what is the impact?

In the last 200-300 years(In significant proportions), humans have complimented themselves with the ability of relocating the natural resources of our planet. Major cities are changing the contour of our planet by re-distributing the resources from other areas of the planet, oil wells are draining the interior of our earth of mass, water tables have dropped drasticly word-wide due to demand levels, and many other scenerios. What is the end result? Will we eventually reach an imbalance?

If you move a million grains of sand to make a sand castle does the beach fall out of ballance?

Humans effects on the planet's structure are only drastic on humans scales, not on a planetary scale. At least when it comes to mass distrbution. While damns may break and caverns implode causing mass human death, its does little to the overall structure of the planet. You could pump tanker after tanker of oil into the ocean and still not add more than nature does.

What we do to the earth only has serious reprocusions on us and other life, not the planet itself.

That being said, we are altering many cycles on the planet. But the earth's cycles are ever changing regardless.

We could easily do ourselves in with global warming or nuclear war, but in the end the earth and even life would still be here.

The earth is indestructable by man. It will always rebalance itself, I like to think of it as blood.

Your blood is a pH buffer solution, pH buffers work to keep a pH within a certain range, but if you go over that range the pH drastically changes.

How that reballancing affects mankind is the real question.

Jurassic Park is really a good book, when Hammond begins to think about how mankind is destroying the world Malcom tells him, "You really are a pompous son of a b----...mankind can't even come close to destroying or saving the world, we can only end up destroying or saving ourselves."

He says a few other things about how life has been around for 4 billion years or such...whatever there you get an idea.

I don't think your views of how we are affecting the environment are entirely accurate but whatever

mass of Earth = 5.9742 � 10^24 kilograms

We just could not do enough to have an effect.

Originally posted by Duke_Nukem
mass of Earth = 5.9742 � 10^24 kilograms

We just could not do enough to have an effect.

I can.

[Edited on 4-6-2004 by Bioviral]

Originally posted by mo_trot

[...]What is the end result? Will we eventually reach an imbalance? [...]

Have you come across the Gaia hypothesis ?

www.google.com...

(note the use of "hypothesis" in the title).