473
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
473 points (98.2% liked)
Asklemmy
44173 readers
1816 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
It can't really be said there is a net-gain in mass (in fact most websites seem to estimate a net loss).
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/297622/is-the-earth-gaining-or-losing-mass-over-time
I don't know what you mean by «massless particles», but plants do not make food out of "the definition of nothing". Photosynthesis is a chemical process and like any other chemical process due to the law of conservation of mass (disregarding mass-energy equivalence), the mass of the reagents is the same as the mass of the products. The sugars produced during photosynthesis weren't just produced with light as input. Light is the energy source that fuels the reaction in the light dependent of phase of photosynthesis, which has water as input, whose products (besides oxygen molecules which are a "useless" byproduct of the reaction) are used to produce the sugars in the non-light dependent phase which also takes carbon dioxide as input (there are obviously more substances involved in the reaction but they are "reused" between the two phases).
So, the mass of the "food" of the plant is in reality obtained from water and carbon dioxide, not out of "nothingness".
Plants make their food from matter that's already here on Earth. They take CO2 and water and use the sun's energy to turn them into sugar. They don't just get it from nothing.