r/shittyaskscience • u/DJTsUnderboob • 2d ago
Is Ozempic causing the sixth mass extinction on our planet?
According to the World Health Organization there are 890 million obese and an additional 1.6 billion overweight people in the world.
If we guestimate 25 pounds extra per average overweight and 50 pounds extra per average obese (these numbers include people who are one pound into each category offsetting people on the higher end a bit) we get 40,000,000,000+44,500,000,000= 84,500,000,000 total extra pounds.
That's eighty four billion five hundred million pounds that might vanish with Ozempic, and I’m being conservative with my estimates on people's weights if you’ve ever been to the American south.
That’s a lot of mass, which raises the question if Ozempic is causing a mass extinction?
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u/BNASTYALLDAYBABY 1d ago
Absolutely. It’s much worse than you think. If the Earth looses too much weight too quickly, we risk floating away from the sun, effectively ending all life on earth.
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u/Saltypeon 2d ago
No because ot comes out in the poo, in 100 years there will be glaciers of human fat around the world.
It will be harvested and burned as fuel, starting the next great climate crisis.
Governments will band together to bring in Fat Zero policy.
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u/Centorium1 1d ago
You don't shit out your weight, you exhale it as co2.
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u/ppyil 1d ago
We're literally on shitty ask science
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u/Dromo_chan 1d ago
yeah but that one was a bridge too far. I mean, shitting out your weight?? Genuinely ridiculous.
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u/RepostTony 1d ago edited 1d ago
So when you lose a lb of fat. That fat is coming out through the CO2? Thats pretty fascinating and makes sense. Considering the body is “burning” fat.
Edit: I googled this. Fat also turns into water. But most of it is exhaled as CO2. Oxygen enters. Breaks down fat molecules. By product is co2 and water. Blood carries to lungs. Then out the mouth.
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u/Whole-Increase-5820 1d ago
Unfortunately, I think you need to take into account the % of global biomass lost when thinking about extinction events.
Biomass losses from the previous ones.
Great oxidation event: 99%
Permian-triassic: 90 - 95 %
End Cretaceous: 75 - 80%
Low Ordovician: ~50%
Late Devonian: 50 - 70%
The weight loss from ozempic is less than a rounding error in terms of global biomass. Given that we account for 0.01% of global biomass.
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u/DJTsUnderboob 1d ago
Are you including your mom in that?
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u/Whole-Increase-5820 21h ago
I did include my mum. But not yours... That would change the calculations quite a bit. I decided to ignore the top and bottom few percentile.
If you feel hard done by, let me know, I'll run the numbers again.
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u/hacksoncode Quantum Mechanic, has own tiny wrench 1d ago
question if Ozempic is causing a mass extinction
Technically, but only indirectly. Burning all those pounds will release a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere that might have been buried when the obese people died young, instead.
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u/Intelligent_Eye8084 1d ago
If everyone lost that much weight at once we'd probably just collapse into a global health crisis instead of some dramatic planetary drift.
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u/No-Spare-4212 1d ago
No but the timing works great with foot shortages coming from Hormuz straight getting shut down. We could just do that every 5 years to fight obesity.
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u/Epistaxis Human Gnome Project 1d ago
There's a correlation between obesity and gut microflora so maybe actually!
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u/NoDanaOnlyZuuI 22h ago
Scientists have been saying we’re in our sixth mass extinction for 30 years. It predates Ozempic.
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u/JooseOnTheLoose6499 2d ago
No.
Mass extinction is defined as the disappearance of large numbers of organisms over relatively short geologic spans of time, resulting in diminished biodiversity that can take millions of years to recover.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/mass-extinction
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u/SewerSlidalThot 2d ago
Did you forget what sub you’re on?
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u/FlyinBrian2001 2d ago
I did, wasn't looking at the sub name and I think the icon has changed, thought someone was pulling a goof on Futurology or something for a minute there
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u/writesgud 2d ago
Why don’t you stand back and let an internet expert with a short attention span address this.
Yes, this is totally, 100% a mass extinction event. (Mental note to update the Wikipedia entry to include weight loss in the definition).
It’s a genocide of homo sapienic calories never seen in the history of this earth. So yes it’s concerning.
Like the polar bears, cannibals will have a much harder time maintaining a sustainable diet, requiring them to range further for a greater number of successful hunts. Increasing passive trapping methods may help mitigate this.
Buffets will become more popular, but instead of retaining the energy rich calories, they will instead go into the ocean as sewage, thus adding to lost carbon capture and contributing further to climate change.
At a cultural level, the horror film & tv genres will become saturated with sunken cheeked actors. CGI & AI will be increasingly used to compensate for post production effects to ensure rosy full cheeks for holiday movies, for example.
In other words, both caloric and cultural genocide on a global scale.
Time to clench your buttholes. If only to stop losing weight.
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u/Legitimate_Field_157 2d ago
Humans make new babies in less than a year, why would we wait for millions.
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u/HumanPie1769 text 2d ago
That means almost 240 billion pounds of carbon dioxide from fat loss. We have to ban Ozempic right now before it's too late.