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| The Realm of Everyday Events |
The Realm of Everyday Events
The realm of everyday events includes everything that can be detected by our unaided senses. It consists of objects with dimensions between 1 millimetre (mm) and 10 000 kilometres (km), and time scales from a tenth of a second to 100 years. A leg on a fruit fly is about 1 mm long. The Earth is about 12 800 km in diameter, rotates on its axis once every 24 hours, and revolves about the Sun every 365.25 days. A human being is about 2 metres tall, and can live for about 100 years. In 100 years, a heart beating once a second beats about 3.2 billion times.
We can look out a window and see trees, grass, buildings, and automobiles. Some of us can see cities, farms, plains, forests, mountains, lakes, or oceans. We can go outside and touch the ground; we can taste water, and eat the food. We can watch the Sun rise in the east and set in the west. We can experience the passing of the seasons. These are all aspects of the realm of everyday events.
We do not inhabit the entire everyday zone. We live in only a thin layer on the surface of the Earth, within the biosphere. If you used a marker pen to draw the largest circle you could on a large sheet of paper to represent the Earth, then the thickness of that line would encompass the entire biosphere, including the tallest mountains and the deepest trenches in the oceans. Humans actually live in only a small portion of the biosphere. Three quarters of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, and much of the dry land is desert, rocks, or frozen ice.
The realm of everyday events includes everything that can be detected by our unaided senses. It consists of objects with dimensions between 1 millimetre (mm) and 10 000 kilometres (km), and time scales from a tenth of a second to 100 years. A leg on a fruit fly is about 1 mm long. The Earth is about 12 800 km in diameter, rotates on its axis once every 24 hours, and revolves about the Sun every 365.25 days. A human being is about 2 metres tall, and can live for about 100 years. In 100 years, a heart beating once a second beats about 3.2 billion times.
We can look out a window and see trees, grass, buildings, and automobiles. Some of us can see cities, farms, plains, forests, mountains, lakes, or oceans. We can go outside and touch the ground; we can taste water, and eat the food. We can watch the Sun rise in the east and set in the west. We can experience the passing of the seasons. These are all aspects of the realm of everyday events.
We do not inhabit the entire everyday zone. We live in only a thin layer on the surface of the Earth, within the biosphere. If you used a marker pen to draw the largest circle you could on a large sheet of paper to represent the Earth, then the thickness of that line would encompass the entire biosphere, including the tallest mountains and the deepest trenches in the oceans. Humans actually live in only a small portion of the biosphere. Three quarters of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, and much of the dry land is desert, rocks, or frozen ice.
