This is the Earth - There are no second chances...

[ddeclue]

This is a picture of Earth taken from Voyager 1 several billion miles away.

If you could see the moon at this distance it would be about 3 inches away on your computer monitor assuming the Earth you see is about a tenth of an inch across.

The moon has no atmosphere and no known water and is 250 degrees in the sunlight and minus 250 in the shade and the days are 14 days long and the nights are too. You could not live there without massive support from Earth and it cost 2 billion dollars in 1969 dollars every time we sent two people to the surface back in Apollo and one of these missions failed.

Mars meanwhile would be 35 feet away from that speck of light at the closest point.

Mars is the closest planet to have conditions even remotely similar to earth - it has a very thin atmosphere with very little oxygen -it is mostly CO2. There are polar ice caps on Mars but how much water they actually contain as opposed to frozen CO2 is anybody's guess. It might be possible to live on Mars after decades of investment and terraforming on a scale that would make the Apollo program seem like a flight to Cleveland.

Mars is the only planet in our solar system to even come remotely close to Earth-like conditions.

The nearest star system from Earth is 4.3 light years away in the real world. That's hard to understand but to put it in terms of our picture, it would be about 5000 miles away from the speck on your screen.

This is the Earth.

There are no second chances.

Don't screw it up.

We now return you to your regular broadcast program.

Doug D.
Orlando, FL

[earth mom]

1. K & R for Mother Earth!

:kick:

[Sal Minella]

2. Nicely done. Thank you.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. well said

k&r

[Laelth]

4. k&r for the Earth.

It is our home. It is the only one we have. We get no second chances.

This is terribly important.

:dem:

-Laelth