Our earth is vast and filled with living things, including us. But you might not have a real grasp of the relative mass of all humans to all marine animals to livestock to plants. An interactive presentation called Biocubes shows us cubes of all the plant mass, all the animal mass, etc. so we can compare. You might not be surprised to learn how the biomass of all earth's plants dwarfs the biomass of animals, but you might gasp at how fungi and bacteria also take up way more space than animals. Then when we break down the animals cube, we find that most of our animals are in the ocean. Humans are a larger biomass than wild mammals, and our livestock biomass is bigger than humans and wild mammals combined.
But it's the last part of the presentation that's a real eye-opener. The "technomass" is the volume of the things humans have made, including building materials, plastic, and metal. An animated sequence shows how the technomass has grown over time until it dominates the earth and takes up more space than all living things combined. It's a breathtaking journey with lots of information along the way. -via kottke
Commenting on Neatorama will earn you NeatoPoints!