She's Leaving Hoooome
Jun. 4th, 2011 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gemfyreOne future scenario often proposed for humans is that one day we'll all just leave this planet - most likely because we've ruined it beyond any use for us - and go somewhere else.
But I was just thinking - doing this itself, building the ships, stockpiling the food/water/air etc and putting all of our bodies on said ships and blasting them into space - that's a heck of a lot of resources and biomass that will be leaving the earth. When we die in space - where will that biomass go? All the metals we had to extract from earth to build the ships, will never be incorporated back into the earth.
It leaves a dilemma like that in the speculative scenarios of what would happen if all humans were just to disappear from earth. Has anyone actually calculated the effect of the loss of biomass were this to happen? These scenarios just have people popping out of existence, rather than dying.
If the slightly more realistic scenario (all of us dying), was used, things would play out differently. All of a sudden there would be BILLIONS of carcasses on the planet. Carrion eater populations would explode, along with diseases carried by dead flesh and the creatures that feed upon it. But eventually all of our biomass would get back into the ground, or the bodies of carrion eaters (as long as it wasn't in such a place where decomposition would occur - which is also something that needs to be considered).
I want to see a scenario where the gory reality is considered. Just making humans disappear is like digging a giant hole on the planet and putting the dirt somewhere in outer space, so the cycles on earth can't use it anymore - that's a BIG effect.
But I was just thinking - doing this itself, building the ships, stockpiling the food/water/air etc and putting all of our bodies on said ships and blasting them into space - that's a heck of a lot of resources and biomass that will be leaving the earth. When we die in space - where will that biomass go? All the metals we had to extract from earth to build the ships, will never be incorporated back into the earth.
It leaves a dilemma like that in the speculative scenarios of what would happen if all humans were just to disappear from earth. Has anyone actually calculated the effect of the loss of biomass were this to happen? These scenarios just have people popping out of existence, rather than dying.
If the slightly more realistic scenario (all of us dying), was used, things would play out differently. All of a sudden there would be BILLIONS of carcasses on the planet. Carrion eater populations would explode, along with diseases carried by dead flesh and the creatures that feed upon it. But eventually all of our biomass would get back into the ground, or the bodies of carrion eaters (as long as it wasn't in such a place where decomposition would occur - which is also something that needs to be considered).
I want to see a scenario where the gory reality is considered. Just making humans disappear is like digging a giant hole on the planet and putting the dirt somewhere in outer space, so the cycles on earth can't use it anymore - that's a BIG effect.
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Date: 2011-06-04 07:42 am (UTC)I also think the far more likely scenario is that only a very small percentage of the population gets evacuated. Plus planets tend to die slowly (from a human lifetime PoV), so it could take a very long time to kill off the sturdier (or luckier) humans...
no subject
Date: 2011-06-04 04:04 pm (UTC)Sooooo... I guess the carrion eaters will have an all-you-can-eat barbeque buffet? ;)
-Sparky
no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 09:31 am (UTC)Take out the oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen atoms (plenty of those to go around), and the cube is 262 meters a side. Drop in the ocean.