According to a new study, the mass of all our things (buildings, roads, cars, etc.) now exceeds the mass of all living things on the planet.
It is not surprising that this is the case if we take into account that the amount of new material added each week It is equal to the total mass of the almost 8 billion people on Earth (Humans constitute approximately 0.01% of the planet's biomass).
Prepared dough: exponential growth
In 1900, the mass of human materials was only 3% of the Earth's total biomass. Since then, materials have doubled approximately every 20 years..
The glut of concrete and asphalt began during the boom years between World War II and the 1973 oil crisis, when developed countries began building.
Meanwhile, total biomass has gradually decreased since 1900 due to deforestation and other reasons. The increase in human mass is driven by the use of geological resources: rocks, minerals and metals.
Human-created mass finally surpassed Earth's total living biomass this year. The timing of that transition depends on whether the biomass accounts for the water. If water is included, biomass will remain larger than human materials until about 2037.
Even so, the comparisons are very striking: Buildings and other infrastructure weigh more than the world's trees and bushes. And the mass of plastic is twice that of all animals.
The world can be divided into three kinds of matter depending on its purpose: dead matter, living matter and processed matter. Let's analyze how many billion tons there are of each type of matter in the world... and discover that There is more matter made from cows than from humans!:
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The news
Each week, the mass of all our material objects added to the world is equal to the mass of all the world's inhabitants.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.