1. Nature

   Do human-made things already outweigh all life on Earth, or will they by 2037?

   Counting living things without water, human-made mass caught up around 2020 (±6 years); counting water, around 2037 (±10). These are calculations from a 2020 study.

   Source: Elhacham et al. · Nature 2020 · author modelsOpen on the chart →

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   The striking conclusion depends on how biomass is defined. The central 2020 crossing concerns dry mass; the later wet-mass crossing was the authors’ extrapolation. Neither means the planet was precisely weighed in that year.

   One scale: trillion tonnes. All three bars show central model estimates for 2020, including the authors’ extrapolations; they are not contemporary measurements.

   • Human-made mass, 2020 extrapolation trillion tonnes, 2020 study estimate

     1.154 (2020)

     Human-made and living mass: estimates from the 2020 study

   • Dry biomass, 2020 extrapolation trillion tonnes, 2020 study estimate

     1.12 (2020)

     Human-made and living mass: estimates from the 2020 study

   • Wet biomass, 2020 extrapolation trillion tonnes, 2020 study estimate

     2.241 (2020)

     Human-made and living mass: estimates from the 2020 study

   • dry crossing central year, ±6 years year, model result

     2020 (2020)

     Elhacham et al.: author figure-generating code

   • wet crossing central year, ±10 years year, model result

     2037 (2020)

     Elhacham et al.: author figure-generating code

   Retain published annotations in the authors’ Figure1.py and Figure2.py: dry 2020±6 and wet 2037±10 years. ± is the reported model uncertainty, not a newly assigned 95% interval. Bars use central 2020 source-table estimates; human-made mass excludes waste. The 2020 study’s extrapolations are not represented as 2026 observations.

   Elhacham et al., Nature 588, 442–444 (2020), DOI 10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5; author files/code pinned to commit 5a0170a51d164c1cc98b232452e86feb1e4ee334. A teratonne is 10¹² tonnes. Human-made material stocks at year-end, not annual production. In-use total excludes separately retained waste. 1900–2015 are historical estimates; 2016–2037 are the 2020 study extrapolation, not 2026 observations or an updated forecast. Biomass is a global model estimate; irregular years are not interpolated. Dry excludes water; wet includes it using the authors’ dry-to-wet conversion assumptions. Biomass after 2017 is author extrapolation. Relative standard deviation retained in %, not a 95% interval. Crossings 2020±6 (dry) and 2037±10 (wet) are published model results sensitive to definitions and uncertainty, not precisely observed transition dates. We preserve source-table years, without reproducing the figure’s shifts or smoothing.

   A question for this picture

   Which measure would change this story?

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