http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053019616677743

I have long found it fascinating that humans will complain about population concerns… without considering that our objects outnumber us by many orders of magnitude. So, for example, it’s not as much of a problem that there are 7 billion people as it is that there are billions of cars, and endless domains of other objects, associated with each person and collective… ‘the stuff’ we make and use outweighs us by 5 orders of magnitude. I do not know what our biosphere can support; but a dead biosphere buried in technological waste cannot support anything at all, and the waste comes from converting living places to desolations.

“Highly preliminary estimates of the major components of the Earth System co-opted into the technosphere (Table 1) indicate a mass of ~30 trillion tonnes (Tt), equivalent to > 50 kg/m2 of the Earth’s surface. The total is five orders of magnitude greater than the standing biomass of humans (~0.3 Gt; Smil, 2011) presently sustained by this construct and its reshaping of the biosphere. The enormous scale of the technosphere by comparison to pre-anthropogenic systems becomes even more apparent when one considers that present human biomass is more than double that of all large terrestrial vertebrates that characterized the Earth prior to human civilization (Barnosky, 2008) and is an order of magnitude greater than present wild terrestrial vertebrate biomass (Smil, 2011).”