Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans

Or perhaps Agent Smith mistook an S-curve that hasn't started to level off yet for unfettered exponential growth.

> Generally, developed nations have seen a decline in their growth rates in recent decades

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Population_g...)

Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was justifying with whatever reason pleased him.

Is this true? This source (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115) gives a very similar percentage (95.8% of all wild mammals) and doesn't mention anything about excluding rodents or bats from the categorization of wild mammals. Is it in a footnote somewhere that I'm missing?

Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed.

Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century. That wasn't so shocking to me, at first. But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then. Railroads. Ocean liners. Factories. Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people. Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable. All made out of steel.

Then it struck me. A few million tonnes a year in 1850. 70 million tonnes in 1910. All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes. Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.

You have any prepper ideas about surviving an apocalypse and living off the land, forget about meat. It'll be crickets or some such. All the wild meat in the world will be gone in like 4 days due to massive over-hunting.

I can't be the only one who is extremely tired of these semi-frequent utterly nihilistic "I'm sad to be part of the human species, we're killing the planet" posts and comments, especially when the posts themselves are possibly misleading (whales aren't included? come on). I don't know about you but I'm quite happy to be alive and reasonably healthy, and I hope to have many children, I hope mankind doesn't go extinct anytime soon, and I'm not going to eat any bugs or fake meat or any of that.

nihilistic platitudes like "how is there still an ecosystem?" are completely baffling to me—I don't understand what would make someone think that way. what could have caused this level of innate shame felt on behalf of one's species?

the only thing I can think of is that people overestimate the power of mankind and underestimate the power of nature possibly due to living in dense urban environments surrounded by nothing but artificial creations of man all day every day, and this skews their perspective.