Earthspeak

I was born in total splendor. In the belly of a supernova, my founding elements were formed. That was about 4.6 billion years ago. I am bound to a star — the sun — in a primordial relationship dictated by a universal force — in a gravitational correspondence with that star that keeps me on an elliptical orbit around it, within distances that average 92.96 million miles. I complete that orbital dance in about 365.26 days, while doing a tilted pirouetting on my axis that lasts 23 hours and 56.07 minutes. Every square meter of my flattened spherical space receives roughly an average of 340 watts from that star. Almost four-fifths of that I ultimately give back to space and the rest I keep in my different pockets — in the oceans, land and the atmosphere. I am shielded from solar winds by the magnetic field, which is an invisible yet powerful shield but my cosmic identity remains: I am because that star is there.

The gases that float around me are more than two-thirds nitrogen (78.1 percent) and a little less than a third oxygen (20.9 percent), argon way behind (.9 percent) with other trace gases in miniscule amounts (.1 percent). This atmosphere is the upper flap to the biospheric envelope that I am.

I also somehow found a way to forge a bond between the hydrogen I inherited from my splendid beginnings with oxygen to give you water. Water is everywhere — in fact in almost two-thirds of my area. But freshwater, which is most precious to you humans is only three percent of the water I have and only one percent of that is available for your needs and desires. In the oceans, I can keep a water molecule for an average of over 3,000 years before I nudge it on to any other pocket in the water cycle and I can push it as rain only after nine days when I keep it in the atmosphere. I think that is a pretty cool thing to do to a water molecule.

Terrestrially speaking, you need to travel about 3,963 miles from my surface to reach my innermost center, which is my fiery core. I weigh more than your imagination can carry — the resulting number when you multiply 5.974 with “1” followed by 24 “0”s when you want to express them in kilos. None of your kind has traveled to my core and I have not been literally placed on a weighing scale but wonder of wonders, I witnessed the birth of your kind who figured a way to know these truths with such play and elegance of mind.

Your kind — Homo sapiens — has inhabited me for about 200,000 years and for most of that time, I used to be flat in your heads until some of you had ideas that their observations made more sense if I were round which later has been proven true and you still prove it true every time you travel. Two hundred forty years before year 1 of the kind of calendar you all now generally use, one of you figured out how to show that I was round and even came up with a number for my radius, not very far from what the number I previously expressed — from my core to my surface. 

Before your kind was even here, there were all kinds of cycles of birth, rebirth and changes — both cataclysmic and miniscule. There have been unseen life forms which inhabit almost my every nook and cranny and they have most likely been responsible for the formation life that you experience all around you now, including your own.  If these unseen ones you call bacteria could talk, oh what stories they will tell! They will tell you about how creative life could be, of how it finds a way to persist in the myriad combinations of conditions! They will tell you about massive extinctions caused by meteors falling on to Earth and covering the sky, separating me for ages from the star that keeps me and all I hold in it alive! But bacteria do not speak. You do.

After 4.6 billion years, I saw the birth of your kind treading my spaces in one form or another — those spaces that span the highest in Everest to the deepest in the Marianas Trench. You have only been here as a distinct species for 200,000 years but you managed to be everywhere. Ten thousand years ago, you started taming me so that my wildness could surrender to your needs. I fed you season after season so you could stay put and not always be on the hunt. Five thousand years later, you built your first cities. Only around two hundred years ago, your kind had its own revolution of ideas that accelerated your needs, desires and capabilities to “tame” me and I yielded. But the same physical laws that brought me to and govern my existence also dictate that there are consequences to this kind of taming. This cosmic gift is not free.

I have been unusually warm for the last 50 years compared to the last 1,300 years in recorded history. Your elegant minds think that if I keep at this rate, global temperatures would rise at about .2 degrees C per decade, making me about 2 degrees Centigrade warmer by the end of this century. A lot of you and other life forms will not be able to bear the consequences of this temperature rise. But I will go on, in one form or another. I will not weep for your loss. You are the only ones responsible for your tears. You make the choices on how to live here and I will show you the consequences of those choices — unabashed and with no premeditated malice.

Thirty eight years ago, you decided to assign one day to celebrate my existence, or rather your heightened awareness of my existence. You call me all sorts of endearing names — Mother Earth, Third Rock but I am indifferent to names because I am simply what I am.

I am a planet within a solar system which in turn revolves around the Milky Way Galaxy.

Four and half billion years ago, I was born in total splendor.

I gave you, everyone and everything you knew a home.

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