When Humanity Outweighed Life: The Moment Human-Made Matter Overtook Earth’s Living World
For most of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, life shaped the planet slowly. Forests rose, oceans filled with microscopic organisms, animals evolved and vanished, and biomass—the total weight of all living things—remained the dominant physical presence on the surface of the planet. Even the most dramatic natural events rarely altered that balance for long.
Then, quietly, without a single dramatic headline or global announcement, something unprecedented happened.
Around the year 2020, humanity crossed a threshold no species had ever crossed before. The total mass of human-produced materials—concrete, steel, asphalt, bricks, glass, plastics, metals, and infrastructure—surpassed the dry weight of all living biomass on Earth.
For the first time in planetary history, what humans have built n...




















