“Look again at that dot. 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.” (Carl Sagan)

Earth is our home. It’s approx. 4.5 billion year old spaceship circleing at 67,000 miles per hour in a very nearly circular orbit around a shinning star we named the Sun. Simoultaneously we are spinning around our own axis at the speed of 460 meters per second (at equator), which is roughly 1,000 miles per hour. If we consider our solar system whirls around the center of our galaxy at approx. 220 kilometers per second, or 490,000 miles per hour, the speed at which we are traveling through space becomes incredible to comprehend! Yet here we are, traveling on this super-galactical living organism, which provides everything needed for our day-to-day survival. Our ship is covered in water and features self-sustaining systems for recycling all its components.

Satelite images show us just what an incredible and well-balanced planet we live on. The summer draught in New York is connected to monsoons in India, just as the ice in Antarctica is vital for the maintenance of natural systems at the equator. Earth remains the only known planet in the Universe supporting a sophisticated eco environment and flourishing life conditions. This is due to a delicate process of achieving the right balance and creating fertile conditions. It took one billion years for water in combination with Sun’s energy to manifest into simple life. First cells are estimated to have evolved approx. 3.6 billion years ago. Two billion years ago witnessed the birth of first complex cells. Over the next billion years these evolved to multi-cellular life, with first simple animals appearing some 600 million years ago. 500 million years ago we saw emergence of fish and plants, 300 million years ago came the reptiles, followed by mammals some 200 mil years ago, birds 150 mil years ago and flowers 130 mil years ago.