Human-made things outweighs Earth’s Living Things

According to a team of environmental researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, Human-made things are set to outweigh all living things on the Earth.

Key Points

• It means that the mass of items constructed by humans could match the combined dry weight of every living thing on Earth.
• They have estimated that in the year 2020, the mass production of humans may outweigh the biomass.
• The creation of human-made things has been rapidly increasing for the last 120 years.
• Human-made objects have increased from just 3% of the world’s biomass in the year 1900 to on par with it today. The amount of new stuff being produced every week is equal to the average body weight of all 7.7 billion people.
• As per the report, since the first agricultural revolution (around 12,000 years ago), humans have reduced the global biomass to almost half, from 2 teratons to around 1.1 teratons today.
• It also estimates that if the total mass of all humans exceeds 300 million tonnes, there are 3.8 tonnes of man-made things like microwaves and jumbo-jets on Earth each year for every single human.
• As per the study, the plastics in the world alone weigh twice the marine and terrestrial animals on Earth.
• The wet weight of the biomass on Earth is 2.2 trillion metric tons at present, and humans are on the way to outproduce this figure in the year 2031 (including waste) or in the year 2037 (without waste).
• If the same trend is held for the coming years, the anthropogenic mass will grow to 3 times the biomass of the world by the year 2040.

The research study that was published in ‘Nature’ journal highlights the dominance of human beings over the planet.