With us humans mining.can we affect the balance of the planet?

Question

With us humans mining.can we affect the balance of the planet?

Answer 1

sure can...

as i am sure it will take many years to replace these fossil fuels..

Answer 2

i read a report on that sometime back- the earth is getting heavier-with population-as far as out of balance is has to be a little wobbly but with such a huge landmass it would be hard to detect

Answer 3

Not really. The earth is very heavy indeed. About 6x10^24 kg and it's also very large, about 8000 miles across. We can only mine down to about 2 miles at the very most so even if we mined the entire surface of the planet, it would be insignificant.

Theoretically it does change the balance very, very slightly but given the mines tend to be spread out over the world, even the insignificant effect is balanced out over all the mines.

Think about it this way. The Earth's mass is 6000 billion billion tonnes. Even if we were mining a billion tonnes a day that's just 0.000000000017% of the Earth's mass. We aren't mining anywhere near a billion tonnes a day.