Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds(stanford.edu ↗)
    107comments
  2. AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible(john.hartnup.uk ↗)
    115comments
  3. If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it(terrytao.wordpress.com ↗)
    88comments
  4. GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher(prinzai.com ↗)
    66comments
  5. Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP(grapheneos.social ↗)
    441comments
  6. “The Secret Life of Circuits” is here(coredump.cx ↗)
    18comments
  7. San Francisco Onion Futures Company(onionfutures.com ↗)
    72comments
  8. Apple M6 Pro Achieves the Highest Single-Core CPU Score in Geekbench 7(geekbench.com ↗)
    53comments
  9. Cloudflare Quick Tunnels(cloudflare.com ↗)
    285comments
  10. Dear Customer, Fuck You(fuck-off.ai ↗)
    2comments
  11. SDCC – Small Device C Compiler(sourceforge.net ↗)
    19comments
  12. How to Write with an LLM(sockpuppet.org ↗)
    338comments
  13. Science Is Open Software(jepedersen.dk ↗)
    40comments
  14. Saving another 100TB of RAM(cloudflare.com ↗)
    81comments
  15. Why building a Rust LSP is hard(rust-glancer.github.io ↗)
    32comments
  16. You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles(tigrisdata.com ↗)
    15comments
  17. How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip(ieee.org ↗)
    92comments
  18. Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology(quantamagazine.org ↗)
    6comments
  19. NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation open-Source Geospatial AI Model(usra.edu ↗)
    2comments
  20. The first new cat species discovered in 100 years(nationalgeographic.com ↗)
    106comments
  21. OpenJev(openjev.com ↗)
    269comments
  22. Goroutine Leak Profiles(go.dev ↗)
    4comments
  23. Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash(cactuscompute.com ↗)
    89comments
  24. Communication by means of modulated Johnson noise(pnas.org ↗)
    1comments
  25. Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug(ledger.com ↗)
    73comments
  26. Veronese's Dogs(publicdomainreview.org ↗)
    1comments
  27. Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between LLMs (2025)(arxiv.org ↗)
    13comments
  28. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)(archive.org ↗)
    73comments
  29. Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud(ferstar.org ↗)
    100comments
  30. Cyclomatic Complexity in C#(ndepend.com ↗)
    24comments

Can population increase change Earth's gravitational pull?

2 pointsby 2y ago
7 comments
2y agoHN ↗

Not significantly. Humans are made up of matter already available at the earth's surface, so population increase alone effects neither the amount nor distribution of the earth's mass.

Technological civilization might at some point meaningfully shift the distribution of mass, but I don't think it has up to this point.

2y agoHN ↗

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-contribute...:

“Humans are responsible for some of the wobble in Earth's spin.

Since 1899, the Earth's axis of spin has shifted about 34 feet (10.5 meters). Now, research quantifies the reasons why and finds that a third is due to melting ice and rising sea levels, particularly in Greenland—placing the blame on the doorstep of anthropogenic climate change.”

2y agoHN ↗

Pretty sure animals and people are made of stuff that is already on planet earth.

2y agoHN ↗

Earth mass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass :

An Earth mass (denoted as M_E or M⊕ ( M_{\oplus } ), where 🜨 is the standard astronomical symbol for Earth), is a unit of mass equal to the mass of the planet Earth. The current best estimate for the mass of Earth is M🜨 = 5.9722×10^24 kg, with a relative uncertainty of 10^−4. It is equivalent to an average density of 5515 kg/m3.

Average mass of a human: 50-75kg, depending on whether it's babies or not

Population of Earth: 8.1x10e9

Total mass of humans: ~ 400-600 x 10e9

Proportion of Earth's mass composed of live humans: 500e9 / 5.9e24 = 8.4e-14 = 0.00000000000084 %

According to the video series on "How the pyramids were built" at https://thepump.org/ by The Pharaoh's Pump Society, the later pyramids had a pool of water at the topmost layer of construction such that they could place and set water-tight blocks of carved stone using a crane barge that everybody walked to the side of to lift.

2y agoHN ↗

The earth loses about 100,000 tons/year via hydrogen and helium escaping. The earth gains about 50,000 tons per year via space dust, etc.

Since temperature = energy, e=mc^2, therefore temperature = mass, the earth gains 160 tons/year due to global warming.

So Earth's mass and gravity is therefore decreasing over time. If you assume global warming is directly proportional to population, we'll need ~2.5 trillion people before we can start increasing gravity.

2y agoHN ↗

No. Lifeforms are merely the re-arrangement of molecules which are already present. And it would be a negligible amount of matter compared to the mass of the Earth anyway, even if it was magically-introduced matter.

2y agoHN ↗

A few comments here say humans are reconstituted preexisting matter. But aren't there added inputs from sunlight and photosynthesis over millions of years?

There's probably not a net gain, as a system, because we're also radiating heat out, burning fossil fuels, etc., but the earth isn't a closed system, is it?

If not for the constant influx of sunlight, we'd have to rely on core heat (tube worms and chemoautotrophy) to fuel metabolism, which most species don't do. It's photosynthesis of algae, plants, and cyanobacteria and subsequent predation that allows most life, including us, to flourish, no? And that requires a constant external input of sunlight?