Earth | Notion

[Editor’s Note 2/23: Sill working on adding notes to each section — hang tight!]

“This we know; The earth does not belong to humankind; humankind belongs to the earth. This we know, all things are connected.” – Chief Si’ahl

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Overview

Age: 4.49 to 4.59 Billion years

Our current estimate is 4.54 Billion years with an error margin of +/- 0.05 Billion (50 Million) years.

Diameter: 7926.2 miles (12,756 km)

Core: Iron and nickel (NiFe)

Distance from Sun:* 93 million miles (150 million kilometers)

*The average distance between the Earth and the Sun is known as 1 AU (Astronomical Unit). “Average” because the distance differs at various points in our orbit.

Our pale blue dot, Earth, in a ray of sunlight. Captured 3.7 billion miles from the sun on February 14, 1990 by Voyager 1 at Carl Sagan’s suggestion. [Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech]

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994