The Earth

This is a test. This is only a test.

With x people on earth, and x life forms, x plant, and x animal. Earth is the 3rd rock from the sun on an outer spiral arm of the milky way galaxy, with x stars. There are x other galaxies, with x stars total. There are x countries on earth, x languages, x religions, with x followers. Catholicism purports to be universal. Is that across all universes?

There are x atoms in the universe, and x grains of sand on the beaches of the earth. How they know this, I do not know. I am not omniscient. We are all born (or conceived, anyway) with a blank slate. Godhood omniscience is a team effort. Thankyou, internet. It's a small world.

Earth geography symbolism: countries, cities
H: History: the universe is x years old.

Okay, Now for the Answers

People on earth (2008): 6.7B, Number of species: anywhere between 2-100M species (see ,http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/FelixNisimov.shtml). Actual number of individual animals?: gobs of oodles (muchIsimo). There's bacteria..which are organisms, some of which live symbiotically in the guts of us (humans).

Plants: In '04, there were 287,655 species of plant known on earth,
Animals?: well, there's 1-10M species of insects, and there's more insects than you can shake a stick at.

Stars in milky way: & number of galaxies in (*known) universe: (see Space, the BIG picture post)
There's around a billion trillion (1BT) stars: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
You're a superstar, yes, that's what you are. Vogue.

On creation: The Big Bang theory proposes that space itself was created ex nihilo at a specific time in the past. This is patently absurd. Space is nothing. You can't create space. In another theory of creation, new universes are spawned with every quantum measurement. By definition, these speculations cannot be tested experimentally. How can you create another universe, if, by definition, a universe is everything? I think physicists are goofy. Are they saying every quantum measurement is creating vast, I mean VAST expanses of space, with possibly trillions of stars and life and all the rest? I'm not the only one with a God complex.

How many atoms are there in the universe? We don't know, obviously. But..
The number of atoms in the Universe is a relatively finite number. That is to say, it does not really change by any appreciable amount. So, if there are 100 atoms in the Universe, there will always be 100 atoms in the Universe. More specifically, since matter becomes energy, there will always be a constant amount of energy in the universe, scientists say. The number of atoms alone in the graphite in your pencil is about 25000000000000000000000 atoms... In just the pencil lead! Matthew Champion at Texas A&M says a 4 followed by 79 zeros is a good starting point. He was just counting hydrogen atoms. This calculation also didn't include dark matter, brown dwarf stars, dwarf galaxies and such. (Dark matter, however, seems to be the majority of matter in the universe). Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter inferred from its gravitational effects. The dark matter component has vastly more mass than the "visible" component.

What's the universe made of? Only about 4% of the total energy density in the universe (as inferred from gravitational effects) can be seen directly. About 22% is thought to be composed of dark matter. The remaining 74% is thought to consist of dark energy, an even stranger component, distributed diffusely in space. If matter can become energy, can energy become matter? If so, we've got a lot of atoms (actual and potential) on our hands.

Countries: There are currently 193 states recognized by the United Nations (192 plus the Vatican...v at Cain) -according to Wikipedia.

Languages: The total number of languages in the world is between 5,000 and 10,000. I don't know if this figure includes programming languages and such. It (also?) doesn't include animal communication, which isn't considered "true" language, lol.

Religions:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religions , there's a pie chart with 19 categories, including atheists, nonreligious, and neoreligionists, whatever that is (1.68% of humanity).
I think atheists are A theists. That is, they get an A in theology. Ace theists. If God truly exists, and wants people to be happy, and people can only be happy through him, then he will make himself evident. I'm an agnostic. I believe in myself. Or me, as HL would say.

How many grains of sand are there on earth (and are there more than the number of stars?). One source says: Count all the sand in all the beaches of the world, all the playground sandboxes, all the deserts...yes, even including the Sahara Desert! Now take that monster number of sand grains and multiply it by 10 and you won't even come close to the actual number of stars in our universe. All you'll do is come close to the number of stars we presently guess we can see with the telescopes available, (i.e. the total number of visible stars in the known universe). Another source gives numbers: There's 10^22 stars. And between 10^20 and 10^24 grains of sand (on earth), which is roughly in the same ballpark.

Shake a stick at this
1. The incredible size of individual species of insects is only dwarfed by the incredible numbers they sometimes occur in. In 1943 Profeesor Salt found that an acre of British pastureland near Cambridge supported over 1,000,000,000 Arthropods of which nearly 400,000,000 were Insects and 666,000,000 were Mites the remaining 38,000,000 were Myriapods (Centipedes and Millipedes).
2. Some Scientist have recorded the otherwise inconspicous Springtails at densities as high 100,000,000 per square metre in the ordinary farm soil of Iowa U.S.A.
3. In Africa swarms of Orthoptera ( Desert Locusts Schistocerca gregaria) may contain as many as 28,000,000,000 individuals. Although each Locust only weighs about 2.5grams when they are all added up together this comes to 70,000 tons of locust.

According to the figures by Jens Gundlach and Stephen Merkowitz, Earth weighs in at 5.972 sextillion (5,972 followed by 18 zeroes) metric tons. Recent textbooks list the weight as 5.98 sextillion metric tons. Either way, that's about 1 trillion metric tons for each person on Earth. Put another way, 1 trillion metric tons is thought to be the total weight of all plant and animal life on the Earth's surface. (What percentage is plant, and what animal?) How many pounds are in a metric ton ("megagram", or Mg)? 2204.622 622 lb (to ten significant digits)—an "easy-to-remember figure." So remember, if you feel fat, about 2.2 trillion pounds are responsible for your weight.

Some Scientist think that 30% of the animal biomass of the Amazon Basin is made up of ants, and that:-- 10% of the animal biomass of the world is ants, furthermore they believe another 10% is composed of Termites. This means that 'social insects' could make up an incredible 20% of the total animal biomass of this planet.

That's the furthest I could get on trying to get a handle on the number of animals on earth..I figured if the physicists have a number for the total number of elementary particles in the entire universe, the biologists ought to know how many animals there are. Oh well.

Actually, I found out this interesting factoid: There are 10 Quintillion insects alive on earth at any given moment. For more insect numbers, quantities, data, and facts, see: (http://insectzoo.msstate.edu/Students/basic.numbers.html) How big is 10 quintillion? A quintillion is 10 to the 18th, or a million trillion (1MT). So there's a ten stars in the universe for every insect on earth.

One quintillion pennies. This many pennies,if laid out flat like a carpet, would cover the surface of the earth - twice. So 10 quintillion would cover the earth 10x.

Jains are a small but influential religious minority with at least 8.2 million followers in modern India and more in growing immigrant communities in the United States, Western Europe, the Far East and elsewhere. Jainism is one of the oldest religions on earth. They practice ahimsa, or nonviolence.

Nonviolence includes the concepts of vegetarianism. Jains are expected to be non-violent in thought, word, and deed, both toward humans and toward all other living beings, including their own selves. Jain monks and nuns walk barefoot and sweep the ground in front of them to avoid killing any insects or other tiny beings. Even though all life is considered sacred by the Jains, human life is deemed the highest form of life. For this reason, it is considered vital never to harm or upset any person.

The universe is 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years old and scientific evidence indicates that our planet Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago and life appeared on its surface within a billion years.