EARTH - A SMALL PLANET, A GIANT WORLD

See that dot? That white dot? Look closely, you will see it. 

Pale Blue Dot (Revisited, 2020) - Prepared from the original photograph obtained by the Voyager 1 probe on February 14, 1990. Inspired, Sagan wrote some of the golden lines in all of human history, which became famous as the Pale Blue Dot Speech. With his calming voice, he said of Earth as - a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam. 

Image Credits: NASA/JPL - CalTech

As the caption says, that dot is none other than our planet Earth, our home, just a mere point of faint light against the backdrop of cold empty space. From the surface, Earth might look to be a formidable planet. But to an (imaginary) extraterrestrial individual, looking through an impossibly powerful telescope some 3.5 billion light years away from us, Earth does not seem promising in the least. As you all know, a telescope only offers a glimpse into the past. So to our imaginary alien friend (hopefully), Earth is a young planet with no signs of higher organisms except some microscopic bacteria. That is a thing about our universe. It is so vast that travelling even at 99.99999999% of the speed of light will not get you very far. Assuming that another of our alien friends lives some 15 billion light years away, then from his perspective, he will see nothing but interstellar space. From his vantage point, the Sun has not yet formed. So that is it. Just like we can not know about them with our current level of technology, the same applies to them too. We are sitting in some embarrassingly tiny corner of a supposedly infinite universe. 

No way we can navigate around the demeaning fact that we are tiny, insignificant, and of not much concern. Our ''Our Sun'' is just an ordinary star out of trillions upon trillions of glowing hot plasma balls if you fancy. But as Sagan taught us, and later Tyson, we are not tiny at all. We are grand, for the universe comes alive through us. Every single one of us is the entire universe, consciously looking at its reflection. Earth is an embarrassingly small planet, but it is indeed a giant world.  

Recently, I finished reading Sir Charles Darwin's phenomenal work, On the Origin of Species, along with The Descent of Man and H.M.S Beagle. I intend to read more of Darwin, for as a matter of fact, my local library has quite a few shelves dedicated to the avant-garde naturalist. All at once, I also picked up David Attenborough's brilliantly composed book, Life on Earth. There again, he begins with Darwin and paints a nice picture of evolutionary biology under four hundred pages concluding with an eye-opening message. Life on Earth has evolved for over 3.5 billion years, and from our vantage point, we humans pack the highest intellectual power. Life is resilient; life can rebound over and over again - and even though it is purely speculative, if life (consciousness) goes extinct on one planet, it may arise differently or may already be in some different orb in some distant corner of our universe. At the same time, life as we know it can be a fragile little thing. For the first time, all life on Earth witnesses a different kind of mass extinction - Holocene or Anthropocene extinction. Since we recognise that the looming threat of global biodiversity loss is our doing, being the ones occupying the highest seat of Earth-bound intelligence, we must shoulder the responsibility of altering our ways of living and preserving the only spark of life that glitters across our immediate cosmic neighbourhood.

Some would say that the doomsday clock is just pure propaganda forwarded by big tech and big pharma to rip off common people and exploit taxpayers' money. Since our ancestors have lived off happily and merrily for so many centuries, there is no reason to fear a break in the trend over the next few millennia, perhaps more. The question is not whether we will live on for the next ten thousand years. In fact, we should be asking ourselves if we have the right to bleed the Earth dry just because we can. Being a formidable factor on our planet, bringing on various unalterable changes to the natural architecture perfected over billions of years, we may tend to forget that we are not Earth's only inhabitants. There are other rightful creatures, with some species having more importance than 8 billion of us combined. 

In this article, I want to highlight a simple fact - Earth is a giant world. Not only it is our home, but it is also the heavenly abode of undocumented millions of flora and fauna 

whose sheer individual populations dwarf the totality of all human beings that have ever walked.  

Let us start with ants. The tiny critters are more vital to the natural architecture than we humans can ever dream of. No matter what we do, we do not stand a chance against an ant. They are diligent workers, fierce fighters, loyal to their colony and sometimes nasty towards others. When our ego holds us back to throw a little love towards the community of ants scattered across the globe, statistics indicate that almost 20 quadrillion Formicidae breathe the same air [1]. That is 2.5 million ants for every single human being alive today. Although we do not possess precise data on the total number of humans (prehistoric and modern) to have ever been born on the planet, according to some estimates [2], the number likely stands at about 117 billion. Still, it amounts to some 170,000 ants per human individual. If by some spell-working, ants could be made as big as a human being and given the task to beat us, each of us would have to fight a mob of 2.5 million ants. And remember most ants sting. 

