Micro, Macro and Me

I saw one infographic about the biomass of humans in relation to the wild and domesticated mammals. Note that the wild animals (mammals) include both marine mammals and land mammals. I couldn't believe that graph - do we outweigh all the wild lions, monkeys, bears, kangaroos, mice, elephants ... by a factor 9:1? The quoted  article  estimates the biomass in terms of GtC (billions of tonnes of carbon. A human being has roughly 8 kg of carbon (and ~60 kg of other elements) and mankind has a total biomass of 6 GtC, for example. See also the book The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics and Change  (I need to confess, that I haven't read that book). https://xkcd.com/1338/ The total biomass for humans outweigh the wild mammals by a factor 9:1. What does this mean for us? Let's return to the small island that I discussed before , where the land area of the world is divided evenly between all humans. You'll find it slightly smaller but don't worry a...

Looking at the world, there are huge areas of valuable land that can provide the human population with food and goods. But we are so many to share the resources (currently 7.5 billion persons). How much land is there per person, if the world would be divided evenly? If you would share a small island with nine other persons, it would be fairly easy to understand how big your share would be. 10% of a 20-hectare island is 2 hectares, 10% of 250 trees is 25 trees, and so on. We can both calculate our share and feel the size of it. For bigger islands and populations, however, it is much harder to estimate our share of the world an the resources. - How many hectares of rain forest would I have if it was to be distributed in a ”fair” manner? How much oil? Phosphor? Plains? Fresh water? Lithium for my next cell phone? Our world has a surfare area of 500 million square kilometers, of which some 150 millions sq km is land. Each of us would have slightly less than two hectares o...