You might actually be an ant colony

Your body hosts trillions of tiny creatures who might be running the show

By Smartasaurus· 1 min read Curious

You are essentially an uninvited guest in your own skin

Mechanism call

Take a position: what's actually doing the work here?

One of these is closer than the rest. Commit before you find out.

The short version

Your body hosts trillions of tiny creatures who might be running the show
Even more striking is the genetic gap.
Every time you wash your hands, you are merely scrubbing the surface of a biological skyscraper teeming with trillion-person cities.

If you counted every cell in your body, you would realize you are an uninvited guest in your own skin. The average human body contains about 30 trillion human cells, but it carries roughly 38 trillion bacterial cells.

In terms of sheer numbers, you are about 56% bacteria. These microbes aren't just hitchhikers; they dictate your hunger, your mood, and how well your immune system fights off invaders.

Most of this weight—about two to five pounds—lives in your gut. If you stripped away all your human meat and bone, there would still be a hollow, ghost-like silhouette of you made entirely of shimmering bacteria.

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