More Life or Death.

[gabrielnoah]

Perhaps a little off-topic but. . .

I was wondering whether each day there is more life or death on Earth.

Consider all life from the smallest, even microscopic organisms to the largest such as coral reefs. Every second of each day things are born and things die all over the world. At the end of the day, do the two equal each other? Is there slightly more life? Or is there slightly more death.

Does anyone even know where to begin looking for an accurate estimate on this statistic.

Thanks.

[comtrails70]

i'd put my money on dying or at least its starting to lean in that general direction.
then again it might just depend on the time of year if your counting all living things.
either way the huge corporations will have it all sorted out shortly.

http://www.livestream.com/spillcam

[devnulljp]

I'd lean toward an equilibrium, but we are kinda fucking that up somewhat, killing things faster than they can evolve to survive.
It's also going to be a hard thing to pin down seeing as how we haven't catalogued all species on the planet yet anyway and you'd be working with estimates only.

[Connor]

i've been studying environmental science this year.so i might be able to impart a small ammount of knowledge.
humans- more life than death
everything else- more death than life. some more than others, but there are only so many resources available on earth, and as humans continue to grow larger in population, it leaves the rest of life with less resources for living.

[devnulljp]

i've been studying environmental science this year.so i might be able to impart a small ammount of knowledge.
humans- more life than death
everything else- more death than life. some more than others, but there are only so many resources available on earth, and as humans continue to grow larger in population, it leaves the rest of life with less resources for living.

I still say that's anthropocentric. Nigel Stork said that "to a first approximation, all multicellular species on Earth are insects" -- there are way more insects than mammals.
And there are way more bacteria and fungi than insects.
A single human has 10,000 x more microbial cells than human cells, so do the math for an ever increasing human population at least.
E. coli has a doubling time of 20 min, and under (admittedly impossible) ideal conditions you'd have a mass of cells equivalent to the mass of the planet in less than 2 days.
There's a lot of life left on this old ball of dirt yet, despite everything Exxon and BP are doing to change that...