I dont remember the age, but it was before Kindergarten, thought men came into the house at night to load the next days shows into the TV.

  • ch00f@lemmy.world
    28·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • indepndnt@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • Faresh@lemmy.mlEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Yes, the mass has been increasing: meteors bombarding the earth daily

          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

          also plants make their food out of pretty much the definition of nothing, massless particles that makes its way up the food chain

          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”.