Dear old Mother Earth comes next. To possible observers on Venus, Earth must be a brilliant figure in the night sky. Most of the time Earth must appear as Venus does to us, bathed in clouds' But' unlike Venus' there come clear openings through which there sometimes would be disclosed most of the North American continent, or or the South American, or Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Earth is 92,870,000 miles mean distance from the parent Sun. It is not yet locked to the Sun, and the days and nights are of short duration, one axial revolution occurring in close to 24 hours. Its temperature is, of course, still lower than that of Venus. Cold as low as 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit has been recorded where men and women live and where trees grow to heights of 100 feet and flowers bloom luxuriantly in summer. Heat as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit is experienced, and animal life is able to endure it and vegetation to thrive in it if water is present. Thus the temperature range is roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
We have an ocean of atmosphere some 20 miles thick which is composed of one part oxygen and four parts nitrogen, and we have more water surface than we have dry land. Life probably gained a permanent footing on our Earth some millions of years ago, and it has taken that amount of time for evolution to develop from the primordial life cell to the men and women, the civilization, and the animal and vegetable life we see around us to-day. Any planet that cooled enough to support life later than Earth did would not be advanced in evolution as far as Earth is if the rate of development were about the same as it has been on Earth. On the other hand, a planet that cooled off before Earth cooled would have a more advanced form of life than has Earth unless it had cooled too much and life had been extinguished by cold. Thus Mercury probably is tremendously behind us in life development and Venus considerably behind, whereas Mars might be in advance of us. In the case of the other planets, as we shall see, they seem to have passed through the cooling stage to a point where life would at least not develop very fast, and probably could not exist at all.
Our home in space appears by the most careful measurement to haue an equatorial diameter of. 7,926 miles and a polar diameter of. 7,899 miles. We may average these roughly and call our Earth 7,912 miles in diameter. Our orbit is about 185,740,000 miles in diameter. We traverse the whole circumference of it in 365 days, so that our Earth and all that is on it are bowling along on a slightly elliptical path around the Sun at a speed of 66,666 miles per hour. That is better than a thousand miles a minute and almost 20 miles per second. To make matters worse, we are revolving on our axis once in 24 hours. If we are 7,900 miles in diameter at the middle, it must be 24,806 miles around our circumferance; and if we ro11 through this distance in 24 hours, it looks as though things at or near our equator were moving at about a thousand miles an hour surface speed. To make matters sti1l worse, our parent Sun is moving through space on some kind of mysterious journey at a speed estimated to be around 44,000 miles per hour; and as a final touch, we suspect that our galactic system is moving with relation to the other galaxies through space. Thus do we see why we Earthians come naturally by the habit of always wanting to be on the move.
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