We are making so many satellites to outer space. What ever we are sending to outer space is consuming some amount of earth’s weight. Even thought the weight is nothing in comparing with the weight of our earth, a question rises in my mind. What will happen if we continue to do this for another 10000 years, sending more satellites to another planet? Won’t the earth’s weight decrease? Am I completely wrong?
Will Earth’s weight decrease?
- Thread starter hariharan
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Well, what goes up must come down eventually: sats do fall back to Earth:smile: And, add in all the space debris that hits the planet and the ever increasing population growth...I'd say Earth may need to go on a diet.
A satellite's mass remains captured by gravity even while it's in orbit. Stuff on the moon still orbite Earth. The weight of equipment gone to Mars and outer space is mass lost from Earth. Loss of that mass, relatively speaking, is much less than the weight of skin ash you wash from your own body in your daily shower.
Perfessor Woof!
Perfessor Woof!
A population growth doesn't change the mass of the Earth... we are part of the Earth.
I agree with you about the weight loss is negligible. But my question is if we do that continuously won't we loss considerable amount of weight?
Student Hari
Student Hari
Well, each year about 40,000 tons of cosmic dust falls on the earth. That works out to: approximately 0.0000000000000006% of Earth's mass.
And that is probably more than we're losing from blasting satellites into orbit and any small amount of atmospheric gases we might lose.
I wouldn't worry about it
And that is probably more than we're losing from blasting satellites into orbit and any small amount of atmospheric gases we might lose.
I wouldn't worry about it
Not completely, you just haven't thought it all the way through. For starters, the earth is weightless, same as the astronauts floating about the orbiting space shuttle are weightless. The earth's mass, however, is about 6 x 10^24 kilograms. Suppose we launched the equivalent mass of an average sort of car, say 1000 kilograms, into interstellar space every day for 10,000 years. That'd be around 3,652,500 cars, or 3,652,500,000 kilograms. So, round it to 4 billion kilograms the earth would lose, just to make it easier, we're not worried about bang-on accuracy here. What fraction of the earth's mass is that? A simple division will tell you it's around one part in 10^15, one thousand trillionth. To put that in perspective, there are about 10 trillion cells in the human body, so it's a loss of mass on the same scale as you losing a hundredth of a single cell.
Like Tonington says, I wouldn't worry about it.
Thanks, Dexter, Tonington.
I thought because of sending satellites to outer space we are losing our weight. After your explanation I am convinced. Shall I consider Earth’s mass is almost a constant always?
I thought because of sending satellites to outer space we are losing our weight. After your explanation I am convinced. Shall I consider Earth’s mass is almost a constant always?
For any practical purpose most of us are likely to encounter, yes, you can consider it to be constant.
We consume food for our growth, plants and animals transformed into food. I think the added mass in our body is the mass transferred from plants, animals etc. This logic may be wrong also.
time
That is an interesting question - so we eat food to convert it to energy in our bodies our bodies use energy to do work to grow food -is mass lost or is energy lost in the process - or is it converted from one side of the equation to the other?
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Law of thermodynamics (am I correct???). Only the forms are changed. This principle is known as conservation of energy. But I am not sure whether this can be applied here. I think Dexter can explain this better than me. Where are you Dexter?????
Energy and matter is lost in digestion. By that I don't mean it disappears, only that during digestion, not all available nutrients and diet components are transfered to growth.
The mother's body is using her digestive system to process energy for both her needs and that of her gestating baby.
Very few organisms can convert 100% of the energy into growth, if at all. There is a cascade. Gross energy is the total amount in the food. When you ingest that food, some of it will pass right through you as faeces. Still more of that energy will be loss as heat increment. The actual digestive process itself requires energy. In the end, there is only growth after the body has satisfied metabolic needs.
The mother needs to eat more, "she's eating for two." That includes higher levels of dietary components like vitamins, proteins, minerals and energy.
Everything on Earth besides the autotrophs eat other life forms to grow and survive. There is no such thing as a free lunch, even producing energy in chloroplasts still requires some energy provided by the organism, for the electron transport chain to work.
:smile:
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I thought I would clarify things a little better, I added some more to my above response just now, but the edit tag doesn't show
The digestibility of nutrients depends on many factors. Species specific, body size, age or stage of development, even complimentary relationships between nutrients.
Whenever we eat something, say a Big Mac, we will lose a good portion of the gross energy to the digestive process, and from inefficiencies in our digestive tract. Further still, the dietary components of that burger won't all necessarily be equally digestible. Digestible crude protein, a common parameter we measure for in nutrition, is different for every different feed stuff. If they chose to make the Big Mac mostly from soy proteins, and add flavour to make it indistinguishable from an animal protein derived burger, the amount of protein we get from that burger will be different.
Further still, there is something called a Chemical Score. A score of 100 would mean that the food item provides all of the amino acids our body needs and cannot produce ourselves(those would be essential amino acids.)
Some components of our diet might not be digestible at all. Think whole corn kernels. Evolution has shaped our digestive tract to be less suited to high cellulose. The energy contained in that corn kernel has to be processed by some external mechanism, or chewed vigorously in order to get a better digestibility from that kernel.
Complimentary nutrients become important as well. A deficiency or excess in one mineral might cause another mineral to be less efficacious. For instance, the utilization of Magnesium, Zinc and Phosphorous can be changed by having too much Calcium.
Many relationships at work in our guts. :smile:
The digestibility of nutrients depends on many factors. Species specific, body size, age or stage of development, even complimentary relationships between nutrients.
Whenever we eat something, say a Big Mac, we will lose a good portion of the gross energy to the digestive process, and from inefficiencies in our digestive tract. Further still, the dietary components of that burger won't all necessarily be equally digestible. Digestible crude protein, a common parameter we measure for in nutrition, is different for every different feed stuff. If they chose to make the Big Mac mostly from soy proteins, and add flavour to make it indistinguishable from an animal protein derived burger, the amount of protein we get from that burger will be different.
Further still, there is something called a Chemical Score. A score of 100 would mean that the food item provides all of the amino acids our body needs and cannot produce ourselves(those would be essential amino acids.)
Some components of our diet might not be digestible at all. Think whole corn kernels. Evolution has shaped our digestive tract to be less suited to high cellulose. The energy contained in that corn kernel has to be processed by some external mechanism, or chewed vigorously in order to get a better digestibility from that kernel.
Complimentary nutrients become important as well. A deficiency or excess in one mineral might cause another mineral to be less efficacious. For instance, the utilization of Magnesium, Zinc and Phosphorous can be changed by having too much Calcium.
Many relationships at work in our guts. :smile:
Although satelites are made with material made here on earth and then being shot off into space may seem like the Earth would be loosing matter in it's overall structure in some fashion or another..... so long as humans keep getting fatter and fatter, we'll counter it.
Jeez, I do have to sleep sometimes, you know, and I do have a life outside CC. :smile:. You posted that at 1:30 in the morning in my time zone.
That's a simplified statement of the conservation law, but essentially correct, though since Einstein showed us that mass and energy are equivalent we have to be a little careful. The real constant term is the total of mass and energy. The sun's converting mass into radiation all the time, and that's the ultimate source of the energy in whatever we eat, but it's not adding anything to the mass of the earth, radiation consists of massless particles. Plants absorb the radiation and use it to power various chemical reactions that enable them to build up their own masses with other chemicals and elements drawn from the air, water, and soil, some animals eat the plants, other animals eat those animals, some animals (like us) do both, other critters like bacteria and fungi recycle the leftovers, as do certain non-biological chemical processes, and so on, round and round we go. Except for the energy input from the sun, it's a zero sum game.