Space
Are there more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way?
The short answer
Yes, by a wide margin. A 2015 study in Nature put the global tree count at roughly 3.04 trillion. The Milky Way is generally estimated to hold somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars — around ten times fewer.
The tree number comes from a 2015 Nature paper that combined more than 400,000 ground-truth forest plots with satellite imagery. The headline figure, 3.04 trillion, was about eight times higher than the previous best estimate, which had leaned much harder on satellites alone.
Stars in the Milky Way are harder to count than trees, oddly enough. Most are too faint to see individually, so the total is inferred from the galaxy's mass and the distribution of star types. Estimates land in the hundreds of billions.
The same paper carried a considerably less joyful number: humans remove roughly 15 billion trees a year, and the global count has fallen by an estimated 46 percent since the start of human civilisation. The comparison is charming. The trend underneath it is not.