The Universe 06

Earth

Welcome to the planet Earth. A place with blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests, soft meadows. A world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is, for the moment, unique. The only world in which we know with certainty that the matter of the cosmos has become alive and aware. There must be many such worlds scattered through space, but our search for them begins here with the accumulated wisdom of the men and women of our species acquired at great cost over a million years.

There was once a time when our little planet seemed immense. When it was the only world we could explore. Its true size was first worked out in a simple and ingenious way by a man who lived here, in Egypt, in the third century B.C. This tower may have been a communications tower, part of a network running along the North African coast, by which signal bonfires were used to communicate messages of state. It also may have been used as a lighthouse; a navigational beacon for sailing ships out there in the Mediterranean Sea. It is about 50 kilometers west of what was once one of the great cities of the world, Alexandria.

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