turned at one hundred miles an hour, our days and nights would be ten
times as long as now, and the hot sun would then burn up our
vegetation during each long day, while in the long night any surviving
sprout would freeze.
Again, the sun, source of our life, has a surface temperature of
12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is, just far enough away so
that this 'eternal fire" warms us just enough and not too much! If the
sun gave off only one-half its present radiation, we would freeze, and
if it gave half as much more, we would roast.
The slant of the earth, tilted at an angle of 23 degrees, gives us our
seasons; if it had not beenso tilted, vapours from the ocean would
move north and south, piling upfor us continents of ice. If our moon
was, say, only 50 thousand miles away instead of its actual distance,
our tides would be so enormous that twice a day all continents would
be submerged; even the mountains would soon be eroded away.
If the crust of the earth had been only ten feet thicker, there would
be nooxygen without which animal life must die. Had the ocean been a
few feetdeeper, carbon dioxide and oxygen would have been absorbed and
no vegetable life could exist. Or if our atmosphere had been thinner,
some of the meteors, now burned in space by the million everyday would
be striking all parts of the earth, startingfires everywhere.
Because of these, and hostof other examples, there is not one chance
in millions that life on our planet is an accident.
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