Man-made Mass Now Likely Outweighs Life On Earth

Man-made stuff is now likely to be officially heavier than the mass of the natural world. A new research published in Nature, which has detailed the “crossover point” between man-made mass and living biomass, seems to suggest this. Considering the fact that we today are largely dependent on manufactured materials, we know that it is inevitable that we would soon outweigh nature. Still, it is still surprising at how it happened so soon.

The weight of roads, buildings and other constructed or manufactured materials is doubling roughly every 20 years, and authors of the research said it currently weighed 1.1 teratonnes (1.1 trillion tonnes).

As mankind has ramped up its insatiable consumption of natural resources, the weight of living biomass—trees, plants and animals—has halved since the agricultural revolution to stand at just 1 teratonne currently, the study found.

Estimating changes in global biomass and manmade mass since 1990, the research showed that the mass of human-produced objects stood at just three percent of the weight of biomass at the start of the 20th century.

But since the post-World War II global production boom, manufacturing has surged to the extent that humans now produce the equivalent of the weight of every person on Earth every week on average.

Learn more about this over at PHYS.org.

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