HowDoesLifeWork#01_Where are we? What time is it?

docteur-plantes (49)in #steemstem • 6 years ago (edited)

Where we are? What time is it?

Version française : Steemit | Busy

You must wonder why I ask these harmless questions? Obviously, you could say that we are in the 21st century after JC and that you read this in one continent among the six, that is true! But let’s replace us compared to Nature.

What time is it?

In fact, if we considering earthly years, this year would be around the 4, 540, 000, 000th years (our dear earth age). We are far away 2018…

It’s difficult to imagine so let’s take an example: let’s say that earth old is 24hours.
24h = 4.54 billions of years, abstract of the day:

3:25 am: First bacteria appear in oceans. (3.8 billions of years ago!)
9:00 am: Birth of the first plants with their revolutionary photosynthesis.
Between 10:50 pm and 10:54 pm: The great age of dinosaurs. They have disappeared 65 million of years ago.

And humans in all of that?
Human is appearing at 11:59 pm and 59 seconds, modern human, which invent printery and make transactions in Bitcoin is appearing a nanosecond (0.000000001s) before 00h. Shortly no?

Where are we?

What I mean is: are we tall or small in Nature? We need a size scale.

I’m 2-meter, let’s take this as a benchmark.

We are surrounded by infinitely small and infinitely big things:
Atom kernel is on the average 10fm size and is around 10, 000 time smaller than the atom itself, atoms compose all know matter (water, wood, air, …) or DNA.
DNA (you will know it soon) is 2nm wide, DNA is stock in cells which are on average 50µm. All living organism like an ant is composed of cells, ant which is 1000 time smaller than me.

Let’s have bigger scales, Earth diameter is around 4 times bigger than Paris – Moscow distance. Sun is approximatively 100 times bigger than Earth! And if we plan a trip until the Sun the GPS would say us that we have 149, 600, 000 kilometres to do.

But universe is really vaster, and kilometres are insignificant to measure it, so we use another unit which is drastically bigger: light-year. Yes, it’s really a distance unit, it’s based on lightfastness which is 3 x 10⁸ m/s (300, 000, 000 m/s). So, one light-year is the distance run by light in one year, knowing that there are 31, 540, 000 seconds in one year, well, we have an astronomical distance.

So, Earth and friends (Mars, Jupiter, …) turn around Sun in Solar System. Our Solar System is in our galaxy branch: The Milky Way. Milky Way is composed of around 100 to 200 billion of stars (what a fork!) like Alioth which is one of Ursa Major constellation. And the universe is composed of 200 billion of galaxies (2, 000 billion as Hubble data shown), very far and away like Tadpole Galaxy.
Table 4.JPG