我们的“东西”怎样重新定义了世界

大自然曾是人类文明“以外的荒野”，正如比尔·麦克基本在1989年的警世之作《自然的终结》中所说，它是“远离人类的世界，人要适应它，并按它的规则出生和死亡。”

但麦克基本指出，我们实际上已经消灭了这个独立存在的领域，也就是这个奇妙、自立而又不断创造生命的王国，它在人类出现之前已经存在了无数个世代。

他说：“那儿还有些东西，但在原先自然所在的地方出现了我们发明的新‘自然’”，在那里，“每一立方码空气和每一立方英尺土壤都打上了人类不可磨灭的残酷印记，或者说我们的符号。”

如今有些人把这个演化而来的领域（或者说地球的新表层）称为“技术圈”，这个词由杜克大学地质学家彼得·哈夫发明。这一层中充满了“东西”。实际上，其中的人造物是如此之多，比如机械、摩天大楼、商品包装、废弃物和宜家家具，几乎已经不可能清楚地进行认知，更不用说测量了。然而，一个研究团队最近发表的学术论文正是要弄清楚这个问题——科学真是惹人爱！

他们的结论是什么呢？这些人造物的重量约为30万亿公吨（没错，他们用了“约为”）。平均算来，地球上每平方米就有50公斤的人造物，这比制造这些物品的人类的重量高了五个数量级。他们估算情况大致如此。

这些研究者认为，上述人造物，也就是制造出来为我们日常生活所用的这些零零碎碎的多样性甚至可能超过了地球自诞生以来所有生物的多样性。此外，这个物品和器具的无穷尽集合体正以它那种活跃的新方式进行互动和演化。哈夫（在另一篇论文中）写道：“从这个角度看，或许可以说科技就是下一门生物学。”

这个观点发人深省。

哈夫指出，一方面，没有“技术提供的支持框架和服务”，我们就再也无法生存下去，这包括人类开发出的通信、交通、能源以及其他网络 ，它们就是要让人类在这个越发拥挤的星球上正常生活。

另一方面，我们确实陷于其中。我们的生活中充斥着消费，我们的日历上是永无止境的购物活动，比如总统日促销、黑色星期五和剁手星期一。我们每次扔掉的垃圾都比上一次多。

这个商品-垃圾-商品的循环对整个人类的幸福有何影响众说纷纭。许许多多科学家和公共机构都说，单就电子废弃物而言，就算它对人类健康的影响还不完全明确，但一定是负面的。

就像我说的那样，判断所有这些会产生什么样的作用还为时过早。但随着我们在数字健康领域的进一步探索，我们也许应该认为，今天我们创造的这些很棒的新玩意最终一定会覆盖在昨天我们创造的那堆玩意之上。

嗯，毕竟这听起来确实有些生物学的味道。那就叫它“东西”的循环繁衍吧。（财富中文网）

作者：Clifton Leaf

译者：Charlie

审稿：詹妮

Nature was once a “separate and wild province” from human civilization, as Bill McKibben wrote in his famous 1989 call-to-arms, The End of Nature: It was “a world apart from man to which he adapted and under whose rules he was born and died.”

But, claimed McKibben, we have effectively killed off this independent sphere—that wondrous, self-sustaining, life-generating realm which existed for eons before us.

“There’s still something out there,” he said, but “in the place of the old nature rears up a new ‘nature’ of our own devising”—a construct where “each cubic yard of air, each square foot of soil is stamped indelibly with our crude imprint, our X.”

Some now call this evolved world (or new layer of the planet) the “technosphere,” a term coined by Duke University geologist Peter Haff. And it is filled to the brim with stuff. Indeed, there is so much of this human-made stuff—machinery, skyscrapers, packaging, waste, Ikea furnishings—that it’s almost impossible to fathom, let alone measure. And yet—gotta love science!—that is precisely what a team of researchers has tried to do in a recent academic paper.

Their conclusion? Our stuff weighs approximately 30 trillion metric tons. (Yes, the authors used the word “approximately.”) That works out to a mass of over 50 kilos per every square meter of earth’s surface, and one that’s an order of five magnitudes larger than that of the human beings who created it. Or so they estimate.

The diversity of stuff—the manufactured flotsam and jetsam of our daily lives—may even exceed the total diversity of biology throughout Earth’s history, the same research team asserts. This endless assembly of things and devices, moreover, interacts and evolves in its own dynamic, emergent way: “In this sense,” writes Haff (in another paper) “one might say that technology is the next biology.”

It’s a thought-provoking thought.

On the one hand, says Haff, we can no longer live without the “support structure and the services provided by technology”—the communication, transportation, energy, and other networks that developed to make human life on an increasingly crowded planet function in the first place.

On the other hand, we are positively drowning in it. Our days are consumed by consumption, our calendars an endless parade of Presidents’ Day sales, Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays. And each trip to the garage bin gets more laden than the last.

What this stuff-to-trash-to-stuff cycle does to our collective well-being is anybody’s guess. Our so-called e-waste alone has dark, if still imprecise implications for human health, say lots and lots of scientists and public institutions.

As I said, it’s too early to know what the effects of all of this will be. But as we head deeper into a realm of digital health technology, we should perhaps consider that the new whiz-bang thingamajigs we create today will surely end up atop the piles of thingamajigs we created yesterday.

Hmm. It does sound biological, after all. Call it the reproductive cycle of stuff.