Hair lasts a long time (compared to most other tissues) because few things break it down. What if nothing broke it down, and all hair that hasn’t been destroyed by heat was still around? How about an estimated mass?
Life time production for a human about 1000km of hair at .000017 oz. per inch for 109 billion people who have ever existed comes to 4,669,560,000,000 lbs. of hair. Include all the other animals and that much hair that has never broken down would change the number of animals that ever lived.
Almost twice what I pulled out of my shower drain last month.
You’re asking about human hair, right?
Because there are a lot more animals than humans, and most have a lot more hair than humans.
And if nothing broke it down, you are talking a one-way conversion: some of the food/liquid we consume is converted into hair, but never degrades or reenters the biosphere? So then eventually the biosphere would run out , since all the food/liquid had been converted into hair?
No, I’m thinking about all the hair from it’s first appearance in evolutionary history.
I have a Siberian Husky who sheds enough hair in a week to make another dog. Much of life on earth would have ended long ago if hair never broke down.
Given the amount of hair my family labradors shed, hair would form life of itself, we would have hair based lifeforms.
(Aside, somewhat to the horror of my mother, us kids plucked the loose fur during post-winter shedding, and hand wove those into “wool”. We reached several meters, probably about 4 or 5.)
“No doubt there are natural enemies which limit the increase…You and I, Watson, we have done our part. Shall the world, then, be overrun by hair? No, no; horrible!”
- Sherlock Holmes
But that’s the thing, if it never broke down and was plentiful, humans would have been using it for kindling these last million years or so.
your math is off …
ballpark values: 1cm growth x month … 12cm per year … in 80 years you’ll get 10m of hair …(seems to pass the “indian-fakir-guy-who-never-cut-his-hair in his lifetime” sniff test) …
10m of hair in 80 years sounds like just one hair. It should be something like 6" per year, per hair.