The Equation between Planet Earth and Humanoids-An Overview
Only 1% of Mother Earth is favourable for human existence ! It implies that Earth is not as customized for us, as we boast of. We got in by force or gate crashed into it to find a living and subsequently started abusing and manipulating her for our own comforts.
In the process we resorted to abusing her in whatever way we could, like a pandemic grade virus, inflicting deadly poison into her eternal body. We nonchalantly assumed the posture of a “Species Pride” and in such a scenario the eco-system took a beating and slowly we realized with an alarm that our surroundings are uninhabitable for our future existence. That is when we organized ourselves to coin the word “Environmental Protection”.
Therefore what we are discussing is meant for our protection and not at all a favour we are extending to planet earth as such. In fact our saviour( Earth) does not need anything from us except a heart breaking plea to leave her alone and get lost or slip into oblivion.
With such an introductory observation as above let me get into the main frame of our subject.
Man-made Disasters
Ocean Oil Spill Pollution
The Bombed Hiroshima
Before proceeding to ascertaining the equation let us get closer to the two entities under scanner.
The Solar System
Our solar system consists of our star, the Sun and everything else bound to it by gravity viz the nine planets, many moons, Asteroids, Meteorites etc. Our Sun is a small member of the Milky-Way galaxy consisting of a hundred billion stars. It is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. Hubble reveals an estimated 100 billion galaxies exist today, but that number is likely to increase to around 200 billion as telescope technology in space improves.
And beyond our solar system there are billions of planets and there surely millions of them may have life systems like ours or similar. Our solar system extends much beyond the nine planets. There is the giant spherical shell known as Oort Cloud but it has not been directly observed.
The Oort Cloud is made of icy pieces of space debris and some of them bigger than mountains orbiting our sun as far as two light years away.
Astronomers have long studied exploded stars and their remains known as “supernova remnants”
Due to its unique evolutionary status, Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is one of the most intensely studied of these supernova remnants.
Cassiopeia A is a supernova remnant in the constellation Cassiopeia and the brightest extrasolar radio source in the sky at frequencies above 1 GHz. The supernova occurred approximately 11,000 light-years away from the Earth.
Our solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago from a dense cloud of interstellar cloud and dust. The cloud collapsed, perhaps due to the shockwave of a nearby exploding star called a Supernova. When this dust cloud collapsed it formed a Solar Nebula or a spinning disc of matter. And it’s center of gravity pulled more and more materials in. Ultimately the pressure in the core was so tremendous that Hydrogen atoms began to combine to form Helium releasing an astronomical amount of energy(Light Energy). With that our sun was born, amassing 99% of the available matter.
Matter further out in the disc was also clumping together. These clumps smashed into one another forming larger and larger objects. Some of them grew big enough for their gravity to shape them into spheres, becoming planets, dwarf planets and moons. Still some extra masses which couldn’t come together became asteroids, comets, meteorites and small irregular moons etc.
The Andromeda galaxy is a spiral galaxy 2.5 million light-years from the Milky Way.
It is the largest in the Local Group, where the Milky Way also belongs. It is massive! Its diameter is around 220,000 light-years and its mass equals the mass of 1,230 billion Suns! There are about one trillion stars in the Andromeda Galaxy.
The order and arrangements of the planets and others is due to a particular way the solar system developed . Nearest to the sun only rocky materials could withstand the heat of the sun when the solar system was young. For this reason the first four planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars-are terrestrial planets. They are all small with solid Rocky surfaces. Meanwhile substances like ice, liquid or gas settled in the outer region of the sun. Gravity pulled these materials together and hence giants like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were formed.
Our home is the third planet from the Sun and the only place we know that life exists. It is the only world in the solar system with liquid water on the surface. The name “Earth” is only one thousand years old. All other planets are named after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. The Earth is a Germanic word which simply means “The Ground”.
Some facts about our Magna Mater(Mother Earth)
- If the sun is as big as a typical front door, the Earth would be the size of a nickel.
- Earth revolves around Sun at a distance of 150 million KM from it.
- Earth is a rocky planet with a solid and dynamic surface of mountains, canyons, plains and more. Most of our planet is covered with water.
- Earth’s atmosphere is 78%nitrogen, 21% oxygen and the rest other ingredients.
- Our atmosphere protects us from incoming meteorites most of which break up in the atmosphere before they can reach us
Earth has evolved into existence as a molten magma ball. The outer ring only got condensed into a rocky shell due to cold conditions. Below that outer shell it is still the super hot magma. It carries embedded volcanoes as well. Due to the molten state, continental shifts have happened many times and it will continue to happen. Due to numerous fault lines, shifts happen in the form of earthquakes. Hence we can reasonably conclude that our habitat is a constantly changing phenomenon.
So there we are now . Earth is a tiny speck orbiting around a tiny star which is just a member of billions of stars in the universe.
Evolution
In such a backdrop around 370 million years ago life started pulsing in microbes. They evolved by surviving on Carbon and Methane as there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Later, around 240 million years ago bacteria evolved, triggering a photosynthesis mode of existence and releasing oxygen in to the atmosphere
Evolution progressed through millenniums and 4.5 million years ago the predecessors of us homosapiens appeared in the form of Australopithecus. And after a long wait of 4.2 million years the homosapiens evolved in Africa 300000 years ago. Therefore we the modern man today is the fine tuned version of the homosapiens of 300000 years ago. And we are just one among the 9 million species mother earth boasts of. Hence we can reasonably assume that we are just nobodies in the vastness of the habitat we are accommodated in.
Mrs Ples
Mrs. Ples - A popular nickname for the most complete skull of an Australopithecus africanus ever found in South Africa.
The Taung Child
The Taung Child (Taung Baby) is the fossilized skull of a young Australopithecus africanus. It was discovered in 1924 in Taung, South Africa.
The genus Australopithecus, of which there are several species, is considered the likely precursor of the genus Homo, to which all of humanity belongs. Though its cranium is comparable to a chimpanzee’s, Australopithecus walked upright, as humans do.
Analysing in a different perspective
Earth came into existence 4.5 billion years ago and us bipeds made our entry only 300,000 years ago. Expanding further if the age of Earth is one year , our age happens to be just half an hour .That too in our primitive form. And when we talk about the revolutionized modern man adapting to a synchronized social system the age is only five seconds.
If our present living environment was made for us the equation wouldn’t have been like this. Many phenomena like water flowing down, water gets heated and going up, continents preparing to slip away above a molten magma below etc. are being enacted by Earth without giving a damn to our species as such. And therefore our presence here or that we got stuck here concerns only us. Then a sensible alternative is only to adjust ourselves. And such an approach mechanism we can simply call by the term “Environmental Protection”. But how to make it possible is another million dollar question we have to tackle.
Instead of lecturing at individual levels about zero carbon threshold or green energy initiatives to get rid of toxins in the atmosphere etc..We have to rope in science, social sciences, economics and political-will together and kick start a mega scale awareness campaign for the masses to drive the real threat deep inside their psyche. For that we have to struggle together as a single social entity instead of the de-coupled configurations we are in as of now. And if we can’t, we definitely will have to take a one way ticket for an entry to the fossilized world for sure.
Concluded