[extropy-chat] Suicide the Green way

[spike]

I would have answered Zach's question differently:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-
> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Max More
...
> 
> Dear Ethan,
> 
> After careful consideration I have decided to end my life. Things
> haven't been going very well for me lately, but more importantly I am
> keen to reduce my carbon impact on the planet. Like the average
> Briton I probably produce around 9.3 tonnes of carbon each year...

Actually Zach, this is not correct.  You *produce* exactly *no* carbon.  In
fact one can argue that you actually reduce the amount of carbon thus: the
abundance of carbon 14 in your body is about a part per trillion in the
usual carbon 12.  If you are a big guy with a mass of 100 kg (this makes
assumption single digit calcs easier) then you have about a tenth of a
microgram of carbon 14.  You are 26 years old, then that's about five
milli-half lives of carbon 14, and you grew from perhaps 4 kg as an infant,
so you would have been carrying approximately 50 kg mass on average, of
which perhaps 20% by mass is carbon, so you will have destroyed carbon, or
rather converted it to nitrogen in your body, about .02 nanograms of it, or
20 picograms if you would rather look at it that way.  If that doesn't sound
like much contribution, think of it as getting rid of about 10 trillion
carbon 14 atoms in your short life.  Congratulations!

If you want the culprit that is actually *creating* carbon, go outside in
the daytime and look at the sky.  The sun makes carbon 14 by bombarding
nitrogen with cosmic rays.  If a square meter on the ground sees a pressure
of about 10E5 newtons, then the mass of atmosphere is about 10E4 kg per
meter, and the radius of the earth is about 6.4e6 meters, so the surface
area is about 3.6e14 m^2 so the mass of the atmosphere is about 3.6E18 kg
and carbon dioxide is about 380 parts per million by volume, so that is
about 600 ppm by mass and of that carbon dioxide, about a quarter of the
mass is actual carbon, so about 160 parts per million by mass in the
atmosphere is carbon, so thats about 6e14 kg of carbon in the atmosphere,
and the part of the biosphere that interacts with the atmosphere is probably
a good twice that, so lets just assume about 1e15 kg of carbon, and one part
per trillion of that is carbon 14, so thats about 1000 kg of carbon 14 in
environmental equilibrium (it is being made as fast as it decays).  So if
half that 1000 kg of carbon goes away in about 6000 years, then the sun must
be making the stuff at about 100 grams a year just to maintain that
equilibrium.

So you have rid this planet of 20 picograms of carbon in a sense, but the
sun creates about 100 grams a year, so the amount of carbon that you removed
is created by the sun about every 10 microseconds.

> I am
> 26 years old, and reckon I could live for another 60 years; if I end
> things now I will save a total of 558 tonnes of carbon...

Actually you wouldn't *save* any carbon by removing yourself, but rather
would destroy another perhaps 50 to 80 picograms of carbon in that time by
living, depending on your size and how you want to look at it.

spike