According to research, human-made materials have already outweighed all life on Earth, which details the "crossover point" where humans' footprint on the planet is now heavier than that of the natural materials.
That means that for the first time, the massive greenery of Amazon, the fish in the oceans, the microbes, and every animal and plants living today no longer make up the majority of matter on Earth as human-made materials now outweigh it, ScienceAlert reported.
Production of Human-Made Objects Doubles
The estimates of human-made materials this 2020 suggests that it has already outweighed the mass of natural matter on Earth. History suggests that when people started learning to plow the fields and tending to livestock, the planet was still coated in a biosphere that weighed 2x10^2 tons.
But with the continuous habit of farming, mining, and building infrastructures, the biosphere has now halved. Besides, the doubling of these human-made materials has only just worsened the case.
A team of environmental scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel said that human-made materials had grown so much that biomass and mass production have already match up. Indeed, 2020 marks the moment when human-made mass tipped higher than the natural mass, Phys.org reported.
Not to mention that humans kept on rearranging 30 gigatons of nature into anything, making it into human-made materials like bookcases, luxury apartments at a rate that has been doubling every 20 years since the 1900s.
The researchers emphasize the growing dominance of humans over biomass and how depressing it is in the history of mankind.
"Beyond biomass, as the global effect of humanity accelerates, it is becoming ever more imperative to quantitatively assess and monitor the material flows of our socioeconomic system, also known as the socio-economic metabolism," the researchers wrote.
This new study draws a big picture of how the planet is during 2020, said Ron Milo, the co-author of the study from the Plant and Environmental Sciences Department at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. He added that they hope humans, as species, will awaken and take responsibility.
Human-Made Objects Will Become Three Teratons by 2040
Aside from the infrastructures and other objects doubling in production, the expanding waistline of people is also a concern, but nothing new, the researchers said. It also includes overfishing, humans' insatiable hunger for T-bone steaks, convenient tins of tuna in the winter, and many more contribute to the increasing mass of human-made materials.
At the current growth rate of human-made materials production, the researchers estimate that it could reach up to three teratons by 2040—the continuous decrease of biomass due to deforestation and land use to make way for intensive agriculture.
Lead author Emily Elhacham said that this problem indicates humanity's outsized impact on the natural world that they can no longer deny. "We are already a major player, and with that comes a shared responsibility," Elhacham said.
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