Alex Cunningham
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The Fibonacci Sequence As Seen in Flowers gallery by Environmental Graffiti is a math and history lesson wrapped in a pretty...
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NGC 3372: The Great Carina Nebula
One of our galaxy’s largest star-forming regions.
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INK
[noun]
1. a fluid or viscous substance used for writing or printing.
2 .a dark, protective fluid ejected by the...
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With the 7 billionth person born, check our our map from “The Future” issue, which lays out the very real changes the Earth will undergo by the year 2050.
(via ilovecharts)
Ratti, a civil engineer and architect, spoke at the TED2011 conference in Long Beach, California, in March and was interviewed by CNN.
“Cities are 2% of the earth’s crust but they are 50% of the world’s population,” and consume 75% of the world’s energy, he said.
There is no overpopulation.
Map of Early Human Migrations, based on data from mitochondrial DNA surveys. Key is in thousands of years before present.
![jayparkinsonmd:
“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lixgndi9qU1qz72ywo1_500.jpg)
“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”
