October 24, 2023: How humans spend their time, Earth's health gets a poor score and the long history of disdain for journalism. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Humans spend a third of their lives sleeping. But what about the rest of the time, how do most people spend their days? Scientists recently compiled the available data about how people around the world allocate their time and used that information to define the average "global human day." The researchers split the results among three categories based on whether the time directly affected humans, the physical world, or where and what people are doing. Check out an infographic created by Scientific American encapsulating the results.
What they found: The largest chunk of time outside sleeping goes to activities that focus on humans: eating, grooming, playing sports, watching television, meeting up with friends, caring for children, going to school or religious services. The next-largest block of time goes to activities that change the physical world. For instance, "food provision" includes farming crops, raising livestock, manufacturing food and cooking. Most humans on Earth spend about an hour a day traveling or otherwise moving around.
Needs improvement: Humans spend relatively little time—about five minutes per average human day—participating in activities that directly alter the environment and climate change, such as extracting energy and dealing with waste, suggesting an opportunity to put in more time to help the planet. | | | Credit: Studio Terp; Source: "The Global Human Day," by William Fajzel et al., in PNAS, Vol. 120; June 2023 (data) | | | A new planetary report card confirms that humans are making little progress on confronting the climate crisis. Researchers assessed Earth's status on 35 "planetary vital signs" with regards to climate. The analysis shows that humans have reached new extremes on 20 of these measurements, including global gross domestic product, fossil fuel subsidies, annual carbon pollution and glacier thinning. Overall, the report considers human activities, such as deforestation and meat consumption, as well as the planet's responses to those activities, including characteristics such as ice loss and temperature changes. Key Finding: Government subsidies of fossil fuels were at their all-time high in 2022, the most recent year out of the 13 for which data are available, topping $1.097 trillion. Without rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, the concentration of carbon dioxide will continue to rise in the atmosphere
What the experts say: "Life on planet Earth is under siege," says Bill Ripple, an Oregon State University ecologist. "Whether you look at planetary boundaries or our planetary vital signs, it's telling a similar story in that this is going to take major attention by humanity and big changes." | | | • Global demand for coal, oil and gas may peak before 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. | 3 min read | | | • Disdain for journalism seems to be at an all-time high. But based on hundreds of letters received by journalists in the 1950s, it's clear that some tropes of media hatred have stayed surprisingly unchanged over the last 70 years, writes Kathryn J. McGarr, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. | 5 min read | | | You know the saying "life is short." Well, a mentor of mine often said "life is long, too," meaning that lots of living can be packed into our time here on Earth (and you never quite know what the future will bring). Here's a nudge to spend more of your days doing what, and with whom, you love. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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