Inevitably, in going about our daily lives - commuting, sheltering our families, eating - each of us contributes to the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. Yet, there are many things each of us, as individuals, can do to reduce our carbon emissions. The choices we make in our homes, our travel, the food we eat, and what we buy and throw away all influence our carbon footprint and can help ensure a stable climate for future generations.
Use The Nature Conservancy's carbon footprint calculator to measure your impact on our climate.
Have you ever thought about what else is out there- beyond our galaxy? Watch this amazing video and see how small our Earth and Milky Way Galaxy seem in comparison to the rest of the UNIVERSE! Think about how big our galaxy is alone. The stars you see in the sky can be millions of light years away! It's difficult to think about distances in outer space because they are so much bigger than anything we could measure on Earth. The distances between stars and galaxies in the universe are so vast it would be very inconvenient to describe them in miles- like measuring the distance from California to India in inches! Instead, scientists use light years to measure distances in space. This sounds like a unit of time, but a light year is actually a distance: the distance that light travels in one year.
How far exactly is a light year? Light travels 186,000 miles per second. That's right, per second! There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year. Multiply these together to get 31,500,000 seconds in a year. Multiply that times 186,000 miles per second and you get 5,850,000,000,000 miles- about 6 TRILLION MILES!
Think about this: If you could drive nonstop to the sun at 60 mph, it would take 180 years. Light makes the same trip in eight minutes. So the sun is about eight light-minutes away.