Insightful Facts About Planet Earth
"We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here, that's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam." -Carl Sagan 1994.
Sagan had a way of making us realize just how small we are on a universal scale. We even know that some of the dots we can see are other planets.
We do not know a ton about these other planets but here are some facts about the pale blue dot we call Earth.
Planet Earth Facts
1. Earth Vs. Garbage
There are more than 100 million pieces of junk orbiting Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 km/hr). This includes man-made objects such as defunct satellites but also rocks.
There are another 22,000 man-made objects orbiting Earth right now in planned orbits.
2. Our Planet's Violent Beginning
Earth was formed by vast quantities of particles (some as small as grains of sand) and larger masses (asteroids) smashing into each other as they orbited the Sun.
As this mass of space junk grew, it created a gravitational field that started pulling everything in its orbit towards it, leading to more impacts and increased gravity. These impacts released huge amounts of energy, much of it in the form of heat.
The amount of heat was so immense that it actually melted the entire mass which was only held together by its own gravity.
Eventually, the outer layer cooled forming the Earth's crust. It is this energy that produced and drives the molten internal layers of Earth as we know them today.
3. Mysteries Beneath The Earth
There is enough gold in the Earth’s core to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a 1.5 foot layer gold.
The reason all this gold is in the core is tied to Earth's formation. Recall a liquid density experiment in your science class.
All the layers of liquid just sit on top of each other and do not mix because they have different densities, the heaviest liquids sinking to the bottom. There was a time in Earth's formation when the entire planet was molten.
During this period, much of the densest material sunk inward toward the middle of the planet and the less dense materials floated to the top. Because gold is such a dense metal, most of it sunk into the depths of what would become Earth.
People have considered trying to get into the inner layers of the Earth to harvest the precious metals within but there are some challenges - for one, the inner core is about the same temperature as the Sun.
