The Body
A Guide for Occupants
Bill Bryson 2019 Bvt Lib 612 BRY
Notes and bibliography and index, yay!
001-004 silliness about the cost of the elements in your body ... actually the cost of purifying those elements. That can be turned upside down; there are 10 tonnes of CO2 carbon above my 0.7 acres, and another 30 tonnes (est) of carbon in my trees and bushes and grass. A few more tonnes in the wood of my house, and the books on my shelf, call that 10 tonnes, for a total of 50 tonnes for a "home price" of perhaps $500K; $10/kg carbon. For the rest of the elements, dig down, there is plenty of everything, arguably $4.7 trillion dollars worth of elements and compounds.
The reference human is Benedict Cumberbatch, 78 kg, ( 18.5% carbon by weight hence 15 kg, so the limiting element of human existence (carbon) cost of a my-backyard-sourced Cumberbatch is $150. Using a less expensive carbon source (like coal, closing at $340/ton (907 kg) is $0.40 per kilogram, or about $6 per Cumberbatch. Humans add 40 billion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere per year, perhaps 11 billion tonnes of carbon, or about one million "carbon-Cumberbatchs" per second.
Personally, I believe one Cumberbatch is ample, and would prefer the atmospheric excess turns into 3000 big trees per second. As I write this, way too many Oregon trees are burning into CO2 instead.
CH02 skin and hair
CH03 microbes
CH04
CH05
CH06
CH07
CH08
CH09
CH11
CH12
CH13
CH14
CH15
CH16
CH17
CH18
CH19
CH20
CH21
CH22
CH23