The population will keep increasing and because of this, the aggregate weight of all living beings is also going to increase. How will this impact our planet? The question is not wrt resources utilisation, food, etc. I just want to know the impact of all that mass increasing everyday as the population keeps increasing.
In: Physics
Three points:
1. Except for solar energy, everything that contributes to increased biomass on Earth is already on Earth. It’s just converted from one form to another, but doesn’t change the overall mass of the planet. Re solar energy, most is re-radiated back out, and the rest really doesn’t weigh much compared to the mass of the planet.
2. The biomass on Earth is about 2.2 trillion metric tons, which certainly seems like a lot. But the Earth is 5.972×10^21 metric tons, a much, much larger number. Compared to the mass of the planet, the biomass is nearly insignificant.
3. Just because there’s more people living now and in the future, doesn’t mean there’s more total living beings (mass or numbers wise). While I can’t say for sure, I doubt the Earth has more biomass now than in the age of the dinosaurs.
You’re not pulling mass from the ether, you’re eating food and drinking water to create more human. There is no net change in mass.
The Earth is so unimaginably massive that the entire human population is rounding error anyway. All of humanity is maybe 10^10 kg, the earth is 10^24 kg, 14 orders of magnitude heavier.
The mass does not increase, it’s just getting from here to there, before it was plants animals or wathever carbon based material on earth, now that material is just humans, the total mass is the same, earth is getting new mass from nowhere
The overall weight does not change. All of that material used to create those beings comes from the Earth already. Net gain is zero.
Rolling the dice that OPs unspoken theory was that it’s humanity’s biomass that is “growing”, which as others have said – that doesn’t create mass – it’s already here, and inconsequential at planetary scales. But anyways – UN and Pew Research recently projected that human population growth will flatten to about 11 billion by 2100 anyways. Birth rates are falling in the developing world, and replacement rates are already nearly flat to negative in parts of the western world (Japan, Italy). There’s no risk of overburdening the earth with increased weight, thus the effect is zero. It’s all a redistribution of materials in the same environment, even if everyone dropped dead from environmental degradation or a rampant virus. You can’t make or destroy matter completely.
Organisms are made of stuff that was already ON the Earth. So, the net weight doesn’t change. It just gets moved around.
There are only 2 ways for the mass of planet Earth to change: removing material from the planet and adding material to the planet. We are constantly losing an insignificant amount of mass due to atmospheric losses. Other than that, asteroids bring in new mass, and launching things to outer space reduces our mass. Everything on planet Earth is made up of matter that was already here and has just been reorganized into a new structure.
If I put you in a closed box with some food and you eat that food you get heavier while the box stays the same weight.
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