I suppose another factor would be us launching stuff like satellites into space, but let’s say, my question is about what happened before humans started launching things.
I suppose another factor would be us launching stuff like satellites into space, but let’s say, my question is about what happened before humans started launching things.
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Loses about 50,000 tons a year.
Most of the loss (about 91k tons a year) is from helium escaping, some of it is from radioactive decay. Earth gains mass from dust and meteor activity.
Human activity accounts for a total of 10k metric tons since we first launched something into space.
Net-net, Earth’s on a slow diet: current estimates say we pick up roughly forty‑ to fifty‑thousand metric tons of cosmic dust and meteorites every year, but we bleed out about a hundred‑thousand tons of lightweight hydrogen and helium that drift past escape velocity, so the planet ends up losing on the order of fifty‑thousand tons annually—about eight‑billionths of one percent of Earth’s total mass per billion years, basically nothing in planetary bookkeeping terms Astronomy Magazinescitechdaily.comscience.nasa.gov.