What about birds? Referring to a general article published in National Geographic [3], there are probably 50 billion to 430 billion avian individuals flying across the good Earth. Colloquially, that is a large number of ''shitting beings'' willing to top our heads with a white crème de la crème. Taking directly from the quoted article, ''the world's most abundant bird is the familiar house sparrow, with a population of 1.6 billion. Coming in second is the European starling (1.3 billion), followed by ring-billed gulls (1.2 billion), barn swallows (1.1 billion), glaucous gulls (949 million), and alder flycatchers (896 million)''. There as well be 25 billion chickens.

Apart from considering individual numbers, we can address animal populations in terms of biomass. Biomass (in ecology) refers to the total mass of all living organisms in a given area or ecosystem at a given time. From the most recent estimate of the human census, we occupy a total biomass (wet) of 400 million tonnes, i.e., 400 billion kg. Compared to the total biomass (wet) of ants which ranges between 30 - 300 million tonnes, we humans seem to have the upper hand. However, there was a time in prehistory when ants dominated humans in biomass. But as I have said in the foregoing paragraph, there are a lot more of them ants. It is better not to get our hopes high. Referring to another estimate [4], earthworms' total biomass (wet) stands at 3,800 - 7,600 million tonnes, almost 9.5 times the human limit. 

In terms of individual numbers, humans will never be the dominant species on Earth, for there are quadrillions of insects and bugs. And they all play a crucial role in the ''Circle of Life''. If these creatures suddenly go extinct, Earth's entire biosphere will collapse within months, if not days. In his final work, ''The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms'', published in 1881, Darwin writes, ''It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important part in the history, as have these lowly organised creatures''. Darwin never failed to understand the importance of these little creatures. So before you bite off the next chunk from that red apple, stop a second to reflect upon the fact that a mind-bogglingly large number of swarmers and critters does their good work of pollinating flowers and fertilising the soil, fixing nitrogen and decomposing dead bodies, without even waiting for our appreciation. 

The Pale Blue Dot is a reminder that the entire Earth, with quadrillions of its inhabitants, is one community. In the grand scheme of biological evolution, we are not so formidable as we picture ourselves along with our ego. We tend to forget our place in the Tree of Life and almost always suppose that nothing can stand in our way. This is where we are wrong. A freak event of Nature can wipe off half a million, while a bit of our muscle-flexing can wipe off the other half. One fine morning, if all of us vanish from the surface of the Earth, the bees will have no problem. They will live better. But if the reverse happens, we may not go extinct like in a typical movie, but we will have a lot less to eat. 

Earth is home to more than 3 trillion trees [5], of which, every year, 15 billion faces the axe. Too bad we are losing our best friends - bees, trees, beetles, ladybugs, termites, and all the like. If you think trees are mere oxygen producers, you are so wrong. Each individual tree is a diverse ecosystem in itself. If you ever get the time to spend some leisure minutes under the shade of an oak tree or whatever mighty tree you have in your neighbourhood, you will know the dozens of individuals that make their home in the branches, in the nooks and crannies and in the little holes scattered across the leprous trunk, scurrying off to their sweet families. Half of Earth's breathable oxygen comes from marine microorganisms - photosynthetic algae, plankton, cyanobacteria, and the like, without which Earth will soon become uncomfortably stuffy. 

If we care to think of each bacterial cell as an analogy of a human individual, there maybe 50 million or so of them in a gram of soil and a further million in a millilitre of fresh water. One litre of sea water can contain as much as a billion individual bacteria and about 10 billion viruses. Somewhere around 1 - 3 % of our body's weight [6] comprises of mere bacteria. We ourselves are home to a distinct world of microorganisms. 

A thousand and a half words are not enough to illustrate that Earth is a seemingly giant world with millions of species of flora and fauna. I have only listed three or four who are far away from the billion club. There are plenty more species that deserve the time and effort. But the central theme of my article is to reflect on the fact that we humans are not the only rightful inhabitants of this planet. There are others. And their place is definitely more important. In light of all the depressing news we get every time we turn on a news channel, I believe that hour has come when we refocus on that white dot and bear in mind that that dot is what we are. We are surely capable of becoming more than that dot. We dare to mark our presence in other worlds, from the Moon to Proxima Centauri, and it is natural for us to do so. But for all that to come true, first and foremost, we need to acknowledge that dot as The Dot so that instead of being a faint speck of light, it can shine as the brightest thing in the entire universe.