The DU Lounge

. . . charities and Face Book marketplace.

As a student of anthropology, I have often contemplated how much stuff, (or material goods, to put it in more scholarly terms), has been created and discarded over the millennia. Of course, prior to the Industrial Revolution, the scale of production was bound by the limits of human labor.

It's just a weird thought experiment to consider that every single physical thing-- be it a dish or spoon or ladle, to say nothing of clothes and personal care items-- that has ever been fashioned and used by billions of humans over the centuries had to go somewhere eventually. Some of it ended up in museums, obviously, but other belongings, like linen undergarments from the Victorian era, were torn up and incorporated into fields to enrich the soil. Anything made of wood could have been burned, of course, and metal pieces melted down and reformed.

For every archaeological find of some preserved artifact, there must have been a dozen or more similar things that were either hastily or painstakingly crafted and which simply no longer exist. And yet, according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, every atom must be accounted for. . . As I said, weird thoughts.