The Weight of the World

Has the world gotten heavier as it's aged? There are billions more people than ever before and that has to weigh a lot. But then again people eat lots of heavy food and turn it into energy that weighs nothing. So does it balance out? All the new plants in a garden weigh a lot. And there's millions of gardens all around the world. Have gardens made the earth heavier?

But then, there's the physical law of conservation -- that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It seems that this law necessarily mandates that the earth weighs the same amount as it did when it came into being. That means for every new baby born somewhere on the planet, something weighing the same amount has to be eliminated. Is this an automatic process? One would hope. If not there would have to be something like Celestial Bureau of Weights and Measures that enforces the law of conservation and it would have to be the largest bureaucracy in the universe. Imagine the paperwork needed just to track a moth burnt in a campfire, and the pursuant forms needed to trigger equal moth weight creation somewhare on the planet.

I suppose once in a while a clerk at this bureau gets lazy and decides to skip some paperwork by simply creating another identical moth. Or even just popping the vaporized moth right back into existence. It could happen since people don't pay moths much attention. Who would be the wiser? Giving cats nine lives was a cost saving measure by this bureau I'll bet.

If this omnipotent agency actually exists, my friend Alan probably has a friend there who could arrange one of those sweet deals where you come back as your favorite animal. Of course there would be the small detail of having to weigh the same amount as your favorite animal. A really fat person couldn't come back as a bird. Unless the bird had stayed aloft its entire life. Then I suppose you could get around the weight issue entirely.