Roberts deliv­ered his lec­ture titled “Why I love bac­teria,” describing not only why bac­teria are impor­tant to sus­tain human life but also how they are so aes­thet­i­cally pleasant.

The sev­eral hun­dred tril­lion micro­scopic indi­vid­uals helping to keep each of us alive and healthy, Roberts said, only scratches the sur­face of the extreme bio­di­ver­sity encap­su­lated in the planet’s entire bac­te­rial pop­u­la­tion.

In fact, he noted that if you added up all the planet’s bac­teria, the total would sig­nif­i­cantly out­weigh the organ­isms we can actu­ally see.