The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything may be 42, but after excluding the universe part, the answer is thirty. It covers the life and everything part of this question: what is the weight of our influence on earth? We have plopped out 30 trillion tonnes of impacts to earth in order to stay alive — luxuriously alive in some cases. This manmade stuff includes bridges, buildings, bird feeders, and books. It’s our landfills and mines, farms and fishing, pens and paper, computers and cars.
To reach this number, an international team of scientists assessed ”the scale and extent of the physical technosphere, defined here as the summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise,” and published their findings in The Anthropocene Review. The study quantified all the “active urban, agricultural and marine components humans used to sustain energy and material flow for current human life….” The authors note that coming up with precise numbers wasn’t possible, but the orders of magnitude are correct. So this accurately shows the relative proportions of our technospheric impacts. (Tonne = 1 metric ton = 2,204.6 pounds.)
Basically, this is the human footprint, the sum total of everything we have made and are doing to support the variety of contemporary lifestyles on earth. This number, 30 trillion tonnes, relates the consequences of modern life, from Bambuti hunter-gatherers in the Congo, to the five million dollar homes of Scottsdale, and the densely packed chawls of Mumbai. All 7.5 billion of us.
We 7.5 billion humans comprise a biomass of 300 million tonnes. This is more than twice the biomass of all terrestrial vertebrates who ever lived on earth before human civilization, and ten times greater than all wild vertebrates alive now. It is, however, less than half the biomass of cows alive now (over 650 million tonnes). And though they are lightweight, our numbers are far exceeded by insects, with an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive. The NY Times claims there may be 300 pounds of insects and spiders per pound of human, i.e., a biomass of 900 million tonnes of insects and spiders (1,984,140,000,000 pounds).
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Despite taking third place in the biomass contest, we’ve been busier than insects and cows in developing a technosphere to support us that is about fifty times greater than our own biomass. Of this technosphere, the most impact is from urban areas (11.1 trillion tonnes), then rural housing (6.3 trillion).
The chart below breaks down the various components of our developments. After rural housing, the next largest impacts in trillion tonnes are pasture (5.03 million tonnes needed for those 650 million tonnes of cows), cropland (3.76), and trawled sea floor (2.25). This latter impact is our destructive fishing.
Bottom trawling is an industrial fishing method where a large net with heavy weights is dragged across the seafloor, scooping up everything in its path – from the targeted fish to the incidentally caught centuries-old corals. Bottom trawls are used in catching marine life that live on the seafloor, such as shrimp, cod, sole and flounder. In the US, bottom trawling occurs on the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts, capturing more than 800,000,000 pounds of marine life in 2007.
In the process of producing all this, humans have added one trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (reminder, one trillion has 12 zeros). World Economic Forum reports that three-quarters of this CO2 is enough to blanket earth in a one meter thick layer of CO2, and it’s growing a millimeter thicker every two weeks. Plus, the other quarter of our CO2 emissions sink into the ocean. Toss in the railroads, plantation forests, reservoirs, rural roads, and the 0.8 trillion tonnes of “land used and eroded soils,” and our total impact on earth comes to 30 trillion tonnes.
All this stuff outweighs the biosphere, and unlike biological matter, it isn’t recycling its materials effectively. One of the study team leaders, Professor Jan Zalasiewicz, observed . . .
"The technosphere may be geologically young, but it is evolving with furious speed, and it has already left a deep imprint on our planet."
Because little of this production is recycled back into active use, we are creating a huge residue on earth — future technofossils. If we considered these from a paleontological perspective, contemporary technofossil diversity is greater than that of biological biodiversity and much greater than recognized fossil diversity. The study considers that our technofossils might exceed all the biodiversity produced during earth’s entire history.
Another study author Professor Mark Williams noted . . .
"The technosphere can be said to have budded off the biosphere and arguably is now at least partly parasitic on it. At its current scale the technosphere is a major new phenomenon of this planet -- and one that is evolving extraordinarily rapidly.”
Thus, with 7.5 billion humans creating an impact footprint of 30 trillion tonnes (66,138 trillion pounds), if each person contributed an equal share, you would be responsible for 4,000 tonnes of technospheric stuff (8,818,400 pounds). Westerners are responsible for more, proportionately, since a Bambuti hunter-gatherer contributes a much lower percent due to their non-industrial lifestyle. But research shows that even humans from 47,000 years ago were capable of causing the rapid extinction of a bird species merely by hunting it and by eating eggs, disrupting the bird’s reproduction.
If nomadic aboriginals in Australia could cause a bird species’ extinction with their stone weapons and fire technology, just think what 30 million tonnes of contemporary human impact is doing. By the time our stuff is fossilized, contemporary insect biomass will have recycled countless times. Meanwhile, humans keep adding techno stuff that doesn’t recycle for centuries or longer (minimum 450 to 1,000 years for plastic bottles). In a few thousand years, who will be here to dig up and categorize all our technofossils? What will they understand about us from toothbrushes, iPhones, and nuclear power plants entombed in earth’s strata?
What is your footprint on earth?
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