What do you think of this fact?
Look up at a really dark night sky and it feels like the stars never end. Still, there’s something on our little planet that outnumbers them. Earth has more trees than our galaxy has stars.
The great tree count
In 2015, a team led by ecologist Thomas Crowther at Yale University published a new estimate in the journal Nature. Scientists from 15 countries analyzed data from more than 400,000 forest plots, combined with satellite images and supercomputers. The final number: about 3.04 trillion trees.
That was a genuine surprise. Earlier estimates had put the number at around 400 billion, just a fraction of that. Do the math and it works out to roughly 422 trees for every person on Earth.
And the stars?
The Milky Way is enormous, roughly 87,000 to 100,000 light-years across, depending on the measurement. Even so, it’s estimated to contain 100 to 400 billion stars. Take the highest estimate and there are still more than seven times as many trees on Earth as stars in the Milky Way.
Small catch: with the naked eye you only ever see a tiny portion of those stars anyway. Trees, on the other hand, are almost everywhere you look. Knowing they outnumber the stars still feels wrong somehow.
There used to be even more
As impressive as the number is, it’s shrinking. According to the study, more than 15 billion trees are lost every year. Since the start of human civilization, the number of trees has dropped by roughly 46 percent.
Crowther put it bluntly: “We’ve nearly halved the number of trees on the planet.”
Stargazing is still worth it. But if you want to see something truly countless, you don’t have to look up. A walk in the woods will do.