Man-Made Structures Now Outweigh the Mass of the Living World
Biocubes is a visualization comparing the mass of the living world (biomass) to the mass that’s been generated by humans (technomass). From a piece in the Times about the visualization:
“The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,” he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.
Update: As noted in the comments and in my inbox, it should probably be “humans outweigh wild mammals 10 to 1”.
Comments 4
« humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1»
It should say wild mammals.
Yeah I heard insects outweigh us by a lot
One of my favourite facts is that all humans would fit into a 1km cube.
Not comfortably. But they would.
WolframAlpha says the volume of a human is 66 litres, but double it because of our shape, headphones, etc, so 125 litres. 8 humans take up 1 cubic meter.
There are 1 billion cubic meters in a 1km cube.
There are less than 8 billion humans. We fit.
I like how "humans" are pictured squarely between Technomass and Biomass - probably all those microplastics we've consumed make us hard to classify as one or the other?
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