Human Affect on Earth

There are many statistics about the earth, oceans, and weather. Although satellites give us a good picture of land and sea, many parts of both have not been visited or set foot on by humans. Almost all of the earth's subsurface is still unexplored. The following are closest to consensus data that I could find.

About 80% of the earth is covered in water. The other roughly 20% is surface land. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says urban areas currently take up less than 1 percent of earth's surface.

According to the FAO Global Land Cover SHARE database, produced in 2014, 0.6% of Earth’s land surface is defined as 'Artificial surfaces'. Artificial surfaces include any areas that have an artificial cover as a result of human activities such as construction (cities, towns, transportation), extraction (open mines and quarries) or waste disposal.
Of the 108 billion people that have ever been alive, it is estimated that 6.4 percent of them, roughly seven billion are alive now. So seven billion humans inhabit or use just .6% of 20% of the earth. Since we have yet to discover major parts of land and sea, it is difficult to project future impact, because we still do not know what we do not know.


Incidentally, to date we have explored five to ten percent of the ocean. There are around 8.7 million species on earth of which 80 percent are undiscovered. No one has been able to determine how many ocean species there might be or the percent we may have already discovered. It is estimated that approximately seven percent or more of territorial earth is yet to be discovered. Finally, we have yet been able to fully explore the human body.

Pluto and the Naming of the Planets

With all the publicity surrounding the recent photos of Pluto, Seems fitting to look at it and the other (real) planets and how they received their names. Pluto is the largest and second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun.

It had been discovered many times by astronomers, who did not realize what they found. It was discovered 'for real' in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, and was originally considered the ninth planet from the Sun. After 1992, its status as a planet fell into question following the discovery of several objects of similar size, in particular Eris, which is 27% more massive than Pluto. This led the International Astronomical Union to define the term planet formally for the first time. This definition excluded Pluto and reclassified it as a member of the new "dwarf planet" category. The other dwarf planets are Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake (sic).

The tradition of naming planets after mythological gods was passed continued after Roman names for the five extraterrestrial planets they were aware of.

• Earth is the only planet not named for a mythological god.
• Venus is named after the goddess of love. It is thought this planet got its name from the fact that it is “pretty” to look at as the third most bright object in our solar system in the sky as viewed from Earth (after the Sun and the Moon).
  
• Mercury is named after the god of thievery, tradesmen or commerce, and travel. It is thought that the planet probably was named such due to how quickly, relatively speaking, it travels across the sky.
• Pluto, although no longer a "real" planet is named after the god of the underworld. The name was proposed by Venetia Burney, a then eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England, who was interested in classical mythology.
• Saturn is named after the Roman god of agriculture. It followed the Greek designation for Cronus. In modern Greek, the planet retains its ancient name Cronus—Κρόνος: Kronos.
  
• Neptune was named after the god of the sea. It got its name thanks to the fact that it has a blue color.
  
• Uranus is named after the very early god of the sky (and father to the Titans).
• Mars was named after the Roman god of war. It’s thought that it was labeled such based on the reddish hue of the planet, relating to blood.
• Jupiter is named after the god of thunder and the sky, and king of the gods. It is probable that it was named such as it is the largest non-star in our solar system.

Incidentally, many languages have their own name for Earth, such as ‘terra’ in Portuguese, ‘dünya’ in Turkish and ‘aarde’ in Dutch. However, the common thread in all languages is that they were all derived from the same meaning, which is ‘ ground’ or ‘soil’. The modern English word and name for our planet Earth likely extends back more than 1,000 years. The name was also found in early English translations from the bible.

Moon and Earth Names

Translations of the Bible into English was one of the earliest recorded uses of the name Earth – "God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good."

It is called ‘terra’ in Portuguese, ‘dünya’ in Turkish and ‘aarde’ in Dutch. The common thread in all languages is that they were all derived from the same meaning in their origins, which is ‘ground’ or ‘soil’.

The modern English word and name for our planet Earth goes back at least 1,000 years. Just as the English language evolved from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (English-German) with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century AD, the word ‘Earth’ came from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘erda’ and its Germanic equivalent ‘erde’ which means ground or soil. In Old English, the word became ‘eor(th)e’ or 'ertha '.

The Moon did have other names, including the name of an ancient deity, Luna, the Roman Goddess of the Moon. The word Luna is still associated with the Moon. For instance, Luna is the root of words like lunar.

When humanity first learned of other moons orbiting the planets in our solar system, one of the primary reasons they were given names was to differentiate them from the Moon, which is still the official name of our moon in English. The word “moon” can be traced back to Old English, where it is said to have derived from the Proto-Germanic word “menon”, which in turn derived from the Proto-Indo-European “menses”, meaning “month, moon”.

With few exceptions, the Moon has long been associated with women, fertility, and a whole host of other female attributes. In most cases, menstrual cycles more or less coincide with the phases of the Moon. It should then come as no surprise that across many languages, the words for “moon”, “month”, and the name for a woman’s menstrual cycle often has the same root word.

Longer Days

The earth is gradually slowing down. Every few years, an extra second is added to make up for lost time. Millions of years ago, a day on Earth would have been only 20 hours long. It is believed that, in another million years time, a day on Earth will be 27 hours long.

Shape of the Earth

When thinking of geo stuff, it is interesting to note that the earth is not round. Most people know this, but did you know you weigh more or less depending on where you live?

The Earth’s shape is classified as an oblate spheroid or ellipsoid. The polar diameter of the Earth is about 26.7 miles (43 km) shorter than its equatorial diameter causing a difference of about 0.3%. This very slightly oblate shape affects the weight of an object according to its position on the Earth’s surface. A 20-lb bag of sand would weigh less at the equator than at the North Pole. This is because the further an object gets from the center of the Earth, the less it weighs. Maybe I might move to the equator.

Our Globe

Forests cover 30% of earth's land surface, land covers 29.22% of earth surface, water covers 70.78% of earth surface (98% of that is in the oceans) (326 million trillion gallons of water) 1.6% in ice caps, .3.6% under land wells aquifers, .036 lakes and rivers,

80% of atmosphere is nitrogen most of the rest is oxygen
People occupy less than 2% of land mass - It mathematically does not seem possible we create pollution that changes the whole earth and the atmosphere above the earth.