single star in the universe.
    • Protons are smaller than anything in this chart yet are believed to decay over an extremely long time scale (>10^34 years).
    • Even smaller particles like electrons likely live forever.
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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago*

    Those particles are exactly the kind of exception I was looking for. Tiny things that last a long time. The opposite kind of exceptions are probably impossible since making large things takes a lot of time. You would need to have something the size of a galaxy that lasts from Monday evening to Thursday morning.

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