I'm getting heavier, and so is the Earth

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/815/is-the-earth-getting-heavier-or-lighter

I am getting old *, and I’m much heavier than I used to be when I was twenty.

I thought about this in the shower this morning and I said to my wife that it must be due to increased gravitation. Everything about us is being pulled downwards more than when we were young. For some reason, she became irritable at this point, and terse words were spoken about people who eat too much chocolate.

In my shower meditation, I deduced that Earth is getting more massive all the time. More stuff arrives from space, than is lost from the atmosphere - meteors, meteorites, dust, particles, the Tunguska whatever-it-was, illegal immigrants from Krypton, Roswell aliens, etc. So, as a result of increased planetary mass, we have stronger gravity today than when I was young.

In the above article. Cecil agrees with me, so he must be right. As I feared, there is a difficulty with the scale of the increase in mass, so my wife may be right about the chocolate.

I wonder is there an up to date estimate of the yearly increase in the mass of the Earth? Let’s assume that Apophis and the like don’t land on us uninvited, just the routine stuff.

  • (“O so old, thousands of years, thousands of years if all were told”)
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I registered on Straight Dope last month to reply to this but I got diverted by something more important. I wanted to say the same thing.

When i read the article I thought ten thousand tons a year cannot be right or even a hundred thousand. Surely it must be larger than that, because there’s so much cr#p floating round in space.

Has anyone worked out the amount since Cecil wrote the article?

Very funny co

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There may be a lot of crap in space, but there’s a lot of space for that crap to float around in.

And a lot of that crap that reaches Earth is dust. It takes a lot of dust to add up to ton, nevermind 10,000 tons. (Do you have any idea how many dust bunnies that would be?)

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Have you looked under my bed lately?

(and yes, I vacuumed today!)