Soil is made of decayed matter? No

Every day, people are born on Earth, and every day, people die. The dead will turn into soil and merge into the earth. So, is the soil actually made of rotting corpses? Actually, not really.

To understand this question, we must first know how many people have ever been born. The earth did not exist in the universe from the beginning, life did not exist on the earth from the beginning, and we humans naturally did not look like we do now from the beginning. If we trace back, human history can be traced back to 65 million years ago, because humans belong to the primates among mammals, and the ancestors of primates began to rise gradually from 65 million years ago. However, the ancestors of primates at that time were still far from "humans", and the real history of mankind should be considered to have started 3 million years ago.

About 3 million years ago, the ancestors of humans and apes began to part ways in evolution, and a transitional creature from ape to human appeared, which we now call "Australopithecus."

In the following 3 million years, Australopithecus gradually evolved from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens and migrated to all parts of the world. Finally, they defeated all other prehistoric humans and evolved into the modern "humans". Although human history is quite long, the population was extremely sparse during the long primitive society. Even if there was an early civilization, the population would not be large due to the limitations of productivity and production resources. Unfortunately, there were no written records of that period, so we have no way of knowing the exact population. Some scientists even believe that during the most difficult time in human history, humans were on the verge of extinction.

Since there are no written records, how can we determine how many people have ever been born on Earth?

There is also a way to obtain it through deduction. Many scientists are very interested in this issue, so many scientists have conducted similar deductions in history. The most famous one is the deduction made by Academician Kraft of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1781. He believed that there had been 170 billion people on Earth, and the calculation result of Professor Wicker of Austria in 1959 was even more amazing. He believed that there should be no less than 400 billion people on Earth. Later, with the advent of computers, calculation deduction became more convenient and accurate. Scientists set the initial population to 100,000. After 3 million years of deduction, they obtained a number of 79 billion.

In fact, no matter which estimated result is, it is less than we expected.

According to the latest statistics in 2022, the world population is close to 7.9 billion. If we extrapolate the result of 79 billion, the number of people born in the world is 10 times the current world population. It can be seen that the world population explosion started in modern times, which also shows that the development of productivity is closely related to the increase in population. At present, the world population is still showing an upward trend. According to a rough statistic, about 360,000 people are born every day in the world, and about 150,000 people die. The population that has appeared on the earth is close to 100 billion, and in addition to humans, other creatures that have appeared on the earth are countless, and these dead creatures will eventually melt into soil, so is the soil made of rotten corpses?

If you say that there is no corpse content in the soil, that would be absolutely self-deception, but if you say that the soil is made up of corpses, that would be a bit biased.

Most of the dead are cremated. After being burned at high temperatures, the carbon in the body will float into the air in the form of carbon dioxide, while hydrogen and oxygen will rise in the form of water vapor. These three elements account for about 99% of the total number of atoms in the human body. What is left is only some calcium phosphate, sodium oxide, and silicon dioxide, etc., which we call ashes. Whether these ashes are directly scattered or put into a box and buried in the tomb, they will eventually blend into the soil over time, but their total amount is insignificant compared to the vast earth. Although burial was practiced in the past, the final result is actually not much different from cremation.

The body buried underground will be decomposed by microorganisms in nature, part of it will dissipate in the form of gas, and the other part will undergo a transformation.

But these substances will not stay in the soil forever. They are the nutrients of life and will be absorbed by other life forms and transformed again. Therefore, soil is not made up of corpses. The essence of soil is actually rock. Rocks in nature form bedrock alluvial deposits after being exposed to the scorching sun, the scouring of water and other natural effects. These alluvial deposits are baptized by time under the influence of microorganisms and climate change and eventually turn into soil. Therefore, the formation of soil is the result of bedrock weathering, not the accumulation of corpses. As for the bodies of dead organisms, no matter how they are handled, they will eventually be integrated into all aspects of the earth's ecology. However, from a microscopic level, the atoms that make up our bodies will not disappear easily.

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