3283: Size and Lifespan

Size and Lifespan

|< < Prev #3283 (August 10, 2026)

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.

|< < Prev Random explanation

Explanation

This comic presents a correlation between the size (in kg, therefore more accurately, the mass) of different objects with colors in their names, and their size and lifespan. It is similar to common charts that map the size versus lifespan of various animals, showing that, broadly, the larger they are, the longer they live, demonstrating biological allometry principles such as Kleiber's law. Here, however, it covers entirely unrelated classes of objects (animals, features of the Earth, and even astronomical bodies), appearing to suggest that there is some universal cosmic trend across all entities named with a color. Black holes are complete outliers due to their evaporation through Hawking radiation making their lifespan scale as the cube of their mass. At either end of the scale, white blood cells and stars are 'smeared' across the chart, crossing areas that fit the apparent trend, but also straying away from it.

Somewhat dubiously, the chart conflates typical lifespans in some cases with lifetime to date in others.

Items Listed

Object	Size (kg)	Lifespan (seconds)	Approx. lifespan (human-readable)	Explanation
white blood cells	10-11±0.5	104.5±1.5, and 108.25±0.75	17 minutes–12 days, and 6 years	The graph separates memory lymphocytes (which need to be replaced only every few years) from the other kinds of white blood cells (which the body replaces every few days).
yellowjackets	10-4±0.5	107.25±0.5	200 days	Example of a long insect lifespan
gray wolves	101.5±0.5	108.5±0.5	10 years	Example of a typical mammal lifespan
blue whales	104.5±1	109±0.5	30 years	Example of a long mammal lifespan
black holes	≤105.5 to ≥1011.75±1.25	≤100 to ≥1025	≤1 second to ≥300 quadrillion years (20 million universe lifetimes)	Black holes eventually evaporate away due to Hawking radiation. 'Smaller' black holes can be surprisingly short-lived for celestial objects; however, this log-scale graph would have to be roughly four times taller to account for stellar-mass black holes (~1075 seconds, or >1057 universe lifetimes) and six times higher to account for the largest known black holes (over 10100 seconds, or >1082 universe lifetimes). Conversely, a black hole close to the Planck mass would be way off the chart to the bottom left, though these are theoretical entities potentially occurring only in extreme conditions, such as at the very beginning of the universe or in a particle accelerator; the smallest known black hole is roughly four times the mass of the Sun.
Red Sea	1017.5±0.5	1015±1	30 million years	The time probably references the end of the desiccation of the Red Sea.
Greenland	1020±0.5	1016.75±0.5	2 billion years	An autonomous territory of of Denmark, Greenland is the world's largest island. Greenland seems to be shown as the opposite of Red Sea, because red is the opposite of green and sea is the opposite of land.
red dwarfs to blue giants	1029 to 1032.5	1021 to 1013.5	1 million years to 30 trillion years	Stars are probably some of the largest and longest-lasting single things in the universe. The inverse relationship between mass and lifespan is because massive stars fuse hydrogen to helium far faster. The charted region is effectively an inverse of the famous Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, with the stellar classification (surface temperature) being inversely proportional to mass, and luminosity (rate of fusion) being inversely proportional to lifespan.
The White Stripes (title text)	102	108.65	14 years	The White Stripes were a rock duo from 1997-2011 made up of Jack and Meg White.

Transcript

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Discussion

I am surprised black holes have so little mass. Can this be correct? 163.116.173.198 a black hole

Black holes can come in a vast range of masses - we're only seeing the relatively tiny short-lived ones, but they extend well off the chart into much more massive and long-lived ones. 82.13.184.33 12:20, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I assume for Black Holes mass is not in kilograms, but in solar masses. 193.210.0.32 (talk) 13:53, 10 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

No - black holes can, theoretically, come in any mass - from hundreds of thousands of solar masses down to a Planck mass (including blue whale sized (and bowl of petunias sized)) - so the line would extend both well above and well below what's shown on the chart. 82.13.184.33 14:05, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Actually, 'well above' is debatable - as far as I can figure, Randall's chart already goes a couple of orders of magnitude beyond the current age of the universe, so how much further there is to go is uncertain. 82.13.184.33 14:15, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Since the vertical coordinate is lifetime, it does go "well above" and "well below" the graph as well, as a black hole's lifetime is proportional to M³ (e. g., a 2 kg BH has 8× longer lifetime than a 1 kg BH (41.86 qs and 5.2325 qs, respectively), a BH with mass equal to the Planck mass (c. 21.76 μg) has lifetime equal to the Planck time (c. 5.39124e-44 s)). So expanding the graph, it goes 43.269 orders of magnitude below 1 s and many magnitudes above 10²⁰ s. 2001:4C4D:12C8:C800:5D8E:47D2:C546:908 18:55, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I definitely want to know why white blood cells have two "clumps" of area instead of a contiguous area. AdmiralMemo (talk) 12:30, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

