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"Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth" Topic


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Tango0109 Dec 2020 9:26 p.m. PST

"Roads, houses, shopping malls, fishing vessels, printer paper, coffee mugs, smartphones and all the other infrastructure of daily life now weigh in at approximately 1.1 trillion metric tons—equal to the combined dry weight of all plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, archaea and protists on the planet. The creation of this human-made mass has rapidly accelerated over the past 120 years: Artificial objects have gone from just 3 percent of the world's biomass in 1900 to on par with it today. And the amount of new stuff being produced every week is equivalent to the average body weight of all 7.7 billion people.

The implications of these findings, published on Wednesday in Nature, are staggering. The world's plastics alone now weigh twice as much as the planet's marine and terrestrial animals. Buildings and infrastructure outweigh trees and shrubs. "We cannot hide behind the feeling that we're just a small species, one out of many," says study co-author Ron Milo, who researches plant and environmental sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. These numbers should be a wake-up call, he adds. They tell us "something about the responsibility that we have, given that we have become a dominant force," Milo says…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Personal logo etotheipi Sponsoring Member of TMP10 Dec 2020 6:30 a.m. PST

… I thought my unpainted leadpile didn't count. I think that tips the balance the other direction!

Asteroid X10 Dec 2020 6:37 a.m. PST

What they are avoiding to note is all of these items come from the earth and do not add a single ounce to it.

ScottWashburn Sponsoring Member of TMP10 Dec 2020 6:42 a.m. PST

Frankly, I think it's something to be proud of.

Personal logo StoneMtnMinis Supporting Member of TMP10 Dec 2020 8:08 a.m. PST

And since all our "stuff" is a threat to human exixtence, and humans are responsible for global warming(which will kill all life), this is a good thing. It will save the planet!

So, we need to make more "stuff". The earth depends on it.

John the OFM10 Dec 2020 8:58 a.m. PST

The implications of these findings, published on Wednesday in Nature, are staggering. The world's plastics alone now weigh twice as much as the planet's marine and terrestrial animals. Buildings and infrastructure outweigh trees and shrubs.

I'm extremely skeptical on those claims. Show me the math and primary assumptions.
And even if so, that's a huge jump to "all life on earth." ALL life?

Harrumph I say. Harrumph.

Personal logo Tacitus Supporting Member of TMP10 Dec 2020 10:16 a.m. PST

The Law of Conservation of Matter Makes this interesting but moot.

Andrew Walters10 Dec 2020 10:28 a.m. PST

This explains the condition of my garage.

I wonder what percentage is concrete. It's pretty heavy, and we use a *lot* of it.

Still, there are a lot of small organisms in the ocean. I wonder what "dry weight" means in this context. I guess I could google…

Oh.

The weight or mass of organic matter or soil after removal of water by heating to constant weight.

link

So, take all life on Earth, remove the 70+% of weight that is water, and it's less mass than all the concrete, brick, stone, and metal ore humans have ever worked. Still impressive, but it no longer sounds crazy.

Personal logo etotheipi Sponsoring Member of TMP10 Dec 2020 2:23 p.m. PST

https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-tsuki-oni-clan-beauty-fantasy-pinup-122868

The Law of Conservation of Matter

This is the thing I bring up when people talk about "natural" products. I usually whip out a credit card and say, "Natural. Not a single atom from anyplace outside of nature."

Personal logo Parzival Supporting Member of TMP11 Dec 2020 8:57 a.m. PST

Hemlock is natural. Wanna eat some?

This article smells bogus.
In any case, what about excrement and dead matter (meaning that which was once alive or was part of a living thing but no longer is either)? Throw that into the mix, and I'll bet things change a lot.

By the way, by definition what humans do must be natural to us, because we do it; thus it is in our nature to do these things. It's just that sometimes the things we do we also decide are "good" or "bad" in their impact on other things or upon ourselves. The rest of nature doesn't have the ability to make a decision upon that question— only we and God do.

Personal logo StoneMtnMinis Supporting Member of TMP11 Dec 2020 11:57 a.m. PST

So, to sum it up: an idiotic article from a publication that long ago jumped the shark.

Tango0115 Dec 2020 3:37 p.m. PST

Glup!…

Amicalement
Armand

14Bore26 Dec 2020 8:29 a.m. PST

The theory I heard long ago was the ant population of earth outweighed the human population.
Not buying this for a second human stuff outweighed even as mountain range yet alone the planet.

Tumbleweed Supporting Member of TMP11 Jan 2021 11:09 a.m. PST

How much does Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China and the Great Pyramids of Egypt weigh? Were they included in the study?

Why should I care?

Besides, the matter wasn't created or destroyed; it was just reconfigured.

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