The Future of the Earth is no Game: August 2015

Sunday, August 30, 2015

How can we Help the Planet: Part 5

Five ideas you can use to help the Earth:

Stop and smell the roses, both figuratively and literally. Roses are an extremely beautiful part of nature, and it is something everyone can appreciate and love. Also, learning to love just one part of nature is a step in the right direction. The saying means "to appreciate life", which is something most people should do because we are human, the species with the most benefits in the world.
Write smaller. This helps save paper and usually smaller hand writing is more neat anyway. However, don't write too small, because it still needs to be legible. You don't want to get an F on a paper just because you were trying to save a sheet of paper, just keep the size of your handwriting in the back of your mind.
Take shorter showers. This one is a simple one that almost anyone can do. You don't have to sing, I mean perform, in the shower if it means you are in there for 10 minutes longer than you have to. A shower only needs to be 5 to 10 minutes and it can save several gallons of water as well as a lot of energy. Visit, http://www.greenlifestylechanges.com/take-5-minute-showers/, for more information.
Don't charge your phone overnight. This wastes energy because the phone is constantly being charged throughout the night and kept on. It also drains the battery of your phone faster, just like keeping a laptop plugged in at all times leads to its battery have a very short life when not plugged in.
Use a white board. A white board is a great place to write down notes without wasting any material. They last a long time and the markers last a long time as well if used correctly and not to color. It can have several notes on it depending on how big you right, the writing is easy to remove so you can have more notes, and it is magnetic, so you can stick papers to it to save room on your desk.

Help the Earth by sharing this blog. I know that this is not the most professional blog out there, nor the most informative, I just want to help the planet in the way I find as most effective. Thank you all for reading and these short lists will continue for as long as I can think of ways to help the Earth.
Follow on twitter at Planet Earth and visit the Facebook page at Let's Give The World A Chance. Don't forget to like, rate, and subscribe, oh wait, this isn't YouTube. Anyway, stay green Earth, see you all next post.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

How Can we Help the Earth: Part 4

Five ideas you can use to help the Earth:

Use paper instead of plastic. Those trash islands in the oceans are made up of mostly plastic, especially plastic bags. Next time you get asked the question, "Paper or Plastic?", chose paper.

Bring your own cloth bags from home. It may be a hassle, but just imagine how much less trash would litter our ocean if every person brought their own bags to the store.

Use plastic cups. This may seem like it goes against things i have said in the past, but hear me out. Write your name on an individual cup and use that cup, rinse it out when you are done with it, then use it again next time. This works especially well with water, but works with all drinks. This saves water because it means you can fit more stuff in the washing machine, and it isn't extremely wasteful because you get several uses out of one cup.

Get more sleep. This one is more helpful to you but think about it this way, the more you are asleep, the less you can damage the environment. The less you eat, use electricity, produce waste, etc.

Take a moment before doing anything and ask yourself if what you are doing will damage the environment. For example, should you drive 5 minutes to the drug store or ride a bike/walk? Which one will damage the environment less? What you do should be based on the answer to the second question. Lastly, this tip should be used within reason. You should drive if you work 30 minutes away, you don't need to reuse everything, drive if you re pressed for time, etc.

Monday, August 24, 2015

Being Human on a Planet that is 4.5 Billion Years Old

Everyone reading this blog post is Human, unless someone trained their dog REALLY well, and we share this planet with approximately 8.7 million other species. We are not the fastest, the biggest, the most numerous, or the strongest, but we are the smartest. we have explored the majority of the surface of our planet and explored a lot of space outside of our planet. We have solved almost every problem we have come across. It was cold so we made fire, we wanted to explore so we invented the wheel, we got sick so we found an antidote, we wanted to entertain ourselves constantly so we made social media, etc. We have done a lot of good for ourselves, but at what cost to everything else?

First of all, we have polluted and damaged almost every part of the Earth if not all of it. we had devastating wars that make large amounts of land uninhabitable by anything without consequence, and we tend to believe that all other life on this planet is less than our own. Don't git me wrong, I love being a human, but we have done some pretty bad things. Worst part is, we have done so much bad in such a short period of time that the Earth can not keep up.

So the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and humans have existed for 200,000 years. To put this into perspective, if you take the longest book in the world, Artamene with 2.1 million words, and compared it to the Earth's existence, human's existence wouldn't even be a paragraph. If the height of mount Everest represented the Earth's age, then the mountain representing our existence would be shorter than a newborn baby.

You see, up until about 200 years ago, humans were not all that harmful to the environment, but these past 200 years have ruined that reputation. The Earth has had a system of taking care of itself for its whole life, it just takes a while. The dinosaurs going extinct and dust filling the sky after the meteor hit 65 million years ago took millions of years for the Earth to recover. An ice age lasts for thousands of years to go away. In fact, an increase of CO2 levels like ours today would take 5000 to 20000 years under normal circumstances. Yet here we are, raising the world’s average temp by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit in 200 years and raising the oceans acidity by .1 pH, or lowering the pH by .1 on the pH scale. This means that, at this rate, at the end of the century most of the shelled species in our oceans will be extinct or endangered which will devastate our oceans. Not only that, but the increase of the Earth’s temperature also creates a lot of problems, most of which I went over in another post.

