I Like it Here
OK, wade right in. 29% of the birds in North America have disappeared in my lifetime. That's around 3 billion birds. July 2019 was the hottest month in human history. New estimates show that at current levels of production, by 2050 there will be more plastics in the ocean, by mass, than fish. People in positions of power and wealth to effect the necessary revolution don't seem to care. Hell, I have heard, is really hot too. It's over for our children. We are doomed. Let's race cars and buy crap.
But,
Wait a minute. I'm sorry. Here's what we know:
The diameter of the Earth is 7,917.5 miles. Yaks and their shepherds live at around 16,000 feet. The Small Himalayan Jumping Spider, who makes his little snug hut/web at 22,000 feet, is the highest living critter we know about. (This fact bugs me a bit since spiders are all carnivores, so what are they eating up there?!) The Bar-headed Goose migrates over the Himalayan Plateau and has been confirmed flying over Mount Makalu at 27,825 feet. Upper atmospheric sampling has found bacteria living from 5-10 miles above sea level. Speaking of seas, the Mariana Snailfish was found living at just over 5 miles down. I don't really want to know what they eat. Ice cold debris descending from the pitch blackness?!
A quick bit of math shows us that life as we know it lives in a layer that is 10 miles thick, maybe 15 if we add those upper atmosphere molds and bacteria. This is a very, very, very thin film. Relative to the Earth, all life lives on only about .189% of the planet and that's a figure based on distance as opposed to mass.
Right now, utilizing the Hubble Space telescope, the farthest we can see visible light is from a galaxy we named GN-z11 that is 32-billion light years from Earth. Hubble has also established the observable universe, using all frequencies of radiation, to be about 46.5-billion light years in all directions, or roughly a sphere with us in the middle that has a diameter of about 93-billion light years. That is what we know. That is as far as humans can SEE and that is how our giant brains do the math and physics and determine the size to the very edge of everything. And as awesome as this vision is, as sophisticated as our sensors and computational analytical skills get, we have not found ANY evidence of other life ANYWHERE.
Ok. All life that exists is the thinnest film of green scum right here. All life. Every last bit. Just the merest wall of a bubble, a layer of almost nothingness, relative to the planet AND the great beyond. This little film is all the life in the universe that we know about for real. As the atmosphere around us, and the oceans and weather and land changes, life will adapt, or die. Extinction events have happened repeatedly, just none involving us.
But, I believe in our humanity and the power in these massive brains. If we can detect a bee on the moon by its heat signature, we can do this. If we can bring back the bald eagle, we can do this. If we can build a Hubble and tune it repeatedly, we can do this. I recently read a sign held aloft by a school kid saying, "It's too bad we don't have an unlimited source of energy floating across the sky everyday." We can fix this plastic tsunami. We can make food for everyone. Tasty food. In my next blog thingy, I will explain how. Maybe. Probably... In the meantime, I would like a little help from you guys to spread the word.
Save the Thin Film and Maybe our Kids' Kids.
Catchy right?
