updated: Dec 31 2020, 02:05 ist
The year 2020 will be remembered, not just for corona pandemic casualties in the world, but also for another shocking but expected milestone that earth has reached in this year. Nature, an International multi-disciplinary science journal has published an interesting research paper by a group of scientists on, what weighs the earth most now, in its latest issue dated December 9, 2020. The findings earmark the year 2020 as the beginning of a dangerous phenomenon human-made materials are beginning to overweigh living biomass. What constitutes this human-made or anthropogenic mass? They are inanimate objects, namely houses, buildings, ships, roads, plastics, clothing, electronics, glass, metals et al, that are produced on a massive scale to make our life better on this planet. Interestingly, this load of non-living materials which is produced in the name of enhancing human developmental programmes is doubling its weight every 20 years. Currently, their w
Choose moderation and unburden the earth December 21, 2020, 7:52 PM IST
By Narayani Ganesh
A new year never fails to inspire us to get on those weighing scales and make a solemn, earnest resolution to shed the extra kilos. Walk regularly, eat right, exercise, are all on the to-do list at least for a couple of weeks until it all gets forgotten in the hurly burly of life. But what of the weight, the burden, we’ve been heaping on Planet Earth? Do we have any thoughts on shedding those extra kilos before we paint ourselves into a corner?
According to scientists researching human impact on Earth, the mass of all human-created things including built-up infrastructure, vehicles and all manner of manufactured goods, now “exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet.” Not only that, using a combination of computational and experimental synthetic biology tools and satellite imagery, systems biologist Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science and his tea
The Mass of Manmade Stuff Now Equals the Planet’s Biomass
The Mass of Manmade Stuff Now Equals the Planet’s Biomass
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The mass of human-produced materials, such as concrete, steel and asphalt, has grown to equal the biomass of all life on the planet, according to a study from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
Humans are adding new buildings, roads, vehicles and products at a rate that doubles every 20 years. This “concrete jungle” is predicted to weigh more than twice the total biomass of living things by 2040.
The Mass of Human-Made Materials Now Equals the Planetâs Biomass, Weizmann Institute Finds
We are doubling the mass of the anthropogenic part of the world every 20 years â and the curve is not flattening
Weizmann Institute of Science
Newswise The mass of all human-produced materials – concrete, steel, plastics, asphalt, etc. – has now grown to equal the mass of all life on the planet, its biomass. According to a new study from the Weizmann Institute of Science, we are exactly at the crossover point, and humans are currently adding buildings, roads, vehicles, and products at a rate that is doubling every 20 years, leading to a “concrete jungle” that is predicted to reach over 2 teratonnes (2 million million) – or more than double the mass of living things – by 2040.
When not busy trying to murder humans in
The Matrix, the AI program known as Agent Smith took time to pontificate on our nature as a species. You canât really consider us mammals, he reckoned, because mammals form an equilibrium with their environment. By contrast, humans move to an area and multiply âuntil every natural resource is consumed,â making us more like a kind of virus. âHuman beings are a disease,â he concluded, âa cancer of this planet. You are a plague.â
I think, though, that it would be more accurate to describe humanity as a kind of biofilm, a bacterium or fungus thatâs grown as a blanket across the planet, hoovering up its resources. We plop down great cities of concrete and connect them with vast networks of highways. We level forests for timber to build homes. We turn natural materials like sand into cement and glass, and oil into asphalt, and iron into steel. In this reengineering of Earth, weâve imperiled countless