40 Things You Might Not Know About Planet Earth, Our Solar System, And The Universe
Earth is a tiny piece of an enormous machine. Can we please keep it?
1. Planet Earth is the only planet in the universe that supports life as we know it — so far.
2. Earth is the only planet we know of with a breathable atmosphere; oceans that support an amazing variety of life and a biosphere that does the same for birds and land animals as well as we humans accompanied by a moon that causes our tidal seas. Therefore, unlike the mythical gods of today and of past ages, the Earth is not mean-spirited, capricious, or spiteful. It just is.
3. According to the experts, science has only barely scratched the surface in its quest for understanding how life on this planet came about 3.7 billion years ago.
4. It is estimated that 99.9% of all species that inhabited Earth have gone extinct.
5. Scientists estimate only ten percent of all life that inhabits the Earth has been discovered and named to date.
6. The surface of the Earth has a rotation speed of 360 meters a second at the Earth’s equator. This equals 1,000 miles or 1,600 kilometers per hour.
