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If we took material like rock from space and got it back to Earth enough times, would Earth grow as a planet?
(self.showerthoughts)
As the title says. I'm actually thinking about this hard with my friends because everything that's produced on Earth stays on Earth so it doesn't change size, but what if it's not from Earth but it stays on Earth?
We do. The sun's energy is locked in plants via photosynthesis, which is then processed by herbivores and passed further down the food chain. That energy exists in form of chemical compounds which are then broken down to release it during digestion.
In terms of numbers tho, it's probably a negligible fraction of the Earth's mass
I thought plant biomass was obtained from the air (CO2/carbon sequestration?) and water.
You need photosynthesis to do that
Sure, but the implication was that plant mass comes from the sun. Maybe some negligible fraction of percent is but nowhere near the majority.
The sun’s energy also goes into heat all over the planet. I’m just trying to understand how any of that energy might manifest as mass in a tangible way.
Or maybe it’s just the case that the amount of energy needed to create mass is astronomically minuscule.
🤔 I suppose that’s the principle behind atomic bombs 🤔
It would actually be an astronomically large amount. An atomic bomb will turn a very tiny amount of mass into a tremendous amount of energy. And that's with a nuclear process that is way more efficent then a chemical one like photosynthesis.
But from pure physics standpoint a carbon atom and an O2 molecule will have a teeny-tiny bit more mass than a CO2 molecule (which is why combining or burning them together will release some energy). So doing the reverse and splitting up a CO2 molecule into it's parts will generate a little bit of mass.
Wow - that’s what I meant. Not sure how I managed to get it backwards.
And to think I fretted so much over using “astronomically” and “minuscule” together 🤪