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Earth Overshoot Day has come on August 8 this year. That means all annual supplies of natural resources Earth should be using have been exhausted today. This is the earliest the day has come. It has come five days before last year.

In 1970, the day came in December. As the world runs out of fish faster than we expected, as we fail to restrict the global warming temperatures to those set in Paris in April 2016, how we combat climate change and and how we make living on the planet more sustainable are a few of the pressing questions facing mankind.

One reason for not enough being done to prevent climate change is that developed countries haven't been facing the effects. That poor and disadvantaged sections of the population in lagging and developing countries will severely face the impact of climate change is a fact that has been widely reported.

The difficulty of making anything sustainable is closely tied to the fact that globalisation and large scale production have become a fact of most people’s daily lives, distancing many from the actual tasks of farming, weaving, mining, manufacturing, and so on. Writers and artists have often sought to point out this disparity, with comical results. In a Ted Talk, writer Thomas Thwaites described his failed attempts to create a toaster from scratch.

In 2015, Minnesota, United States-based YouTuber Andy George decided to create a web series focussed on trying to create items from scratch. Six months of work and $1500 made an "okay" chicken sandwich (video above). Ten months and $4000 did not create enough material for what looked like a very uncomfortable suit. Fifty hours of work and $400 yielded a book that few would want to use.

There are more videos where George explains the process that goes behind every aspect of the creation of these objects. Since no salt mines were able near his home, he had to take a plane to get ocean water which he boiled to yield salt.

In 2015, Bill Gates tried the Janicki Omniprocessor, an invention that converted fecal matter into drinking water. But when water is overused, more and more waste is being produced, that might prove beyond our capacity to handle.

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Now that we are running out of resources on the usable planet we have, efforts are being made to colonise Mars. In March, NASA said earthlings would be living and working on the red planet by the 2030s. Here's how to achieve that plan B, when Earth becomes our "ex-planet".

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