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If we compare the total mass with the mass of all Naturally living beings with all creatures on Earth, be they bacteria, viruses, fish, insects, plants, etc., then what is the weight percentage of all people?

I ask this because I saw it mentioned that once people and all life they cultivated made up 0.1% of all animals and now 98%. With an exclamation mark. I am not sure if these were percentages of the total number of animals or their weight. I guess it is the number.

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  • $\begingroup$ Why is the question downvoted? Please give a reason. I dont care about downvotes but I dont like irrational ones. Is it about the word Natural? What is Natural? $\endgroup$
    – Deschele Schilder
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 13:07

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This has been studied in this paper, and they came up with:

Total biomass = 550 gigatons of carbon

Human biomass = 0.06 gigatons of carbon

So this would make humans about 0.01% of all biomass. If this sounds like a little, a couple of points are worth mentioning:

Graphical representation of the global biomass distribution by taxa

Graphical representation of the global biomass distribution by taxa. (A) Absolute biomasses of different taxa are represented using a Voronoi diagram, with the area of each cell being proportional to that taxa global biomass. (B) Absolute biomass of different animal taxa.

Biomass and anthropogenic mass estimates since the beginning of the twentieth century on a dry-mass basis.

Biomass and anthropogenic mass estimates since the beginning of the twentieth century on a dry-mass basis.

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  • $\begingroup$ Wow! Great answer. Luckily we form a small part. For every person 100 000 kilo! $\endgroup$
    – Deschele Schilder
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 12:53
  • $\begingroup$ 10,000 Kg actually. $\endgroup$
    – Dave
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 12:55
  • $\begingroup$ I'm surprised that livestock and humans are so close in mass. I'd thought that livestock would be higher, given the inefficiency of meat. $\endgroup$
    – jakebeal
    Commented Jul 22, 2021 at 21:12
  • $\begingroup$ @jakebeal I'm sure human omnivory helps, but also that the life of livestock is so brief. Chickens are slaughtered around 6 weeks age, pigs at 6 months, beef just over a year. A dairy cow produces about 10X its weight in milk per year (though of course a lot of that is water), a hen >3X its weight in eggs. $\endgroup$
    – Bryan Krause ♦
    Commented Jul 23, 2021 at 19:32

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