Call us Homo slobbus.
It took roughly four billion years for the first living bit of protoplasm, bred perhaps in an undersea volcanic vent or a warm pond, to grow and evolve into the 1.1 trillion tons of biomass that inhabit Earth today. But all of that is outweighed by the plastic, concrete and other material that humans have produced in the last century alone in the form of everything from roads and skyscrapers to cars, cellphones, paper towels and bobblehead dolls.
That was the takeaway of a meticulous global inventory of stuff, natural and unnatural, compiled in 2018 by Yinon M. Bar-On, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, and his colleagues. They synthesized data from a vast number of scientific studies, from large global measurements to rough guesstimates. One figure widely quoted by pest control companies: There are 1,000 pounds of termites for every human on Earth. If you like big numbers, the 2018 report is delicious reading.
Recently, Brice Ménard, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, and Nikita Shtarkman, a computer scientist and graphic artist, visualized Dr. Bar-On’s research. The two had previously collaborated on an online map of the universe, which has been viewed more than a million times.
Their new visualization represents various kinds of living matter and “technostuff” in the form of cubes, with sizes proportional to their total weight on Earth.
“This is the portrait of our planet,” Dr. Ménard wrote in an email. “I thought everyone should know about it. I decided to create a powerful visualization so everyone can see this with their own eyes and better appreciate what has happened during our own lifetime.”
Life started long ago and proceeded slowly at first. Ninety percent of Earth’s biomass today is plants. Another sizable chunk is in the microbes — viruses, bacteria, algae and fungi — the biochemical threads that bind us.
Humans — some eight billion people weighing 120 million tons — account for only about one one-thousandth of Earth’s current biomass, according to Dr. Bar-On’s study. Termites and their mounds account for 445 million tons, according to recent estimates.
But we humans have had a much larger impact on our planet, especially recently. There are now 1.3 trillion tons of man-made stuff on the planet, almost all of it built in the 20th century. The biggest portion of it is more than 600 billion tons of concrete, followed by about 400 billion tons of sand, gravel and other aggregate materials used in construction. Earthlings have built two billion cars, Dr. Ménard wrote in the email, and 70 billion tons of asphalt to drive them on.
“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.
“I knew the numbers,” Dr. Ménard said. “But seeing this made me much more conscious about my plastic footprint and the need to reduce it — something everyone can attempt doing.”
The future looks as if it will be worse, Dr. Ménard said, as the world’s population increases and countries add more infrastructure, requiring ever more energy and fossil fuels. All that concrete absorbs heat and keeps cities from cooling off at night. The global temperature rose a full degree Celsius during the building boom of the 20th century. “Our animation showing the rise of the technomass comes with an unavoidable rise of the global temperature,” Dr. Ménard said.
Onward and upward.
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