| If I am understanding what you are asking, then yes - in theory, one (ok - an advanced species; note, that is not humans - not yet) could consume all the materials of the Earth, convert them, and turn them into "things" that are in space; in short, strip mining the Earth until it was completely gone. Certainly that could be done in theory - but the amount of energy it would take would be of a scale we haven't even begun to barely imagine. We certainly aren't generating that amount to do it, or harnessing such amount either. So practically, the answer to your question is "no"; what we "send away" from the Earth is negligible. In order for you to understand why, I encourage you to research the scale of things you are trying to understand. The Earth is big - really big. It may not seem like it, but it really is. What might cause you both a bit of "fright" and "wonder" though is the atmosphere: Compared to the Earth, the atmosphere is thin - very thin. For instance, if you imagined a baseball as the planet Earth, the atmosphere would be a very thin layer over the surface of the baseball, much lower than the ridges formed by the lacings. Then you compare the scale of the Earth (it's size) to that of say - Jupiter (heck, just the Great Red Spot!). Then compare Jupiter's size to the size of the Sun (hint: Jupiter is tiny). Then compare the Sun to the size of our nearest neighboring star. Then compare the size of that to other known stars. Eventually you get to the size of our galaxy - which is an insanely large collection of stars... Then take a look at the Hubble Deep Space image - and realize that all of those points, far in the background - that all of those are each a galaxy, separated by vast distances from each other... ...and then realize that what we see on that image is only a tiny amount of the whole universe. The Earth? Compared to all that, we aren't even the size of a quark on the butt of a bacterium... |