13 Astonishing Facts About Our Planet Earth!
11 Areas where it is common for people to live over 100 years are known as âBlue Zonesâ. There are 5 on Earth: Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; Loma Linda, California; and Icaria, Greece.
Blue Zones are demographic and/or geographic areas of the planet Earth where people live considerably longer lives than others. The idea spawned from the demographic work achieved by Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain, who concluded that Sardinia’s Nuoro province was the region with the highest concentration of male centenarians.
After zeroing in on a cluster of villages with the highest longevity, they drew blue circles on the map, referring to the circled areas as Blue Zones.
National Geographic Fellow Dan Buettner identifies longevity and offers an explanation for hot-spots in his book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. The book covers locations in countries such as; Japan, Italy, Costa Rica, Greece and the United States of America. The information is based on experimental data and eye-witness observations as to why these populations in the Blue Zones live healthier and longer lives.(source)
12 The Flyby Anomaly: When spacecrafts do Earth-flybys at certain angles, they experience a small but sudden velocity increase which is still unexplained. One of the proposed explanations is the existence of a ring of dark matter around the Earth.
The Flyby Anomaly is an energy increase that appears unexpectedly during Earth-flybys of spacecrafts. This oddity has been spotted by shifts in the S-band and X-band Doppler and ranging telemetry. Taken together it creates a remarkable unaccounted velocity increase of up to 13 mm/s during flybys. Larger discrepancies (400â1000 m) have also been observed.(source)
13 Stephen Hawking says humanity will not survive without leaving earth, insisting that human beings may have less than 200 years to figure out how to escape our planet.
According to Mr. Hawking, in order for humanity to survive long-term, it’s necessary to find a way to evacuate the planet. He suggests that the human race may face extinction in less than 200 years.
“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”
According to Hawking, it appears that inhabitants unable to flee the planet will have to deal with man-made catastrophes, such as climate change and/or nuclear/biological warfare. There is also a possibility of mass destruction, by the means of an asteroid impacting with the Earth or a nearby supernova/gamma-ray burst.
“The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.” – Stephen Hawking
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