See the table here - certain lymphocytes have a lifetime of years, whereas for other white blood cells it's only hours or days. 82.13.184.33 12:39, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The table is wildly off and doesn't match the graph. Wolves weight 1 kilogram? Blue Whales weigh 100 kg? 2803:7260:110:270:ad6d:487c:fa3:ce0 (talk) 12:35, 10 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Table re-measured to the nearest quarter-increment. SomeDee (talk) 12:57, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Logarithmic scale. 10^10=10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10=10000000000 Inevitablepotato36 (talk) 00:01, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

yeah it does seem a litlle off actually- Inevitablepotato36 (talk) 00:02, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Does anyone know what the title text is talking about? I feel like it's referencing some sort of sport thing, but I'm not sure MiquelFire (talk) 14:24, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The White Stripes were a two-person band active between 1997 and 2011 - see Wikipedia link in the table. 82.13.184.33 14:40, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Does Greenland's mass include the ice cap? Should mention this. DKMell (talk) 16:07, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The age of Greenland on the chart appears to be roughly the age of the Earth. In one sense I suppose that makes sense, in that the material that now makes up Greenland came together at around that point, but I would have expected it to have been set at the point when it separated off from the continent due to ice sheet collapse. 82.13.184.33 16:29, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Is there a joke I'm missing in the fact that everything is a color?

Not sure you're missing anything - that kind of is (a large part of) the joke - the only thing that ties them together is a colour in the name, which makes them a silly set of things to graph together. 82.13.184.33 08:26, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

I don't understand why there are no velociraptors in this chart. Their fans are _very_ colorful. 2601:647:4001:656B:5DEB:C9F7:C93D:4E77 18:23, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Black holes in the middle? Given that black holes cover the full range of mass, and the population is weighted (heh) towards the top, why did Randall put them in the middle of the graph? 37.19.220.64 19:00, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Where else? It would be equally incorrect to have them either at the low end (many are enormously massive) or the high end (theoretically, there were Planck mass black holes at the Big Bang). Nitpicking (talk) 22:07, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The graph includes only very small, theoretical block holes (up to <10¹³ kg, or 5x10^-18 solar masses) because larger ones take a very long time to evaporate. If it showed the largest supermassive black holes, which would indeed extend over to the right edge of the graph, it would have to be six times as tall - and if that were scaled to still fit on your screen, you couldn't see the detail of any of the things you see here. DKMell (talk) 23:27, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

If it were to include all black holes, including the tiniest theoretical micro black holes, it would have to be even taller (and wider), as the scale would have to be extended well off the bottom as well. 82.13.184.33 08:34, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Trivia: the White Stripes released an album called White Blood Cells. Nitpicking (talk) 22:12, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

True - although those White Blood Cells would ruin the spurious graph, being CD-sized or vinyl-sized (or bits on a computer-sized) and having a lifespan of 25 years and counting already. (Randall has snuck in another 'making you feel old' reference here, probably without even realising it!) 82.13.184.33 08:38, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Non-Living data points: The idea of treating large systems using the same law of scale is also discussed by Geoffrey West in his book "Scale". https://www.organism.earth/library/document/scale -- Jh6p (talk) 22:38, 10 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

He has left out oranges and "purple" items (purple martin, purple mountain majesties, etc). Also, I cannot find any things that are known as "magenta X" or "cyan X", perhaps there isn't any well known enough. SDSpivey (talk) 02:35, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Cyanobacteria seems like an obvious choice for that. I don't know anything magenta-named that would fit. 02:35, 11 August 2026 (UTC) 125.236.215.22 03:32, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

There's Magenta from Rocky Horror. 82.13.184.33 08:29, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Why does the black hole line get thicker higher up? Is it due to uncertainty in how fast it grows at this scale, or is the constant unknown? (I assume not uncertainty in rate of Hawking radiation, as I thought that uncertainty is on the small end and is about the contribution of non-photon emissions?) 2003:EB:5F1C:AF00:19B6:547E:51CC:9C29 07:34, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Why do black holes get bigger uncertainty at the top than at the bottom? 159.224.64.162 08:30, 11 August 2026 (UTC)
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