{"id":177,"date":"2007-06-12T09:37:32","date_gmt":"2007-06-12T14:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weeklyrob.dreamhosters.com\/?p=177"},"modified":"2007-06-12T09:37:32","modified_gmt":"2007-06-12T14:37:32","slug":"atoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=177","title":{"rendered":"Atoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just generally musing about how humans haven’t actually added any atoms to the planet.<\/p>\n

All the plastic, all the emissions, all the disposable diapers, all the steel, the wreckage, the garbage, the skyscrapers, the concrete, glass, photo paper, book bindings, vinyl, paint, light bulb filaments, are made of stuff that was already here. And also all the people.<\/p>\n

We’ve rearranged the atoms; heated them, cooled them, or otherwise played with them so that they combine differently than they ever had before. But we haven’t introduced any new ones. [But wait! Not true, not true! See Kevin’s comment.]<\/p>\n

And all the carbon dioxide that we’re releasing lately, was mostly here before. It’s been carbon dioxide before, then split into carbon and oxygen, then formed into carbon dioxide again. The trees absorbed it, made it their own, then died. Then millions of years later we burn those trees and release it again. (Of course, they collected it slowly and we’re releasing it quickly. I’m not commenting on the affect it has, just on the fact that it’s not new as a molecule.)<\/p>\n

I once read a book called Stuff<\/a>, which impressed opon me the way that we manipulate atoms in ways that nature (before man) never anticipated.<\/p>\n

[Incidentally, I am a believer that man is natural, so just as we wouldn’t say that nature never intended a stick to be used the way that chimps do to fish for ants (ant for ants?), we shouldn’t say that nature never intended nylon. But it’s a handy phrase, so what the hell.]<\/p>\n

I emailed the author of Stuff, way back in 1997, when the book came out, and he emailed back! So I like him and the book. But that’s somewhat beside the point, which is just that all the atoms are the same as they always were. We do get a surprisingly large number of atoms from space every day, but they don’t make up much of what we use.<\/p>\n

No, pretty much everything you see, use, touch, and rely on, was here when the dinosaurs were, and for a coupla billion years before them, too. Nifty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just generally musing about how humans haven’t actually added any atoms to the planet. All the plastic, all the emissions, all the disposable diapers, all the steel, the wreckage, the garbage, the skyscrapers, the concrete, glass, photo paper, book bindings, vinyl, paint, light bulb filaments, are made of stuff that was already here. And also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-such"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}