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posted by janrinok on Thursday May 24 2018, @04:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the leaving-our-mark dept.

The authors of the open-access article The biomass distribution on Earth (DOI:10.1073/pnas.1711842115) undertook

[...] a census of the ≈550 gigatons of carbon (Gt C) of biomass distributed among all of the kingdoms of life [...]

According to Science Alert,

The most comprehensive study ever of the weight of all living biomass on the planet has discovered humans account for only about 0.01 percent of life on Earth [...]

[...] their analysis suggests human civilisation has slashed the total biomass of wild mammals by as much as 85 per cent, and has cut plant biomass in half.

Livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, makes up about 60 percent of all mammals on Earth (at 0.1 Gt C).

[...] the biomass of domesticated poultry [is] about three times greater than that of wild birds.

The Guardian interviewed one of the authors.

"It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth," said Milo. "When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken."

[...] in weight terms Homo sapiens is puny. Viruses alone have a combined weight three times that of humans, as do worms. Fish are 12 times greater than people and fungi 200 times as large.

In a 2016 study (PDF) covered by Gizmodo, the Anthropocene Working Group estimated

[...] the weight of Earth's "technosphere"—basically, all of the structures people have built, modified, or messed with [...] everything from factories to smartphones to the land we've farmed [and our garbage at] 30 trillion tons [...].

[...] "It has enabled the production of an enormous array of material objects....Many of these, if entombed in strata, can be preserved into the distant geological future"

Its authors noted that "the total [mass of the technosphere] is five orders of magnitude greater than the standing biomass of humans."


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday May 24 2018, @09:31AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 24 2018, @09:31AM (#683478) Journal

    No need to go on a diet yet, we're not that heavy after all.

    On the contrary, we must reduce the percentage of the rest.
    A call to action: start eating those viruses, they are only three times our mass.
    I might even launch a Kickstarter for an Ebola sauce!!!

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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