Earth has land. You know that — the odds are pretty goodyou’re on some of it right now. But here’s a weird thing to think about:It’s possible that land didn’t always exist. And technically-speaking, it doesn’t /have/to. I mean, if you were just to simply smooth out the Earth’scrust, the oceans contain enough water to cover the planet in a sea more than two kilometersdeep. So… why does land exist? Why is it so varied, with all those mountainsand valleys and flat plains? And — here’s a fun one: Could anythingever get rid of land on Earth? To answer those questions, which god knowsI want to do, you need to travel back more than four billion years. Billions of years ago, Earth started as acloud of dust and grains left over from the Sun’s formation. Then, over time, those pieces slowly balledtogether into proto-Earth. That ball was made of all kinds of elements. And as it aged, the denser ones, like iron,sank towards the center of the ball to become Earth’s core, while lighter on...
Hello i am Dhruv One of the most fundamental ideas in physics is that the disorder of the universe is constantly increasing. Which is funny, because life as we understand it is pretty darn… ordered. And it turns out life’s inherent chemicalmakeup has been hacking the disorder of the universe for billions of years. To understand this disorder, otherwise known as entropy, imagine you have given a bag of glitter to a toddler. Is all that glitter going to stay in the bag?No, probably not. And once it’s out there, it’s there forever.It’s not going back in the bag. You’re just going to have to make peace with glitter being a permanent feature of your floors, your furniture, maybe even your food and hair and skin. But your two-year-old force of nature wasonly abiding by the second law of thermodynamics. The second law holds that entropy, which is a measure of how spread out the energy of a system is, is constantly increasing. Initially, your bag of glitter had low entropy because...