this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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Apart from the babies thing, that's still a very interesting question. I bet someone knows the answer, but I wonder if the weight of the earth increases or decreases on average. I'd have to guess it's a net increase from picking up stuff as we move through space, which probably dwarfs the mass of stuff we've sent out (especially if you don't count satellites since they're more or less still tied to earth). I don't think there's anything like natural ejections of matter from earth either.
If I recall correctly, it decreases. We lose more weight of atmospheric gas than we gain weight of meteorite material.
Additional external mass is additional mass. shrug
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.