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Earth Day - April 22nd
Earth Day Facts
Annually, April 22 is a day set aside to honor the Earth. But every day is Earth Day, and some of the things that will happen 365 times in a year are listed below. Not all of them can continue indefinitely.
*Earth will travel 1.6 million miles in its annual journey around the Sun, the 4.6-billionth such round-trip. It will rotate about its axis exactly once.
*The Sun will travel 13.5 million miles around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
*The Sun will fuse 51.8 billion tons of hydrogen into 51.5 billion tons of helium. (Lest you worry, it will have the capacity to do this for another 5 billion years or so.) *The other 0.3 billion tons will be released as energy (Einstein's E = mc2).
*The energy poured forth in all directions each day is 10 trillion trillion kilowatt-hours. The fraction of this energy that bathes the Earth powers nearly everything that lives there.
*The fraction of the sun's energy intercepted by the Earth at the top of its atmosphere is 6000 trillion kilowatt-hours, about 600,000 times the quantity Americans consume in a day.
*The population of the world will grow by 211,000 people. A new Akron, Ohio will be added every day.
*40,000 acres of land, an area about the size of Boise, Idaho will be converted to desert.
*200 million tons of topsoil will be lost through erosion from croplands.
*50,000 acres of forest will be eliminated.
*Between 20 and 500 species will disappear from the planet forever.
*We know so little about the family of life to which we belong that we cannot quantify the damage we are inflicting upon it.
*We do know that extinctions are occurring 100 to 1,000 times faster than the normal background rate.
*People will consume more than 3 billion gallons of oil.
*Burning the oil and other fossil fuels will release 70 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, slowly but surely nudging the planet's temperature upward.
*3 million tons of iron ore, 575 thousand tons of tin, 330 thousand tons of bauxite (for aluminum), and 34 thousand tons of copper will be ripped from the Earth.
*800 million people will go to bed hungry and awake too weak to lead productive lives.
*18,000 children will die from chronic hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases.
*The world will spend $3 billion on military expenditures, half by one country.
*$2 billion will be invested in research and development.
*This will result in the publication of 1,900 science and engineering articles and granting of 150 patents.
*4000 books will be published.
*1.3 billion children will be educated in pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools.
*97 billion e-mail messages will be sent, more than 40 billion of which will be spam.
*One thing is certain: the world of today will be different tomorrow - and the day after that, and on and on ad infinitum.
The question is not whether we must learn to live sustainably, but how fast we can do so.
