Only thing I remember from science class, We cant create things everything transform. So Earth got only “limited” amount of atoms? With the growth of the human population wont we run out of resources/atoms/molecules to make more babies or at the expense of something elese on the planet ?
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Potentially i suppose. Like there is only a certain amount of the chemicals that make up humans on earth. However they may be able to be created in the future. As it stands there will be enough for a long while, given that we are made of the same stuff as all other creatures on the planet.
As our biomass grows (With everything domestic related to us), the biomass of almost every other life form decreases.
I think your premise is true, we have limited resources and our population is and will be limited by the resources.
Every now and then as population grows pandemic diseases, wars and natural disasters wipe us up to a more sustainable point.
Kind of, but not in the way you’re thinking. People don’t just appear out of nothing, sucking in the atoms around them. They’re created and grow through energy and atomic transfers. We get that as sustenance through food. Women who don’t recieve enough sustenance to support a fetus, then the fetus will strip what it needs from the mother, causing weakness in bones, teeth, anaemia, etc. When they’re born if you don’t get enough sustenance to grow you can end up stunted or die.
So it’s sustenance that is the important resource for making and creating new people.
Yes and no. The building blocks of humans are things like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, water. There aren’t any elements in our biology that are rare compared to the total amount on earth.
However think of a field of crops or a hillside grazed by sheep raised for meat. Those are taking resources – space, water, soil and plant nutrients – that would otherwise be used by different plants, animals and fungi.
For example without human agriculture, most of the UK would likely be covered in forest. So our consumption comes at the expense of trees and woodland organisms. Or think of the sea, where fishing is literally reducing the number of fish in the sea.
Matter circulates. During live we absorb and release lots and lots of matter. After we die matter that made us during death also continue to circulate.
Not in any meaningful sense of running out of “stuff”. The earth is probably far larger and more massive than you imagine. All life (biomass) on the planet is not a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the mass of the earth. In that sense all life on earth is pretty much nothing compared to the size of the planet.
Well before we “run out” of stuff, there are things that would limit our population – and that is probably the energy needed. Nearly every bit of energy that sustains life comes from the sun (the only bits that are not is geothermal and nuclear). At the way we currently can use this energy available (plants etc) we’d probably reach a limit there before we run out of stuff. Of course, humans are pretty smart and we can improve technology and perhaps our energy efficiency.
This is fairly big picture stuff. Scientists “grade” potential alien civilizations by their ability to use and generate useful energy. Useful energy is very likely to be not only the limiting factor for humans on earth but the universe in general.
The Earth has a mass of about 6×10^24 kg, the average human masses about 70 kg (7×10^2 to use consistent notation). So if you converted all the atoms of the earth into humans (ignoring any losses during transmuting), you’d get about 10^22 people, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. We currently have about 7 billion (7×10^9 ), so you can see that this is not a situation that’s likely to happen soon, if ever.
Also you can change 1 atom into another, but that would be a physics question.
Not if we’re clever about it. The universe is infinite, so if we can find a way to travel faster than light, we only run out of resources when Heat Death happens (if it does. Mabey it wont. Hard to tell for sure. For all we know expansion could stop tomorrow. Or reverse. No way to know for sure that it will keep being like this forever). Even without FTL though, we have enough access to resources to make an amount of humans which frankly, is too large for our ape brains to comprehend.
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