Dirt the movie

My college advisor sent this link to me. http://www.dirtthemovie.org/ . This is a film from the SunDance Film Festival. I can't wait to see it. It should be available in September.

I took a class on soil spring of 2009. Learning about soil made me realize how amazing it is and how important it is to our survival. I always think about and debate in my mind, what is the most important substance on Earth that we need for us to survive. Is it water, the air, the dirt below our feet? Which one? I can't decide.

Without water there would be no life at all; water is amazing there is no other molecule on Earth like it. I believe we are not the only planet in the universe that has water, based on the fact that the universe is so big (it is almost impossible to wrap your head around its vastness), then to know that there are billions of other galaxies out there just like the Milky Way Galaxy. A bit of a side note: something I didn't know about our galaxy until just a few years ago (surprising I know) is how big it really is. On Star Trek Voyager they get taken to the other side of our galaxy, they are hurled 70,000 light years away from our solar system, that means it will take them 70 years to get back home at warp 9.5. Wow! At first I assumed they were on the opposite side of the universe. I had no idea how incredibly huge just our little galaxy is among billions. It would be impossible for Earth to be the only planet in all of the galaxies in the universe to be the only one that have water and life.

But without air we would die, until the atmosphere was created the only things that survived on Earth for billions of years were bacteria and virus's. The first substance on Earth that produced oxygen through photosynthesis was a bacteria called Cyanobacteria, we owe our existence to bacteria. They created the atmosphere we have today that allowed evolution to occur.

But without soil, plants wouldn't grow, so there would be no oxygen or an atmosphere to hold the water.

Soil has amazing diversity, in 1 cup there is 10,000-20,000 different species, and up to one billion to one trillion bacteria in that one little cup. The population of the planet right now is roughly 6.7 billion. There are more bacteria in 1 cup of soil than the whole population on Earth. Do you think they communicate with each other?, even though they don't talk like us does that mean that they can't be as smart as us? could they be more intelligent? Hummm

So I still can't decide what single substance is the most important for our survival????

Scanning the heavens, Hubble captured this image of a cluster of galaxies called Abell 2218. The cluster is so massive, and so compact that its gravity bends and focuses the light from galaxies that lie behind it. Credit: NASA