What’s the biggest number of man-made things on Earth?

Think off the amount of sperm exited onto yer “auld sock” just on this forum alone. 😛

Slow down, you move too fast
You’ve got to make the morning last
Just kickin’ down the cobble stones
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy!

PFM: Not nice.

GG; you know I’m right, don’t you? Come on, admit defeat!

All those newspapers and tea bags will have been recycled, used to wrap fish and chips or composted, so they no longer exist as newspapers or teabags, unless that is what they were recycled into. But, most bricks ever made probably still exist as bricks, even if they’re just buried underground somewhere.

If there’s 10,000 bricks in my house, I don’t own ten thousand of anything else, so there must be more bricks.

teabags? what about tea LEAVES then? They are manufactured…

Plenty of **** tea-leaves round here, brant. Wish they’d LEAVE my bike alone!

See what I did there? Eh? Eh?

Ah, sod the lot of you, then…

tea bags will have been recycled

Yorkshire man miketually ?

But Mike…surely you have a few books in your house? And magazines, and catalogues, and phone books,etc…and they are all made up of pieces of paper!!!!!!!!
I bet there are more than 50000 pieces of paper in your house…now there’s a challenge…happy counting! 😉

1, 2, 3, 4, 5…

9 shelves of books in the living room. About 25 books per shelf. 200 pages per book. 45,000 pages.

Plus more books upstairs. Maybe there is more paper than bricks then…

What’s the biggest number of man-made things on Earth?

and I thought you were going to brag about your latest sperm count results..

😉

Threads.

As in, threads in man-made fibres. There’s sh1t-loads of them in the world.

Closely followed by pointless threads on mountain biking forums.

Sperm?

ball bearings

Thoughts

Good call, Ernie. But, like paper, threads are manufactured in vast great lengths, and then cut. So, by the meter? And you could include string, rope, twine, etc.

Ball-bearings is another good one, epicyclo. Got to be a fair number of them, rolling around.

But I think ernie might actually have it.

There can surely be nothing greater than the number of pointless threads on tinternet…

nails?
screws?

I was reading ‘The world without us’*, the author of that book reckons that the most numerous man made thing on the planet is the little polymer fibres that are left behind when plastics are shredded/bashed/destroyed/broken down by UV. Incredibly stable (should last billions of years) and there are trillions upon trillions of them. They get everywhere, shellfish, people, where ever as they’re so small.

*Good book, scientific (ish) look at what would happen if we all disappeared over night.

buttons?

Must be transistors, late to the “man made” party compared to bricks, sure, but very rough and ready research suggests 3,873 million “bricks” in the great wall of China and 376 million transistors in a Pentium D 900.

Call it 11 Pentiums and we have done that big wall.

3 million “bricks” in the great pyramid, well, we need a hundred odd pyramids for one Pentium!

Chips may be more efficient with fewer transistors, but the extra thousands in every calculator, car processors, microwaves, TV’s etc.

Just got to be, surely?

Tesco torches?

Is it socks? I got 6×10^17 in my drawer alone, yet not a single matching pair?

As for babies, well, apparently, there have been more people born in the last 200 years or so, than have ever been alive prior to that.

That’s an urban myth that’s been around for a while, Snopes puts explains why it’s not true:
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/dead.asp