It is true that the Earth goes through stages and has always recovered from them, but up until now it has always had time to adapt. Humans have disturbed 4.5 billion years of evolution and sustainability in 200 years all because we want to make things better for us. Being a Human on Earth is great, but being any other species is miserable. If we don’t change our ways and learn to respect the 8.7 million other species we share this Earth with, we will bring about the end of the world.

Follow on twitter at Planet Earth and visit the Facebook page at Let's Give The World A Chance. Don't forget to like, rate, and subscribe, oh wait, this isn't YouTube. Anyway, stay green Earth, see you all next post.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

How Can we Help the Earth: Part 3

Five ideas you can use to help the Earth:

Buy used items or donate things rather than throwing them away if they can still be used.
Don't turn things on/leave things on that you don't need. For example, you don't need a light on when it's daytime, just open the blinds.
Use the sprinklers less. Grass and most other plants only need to be watered by the sprinklers 3 times a week for periods of 30 minutes.
Use your computer for documents instead of paper unless paper is required. This may use energy and pollute, but it saves trees, which minimizes pollution.
This may be gross to some people, but the good old saying "Yellow is Mellow, Brown flush it Down". Believe it or not, but one toilet flush uses up to 1.6 gallons of water in new toilets. That is the amount of water a person is recommended to drink in 3 days.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

How old is the Earth: Cool Math Ahead

Under conditions where no lead loss or gain from the outside environment has occurred, the age of the zircon rock can be calculated by the equations for exponential decay like so:

N_{\mathrm{Now}} = N_{\mathrm{Orig}} e^{-\lambda t} \,

where in this situation:

$N_{\mathrm{Now}}$ is the number of Uranium atoms measured now.
$N_{\mathrm{Orig}}$ is the number of Uranium atoms originally - equal to the sum of Lead and Uranium atoms measured now.
$\lambda$ is the decay rate of Uranium.
$t$ is the age of the zircon rock, which one wants to determine.

The above equation is thus equal to:

N_\mathrm{U} = \left( N_\mathrm{U} + N_\mathrm{Pb} \right) e^{-\lambda_\mathrm{U} t} \,

Which can be rearranged:

{{N_\mathrm{U}}\over{N_\mathrm{U} + N_\mathrm{Pb}}} = e^{-\lambda_\mathrm{U} t} \,

and simplified:

1 + {{N_\mathrm{Pb}}\over{N_\mathrm{U}}} = e^{\lambda_\mathrm{U} t} \,

The more common form of the equations finally are:

{{^\text{206}\,\!\text{Pb}^*}\over{^\text{238}\,\!\text{U}}}=e^{\lambda_{238}t}-1

(1)

and

{{^\text{207}\,\!\text{Pb}^*}\over{^\text{235}\,\!\text{U}}}=e^{\lambda_{235}t}-1

(2)

According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-lead_dating, this is the formula for Uranium-Lead dating. However, there is another way to put it that is simpler and works as well. The formula is (1/(2^x))=(Percentage of Uranium in the Zircon). Once you solve for X, multiply the X value by the half life and your answer is the age of the Earth approximately. This method is less exact, but it is much simpler and is very close to the age of the Earth.

However, there are four main problems with this method. First is the fact that we may not have found the oldest Zircon that still exists. Second is the fact that older Zircon may have been destroyed by any number of possible natural or man made forces. Third, if the Zircon that is being examined has been exposed to radioactivity throughout its existence, then the method is ruined because Uranium was added to the Zircon. Lastly, there may be more effective ways of measuring the age of the Earth that we have not discovered yet. These are the main reason why we do not know the exact age of our planet, and we never will. But one of you readers may be the one to discover the Earth's exact age.
Follow on twitter at Planet Earth and visit the Facebook page at Let's Give The World A Chance. Don't forget to like, rate, and subscribe, oh wait, this isn't YouTube. Anyway, stay green Earth, see you all next post.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

How Can we Help the Earth: Part 2

Five Ideas you can use to help the planet:

Find creative ways to reuse things. For example, large Gatorade bottles can be a coin holder when cleaned out.
Take cold showers. Not only does this help you because cold showers are healthier for you, but it saves energy because you don't need to heat up the water.
Donate as much as you can. Those old shoes that are still in decent condition, donate. Those pants that are to short but are still usable, donate. Have some spare cash and want to do something good, donate. You get the point.
Save the napkins you don't use for later. No use in throwing away perfectly good napkins.
Recycle as much as possible. This may seem like common sense, but 90% of plastic water bottles are not recycled, let's work together to change that.

