this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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I remember asking my dad if the Earth ever got heavier besides when meteors landed and babies were born.
I couldn’t comprehend that babies were made out of food. I thought they just came from nothing.
"babies were made of food" gave me a chuckle! a bit of a shower thought moment :)
Yup, and food is made almost entirely out of carbon dioxide and water.
Uh, pretty sure we add the oxygen when we eat the food.
Plants eat CO2
Yeah, so the plants turn carbon dioxide and water into cellulose and water mostly, herbivores digest the cellulose into protein and carbohydrates we can eat, we eat them and turn that protein and carbohydrates into our bodies and energy using oxygen, back into carbon dioxide and water and expel it. It's the carbon cycle.
Right. But CO2 isn’t in the food like you said above. We make it into CO2 when we use the energy.
Are you thick? The food is made into food by plants from it.
When plants undergo photosynthesis, they break the oxygen off the CO2 molecule and create carbohydrates. At this point, the CO2 molecule ceases to be. So to say that there is CO2 in food is incorrect. Our bodies recreate the CO2 when recovering energy from those carbohydrates.
I said food was made from carbon dioxide and water, and repeatedly explained the process I was referring to. I never once said carbon dioxide was "in" food, although even if I did I don't think it is this easy to misunderstand what I'm saying.
You said it’s made “of” carbon dioxide, not “from” carbon dioxide. Different prepositions carry very different meanings in this context.
I’m glad we agree on the process. Your initial statement was imprecise and led to confusion.
Apart from the babies thing, that's still a very interesting question. I bet someone knows the answer, but I wonder if the weight of the earth increases or decreases on average. I'd have to guess it's a net increase from picking up stuff as we move through space, which probably dwarfs the mass of stuff we've sent out (especially if you don't count satellites since they're more or less still tied to earth). I don't think there's anything like natural ejections of matter from earth either.
If I recall correctly, it decreases. We lose more weight of atmospheric gas than we gain weight of meteorite material.
Additional external mass is additional mass. shrug
It can't really be said there is a net-gain in mass (in fact most websites seem to estimate a net loss).
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/297622/is-the-earth-gaining-or-losing-mass-over-time
I don't know what you mean by «massless particles», but plants do not make food out of "the definition of nothing". Photosynthesis is a chemical process and like any other chemical process due to the law of conservation of mass (disregarding mass-energy equivalence), the mass of the reagents is the same as the mass of the products. The sugars produced during photosynthesis weren't just produced with light as input. Light is the energy source that fuels the reaction in the light dependent of phase of photosynthesis, which has water as input, whose products (besides oxygen molecules which are a "useless" byproduct of the reaction) are used to produce the sugars in the non-light dependent phase which also takes carbon dioxide as input (there are obviously more substances involved in the reaction but they are "reused" between the two phases).
So, the mass of the "food" of the plant is in reality obtained from water and carbon dioxide, not out of "nothingness".
Plants make their food from matter that's already here on Earth. They take CO2 and water and use the sun's energy to turn them into sugar. They don't just get it from nothing.
They … arent made out of food .....
Their mass is derived from matter ingested by the mother.
I mean, we’re all made of star stuff, but in the local sense, mothers can turn the food they eat into babies.
Ah that's what you meant. I thought sperms got confused as food
"More evidence we need better sex ed! People don't know where babies come from!"
PS: sperm is made of food.
Welp.