People represent only 0.001% of all living things on Earth

Mankind is discovered as simultaneously insignificant and completely dominant in the vast scheme of life on Earth by a innovative new assessment of all life on the planet.

According to the study, 7.6 billion people in the world represent only 0.001% of all living things. However, since the dawn of civilization, mankind has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of the plants, while the livestock kept by humans is rich.

Bacteria are truly a major life form of 13% of everything but plants obscure everything, representing 82% of all living matter. All other creatures - from insects to mushrooms, fish, and animals - make up only 5% of the world's biodiversity.

Another surprise is that the exaggerated life discovered in the oceans by the recent BBC Blue Planet II television series results to represent only 1% of all biodiversity. Most of life is the earth, and a large piece of eight is bacteria buried deep below the surface.

I was shocked to realize that there was not already a comprehensive assessment of all the different components of biomass”, said Prof Ron Milo at the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Israel, which led the work, published in the Processings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I hope it gives people a perspective on the very dominant role that mankind now plays on Earth”, he said, adding that he now chooses to eat less meat because of the huge environmental impact of livestock.

The transformation of the planet from human activity has led scientists to the brink of a new geology age of Anthropocene.

The destruction of the wild habitat for agriculture, logging and development has resulted in the beginning of what many scientists consider the sixth massive extinction of life in Earth's history of four billion years. About 50% of Earth's animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years.

But the comparison of new estimates with those for the time before people became farmers and the industrial revolution began to reveal the total extent of the great decline. Only one sixth of the wild mammals - rats in elephants - remain - even surprising scientists. In the oceans, three centuries of hunting has left only one fifth of marine mammals in the oceans.

Since the rise of humanity 83% of wild animals have disappeared

“is undoubtedly impressive, our disproportionate place on Earth”, Milo said. When I make a puzzle with my daughters, there's usually an elephant next to a giraffe near a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic feeling of the world, there would be another cow next to a cow and then a chicken “.

Despite mankind's superiority, Homo sapiens is weak in terms. Only viruses have a weight combined three times that of humans, as do worms. Fish are 12 times larger than humans and mushrooms 200 times larger.

But our impact on the natural world remains great, Milo said, especially in what we choose to eat: our “S of food have a huge impact on the habitats of other animals, plants and organisms”.

“I will hope that people will take this [work] as part of their world view of how they consume,” he said. I haven't become a vegetarian, but I take the impact of my decision making, so it helps me think, do I want to choose meat or birds?

Researchers calculated biodiversity estimates using data from hundreds of studies that often used modern techniques, such as the discovery of satellite distance that can scan large areas and genetic sequences that can detect countless organisms in the microscopic world.

Paul Falkowski, at Rutgers University in the United States and not part of the research team, said: “The study is, according to my knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis of the distribution of biodiversity of all organisms including viruses on Earth”.

“has two major steps from this letter,” he said. “S first, people are extremely efficient in exploiting natural resources. Humans have destroyed and in some cases have eliminated wild mammals for food or pleasure in almost all continents. Second, land plant biomass prevails on a global scale, and most of this biomass is in wood form “.