Friday, August 14, 2015

How old is the Earth: Cool Analogies Included

To start this off, there is no way to tell exactly how old the Earth is because it is SO OLD. We can get close and the closest we got was 4.5 billion years old give or take 70 million years. So if that is all you wanted to know, stop reading. But there are more facts ahead. I will be going over how we have determined the Earth's age and analogies to help you grasp how old the Earth is. So for those of you who stuck around, let's get right in to it.
Scientists have determined the age of the Earth by observing Lead levels in Zircon. Zircon is similar to Quartz and both are extremely resilient, so they can last a long time. The fact that Zircon can last so long is one of the reasons why this method is used. You may be wondering why Lead is in Zircon, so let me explain. Zircon has small traces of radioactive Uranium in it and this Uranium is similar enough to Zirconium, where Zircon gets its name, that it can take Zirconium's place when the mineral is forming. This Uranium then radioactively decays into Lead, which means the more Lead in a certain piece of Zircon, the older that Zircon is. This makes sense because the older the Zircon is the more time it has to produce lead. The age is then determined by using the half life of radioactive Uranium and comparing it to the ratio of Lead to Uranium. If the ratio is in Lead's favor, then it is older than a ratio in Uranium's favor because it hasn't decayed yet. This can get complicated due to the fact that there are 2 kinds of decay, 235U to 207Pb which has a half-life of 701 million years, and 238U to 206Pb which has a half life of 4.47 billion years old.
Now for the fun part, the analogies. First off, if we had one piece of paper for each year that the Earth has existed and put them in a single stack, that stack would be 50.86 times taller than Mount Everest. The oldest person that ever lived, Jeanne Calment, lived for 3861561600 seconds when rounded to the nearest day. It would have taken her 20.24 more years for the number of seconds she lived to equal the number of years the Earth has existed. Usain Bolt can run at a speed of almost 45 km/h, if he were to run 4.5 billion milometers, it would still take him 100 hours. Mind still not blown? Well here is one last comparison. If we had a single grain of sand for each year the Earth has existed, then it would way 2700 kilograms, or as much as 2 hippopotamuses. Mind still not blown? Well here is one last comparison.
If you are interested in the math of the Uranium-Lead dating method or you want to know possible problems when it comes to dating the Earth, read my next post. Follow on twitter at Planet Earth and visit the Facebook page at Let's Give The World A Chance. Don't forget to like, rate, and subscribe, oh wait, this isn't YouTube. Anyway, stay green Earth, see you all next post.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

How Can we Help the Earth: Part 1

Five ideas that you can use to help the Earth:

Collect water that you normally waste, such as the cold water at the beginning of a shower, and use it for something such as cleaning dishes or watering plants.
Recycle everything you think can be recycled, the plant can actually separate the trash from recyclables. However, recycling everything would be an extreme, so just recycle everything that you think can actually be recycled.
Use more gas efficient cars. Don't buy trucks just to look cool, buy cars that are practical and you will use for their intended purpose. A normal car is for travel, and minivan is for travel with a large group, a truck is for transporting heavy materials even in rough terrain, etc.
Hang dry clothes to save electricity once and a while. It is effective, natural, and less noisy.
Don't rinse your toothbrush before use, it is not necessary and is just a waste of water.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Population of the Earth: How to fix it

The last two posts went over the problems of overpopulation and what overpopulation is in general. Now this is the post that you have all been waiting for. How on Earth do we fix all this? No pun intended.
The first problem was a lack of resources, or a lack of sustainable resources. Some possible solutions include:

Cut down on meat products due to the fact that it is an extremely inefficient source of food. We give pigs, cattle, chickens, etc way more food than we get out of them.
Use forms of sustainable energy like solar and wind energy, and make them as efficient as possible. Also, using more forms of sustainable energy, such as burning trash.
Be less wasteful. Sure some things just become unusable at times, but most of the things we throw away could still have use or could have been recycled. That chip bag can carry more than chips, just clip it closed, that wrapper can be used as a quick note card or can wrap something else in a pinch, and that diaper you can, well, that you should probably throw away.

The next problem that was brought up was the lack of space and killing nature. Some possible solutions for that include:

Just stop dumping all of our trash into other places. Again, we can burn a lot of the trash for energy anyway in a way that is less pollutant than coal.
Just stop wanting more space. First, we do not need to take up more surface area on the the Earth, we can just build up, build our buildings taller.the only place this may be an issue is in a location that has frequent Second, we have plenty of space to begin with, people just need to be more efficient with the space we have been given by the Earth.
Especially stop taking land from endangered species. This does not mean taking land from ANY species is good, but taking territory from an endangered one could drive t to extinction.

The last problem was uncontrollable things, assuming the Earth becomes overpopulated such as war, disease and famine. Some possible solutions are:

Hope science is advanced enough to create new vaccines and medicines for new diseases.
Force everyone to go vegetarian in order to maximize food efficiency. This also means wasting food would be illegal.
Hope that everyone decides to work together instead of resorting to panic. Panic and anger are what starts war, without panic and replacing it with cooperation will minimize war possibilities.

Keep in mind, these are not the only solutions, these are just some. If you all would like to google these topics yourself feel free to do so, but don't worry to much. It will be decades until we REALLY need to find a solution to overpopulation, but it is never to late to start.
Follow on twitter at Planet Earth and visit the Facebook page at Let's Give The World A Chance. Don't forget to like, rate, and subscribe, oh wait, this isn't YouTube. Anyway, stay green Earth, see you all next post.

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