Earth Day 2020
Today is Earth Day and instead of boring you with more doom and gloom prophecies about the coronavirus or any other threats to our world, I thought I'd bore you instead with some facts about our wonderful planet that you may not know.
First, let's go to outer space for a moment. The Earth is one of eight planets in our solar system. I know there are disappointed partisans for Pluto, which was a planet until 2006 when the International Astronomers Union got around to defining planet as something that orbits the sun (check), has enough mass to be spherical (check) and is the dominant gravitational body in their orbit (not so fast, Pluto, it's Meatloaf for you). Pluto's planethood was always on tenuous ground. There are many asteroids larger than Pluto including Ceres, which was considered a planet itself for a while in the 19th century, Holst didn't write a movement for Pluto and Pluto is only about the fifth of the size of our moon.
Speaking of the moon—did you know it smells like gunpowder? Twelve people have visited the moon, all Americans (USA! USA!), and when they studied the moondust that clung to their suits, they were surprised to find out it smells like gunpowder. NASA employs a team that sniffs every piece of everything that goes into space. George Aldrich has been NASA's chief sniffer for 46 years (he prefers the title "nasalnaut"). Bad smells are an indication that something has chemically gone wrong with a piece of equipment so the nose knows if something stinks before it's launched into space.
If you looked at the Earth from the moon do you know what you'd see? Well, you'd see that it's round, of course. It makes me quite ashamed to share a planet with a growing number of people who do not believe this. Everyone knows the planet is round, the ancient Romans knew it was round, they knew it was round in the middle ages, freaking Columbus knew it was round. The idea that it is flat is a maddeningly recent assertion, aided in no small part by Washing Irving's fanciful 1828 The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which states that the explorer set out to prove that the Earth was round. This is incorrect. Columbus left Spain looking for India—not a new continent, not to prove the spherical nature of the Earth (which was already accepted as fact in 1492)—and he died believing he had found India, though it was only the Bahamas. From the moon, you wouldn't see the Great Wall of China. No human-made objects can be seen by the naked eye from the moon, which is 250,000 miles away, making even continents barely visible. Space, which is only 60 miles away at its closest point, makes the Great Wall of China visible but loads of other things too, including highways, large ships and Meatloaf.
Since we're still on the moon—did you know the Earth has seven of them? Of course there's the moon we all know and love, whose official name is Luna, but then there are at least six other Near Earth Asteroids that make a kind of orbit around our world. On the topic of asteroids, you are more likely to die from one than you are of being struck by lightening. The chances of a lightening strike killing you in a given year are about one in four million but an asteroid strike, which happens about every million years or so(and we are way overdue for one, by the way [OOPS, there's that doom and gloom again!]) would be so devastating that even if it's unlikely to happen the toll would be so high that your chances of dying by asteroid in a given year are about one in three million.
Ok, let's travel back to solid ground real quick, taking time to honor the fact that we are one of a few species who have travelled to space and beyond. The first animals to go to space were fruit flies, who took the trip along with some corn seeds on an American rocket in 1946 to test the effects of exposure to radiation at high altitudes. Then we sent moss up there and then monkeys, starting with Albert II, who broke the plane of space in 1949. They didn't tell him what happened to Albert I before they launched him (he died) but then, Albert II didn't quite make it back himself as his parachute failed to deploy on reentry, killing him. It took until Albert VI before we sent a monkey to space who lived to tell the tale back on Earth and Albert VI had better have told it quickly because he died two hours after returning. Dogs, chimps, guinea pigs, rats, cats, frogs, wasps, beetles, spiders and newts are among the animals who have made to space and many of those have come back alright, including nematode worms, the only survivors of the 2003 Columbia space-shuttle explosion, who were found living among the wreckage.
The tallest mountain on Earth is Mauna Kea, the highest point of Hawaii, when measured from its base (which is under the sea) to tip, is about three-quarters of a mile taller than Mount Everest (which is still the highest mountain in the world). Antartica is both the wettest and driest continent in the world. Some parts of it have seen no rain for two million years while 70% of the Earth's fresh water is found there in the form of ice. The largest animal in this world is the blue whale, the largest land creature the elephant and the single largest living thing is a mushroom, the honey fungus, and its largest recorded specimen covers about 2,200 acres in Oregon. Meatloaf finished second.
There are more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each containing anywhere between ten and 100 billion stars and we are very lucky to live in this fascinating one filled with natural wonders and human miracles. I hope you get to visit some today, if only in your imagination. Immanuel Kant, who was born on this day in 1724 said “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe...the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Too true.