Environmental & Geomicrobiology

	"Astronomy is a field that is used to dealing with large numbers, but these can be dwarfed when compared with life on the microbial scale: For instance, if all the 1 × 10³¹ viruses on earth were laid end to end, they would stretch for 100 million light years. Furthermore, there are 100 million times as many bacteria in the oceans (13 × 10²⁸) as there are stars in the known universe...". From Microbiology by numbers, Nature Reviews Microbiology, September 2011.
	Even more amazingly, dental plaque is so densely packed that a gram will contain approximately 1 × 10¹¹ bacteria, roughly the same number of humans that have ever lived. ... From Microbiology by numbers, Nature Reviews Microbiology, September 2011.
	"The number of prokaryotes and the total amount of their cellular carbon on earth are estimated to be 4–6 × 10³⁰ cells and 350–550 Pg of C (1 Pg = 10¹⁵ g), respectively. Thus, the total amount of prokaryotic carbon is 60–100% of the estimated total carbon in plants, and inclusion of prokaryotic carbon in global models will almost double estimates of the amount of carbon stored in living organisms. In addition, the earth’s prokaryotes contain 85–130 Pg of N and 9–14 Pg of P, or about 10-fold more of these nutrients than do plants, and represent the largest pool of these nutrients in living organisms." From The Prokaryotes, The Unseen Majority, Whitman et al. 2009 ; for updated data and debate on this topic, see Nature report New estimate reduces the number of bacteria by half?
	Extremophilic life forms - the universe may be more habitable than we thought.... article by Lynn Rothschild, 2002 Is Earth´s Life Unique in the Universe - click here for an example of speculations in the Scientific American Article from 2014
	One of the worlds toughest bacteria - Deinococcus radiodurans ...itt can survive drought conditions, lack of nutrients, and, most important, a thousand times more radiation than a person can (click e.g. here for more information).
	In total, there are ~1,400 known species of human pathogens (including viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and helminths), and although this may seem like a large number, human pathogens account for much less than 1% of the total number of microbial species on the planet... From Microbiology by numbers, Nature Reviews Microbiology, September 2011.
	Every speck of dust, drop of water, and grain of soil and each part of every plant and animal contain their own worlds of microbes....J. W. Brown. ASM Publication on the Principles of Microbial Diversity. 2015. On this point, ignoring questions about what actually constitutes a species, estimates for the total number of microbial species vary wildly, from as low as 120,000 to tens of millions and higher. Part of the reason for this large range is that we have only sequenced 1 × 10²²% of the total DNA on Earth... This means that the fraction of microbial diversity that we have sampled to date is effectively zero... From Microbiology by numbers, Nature Reviews Microbiology, September 2011.
	Based on the current research rate of the biodiversity, it will take: 480-1,200 years to cover all present eukaryotes. 16,000 years to cover all present prokaryotes. Mora et al. 2011, Plos Biology; Tamames et al, 2012, Trends Microbiology
	"Unravel your whole DNA and it would stretch from here to the moon" - click here for a collection of estimations of the DNA size in our cells.
	Your brain generates nearly 25 watts of power while you're awake, which is enough to light up a light bulb. There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain, the same number of stars in our galaxy. The total lenght of our neurons in our brain is about 5,8 million km, which corresponds to about 145 times around the earth.
	Blog about Viruses An Ocean of Viruses The rate of viral infection in the oceans stands at 1 × 10²³ infections per second, and these viral infections remove 20–40% of all bacterial cells each day. From Microbiology by numbers, Nature Reviews Microbiology, September 2011.
	"Snow flakes are being manufactured in the atmosphere at an astounding rate - around a million billion crystals each second. Every ten minutes that´s enough snow to make an unstoppable army of snowmen, one for every person in the world. Over the Earth´s history, some ten times the mass of the planet has floated down to its surface in the form of tiny ice crystals" - Kennet Libbrecht. The Snowflakes, Winter´s Secret Beatury"
	Giant crystals in a Mexican Cave - up to 12 m in length and 55 tons in weight...
	Planet Earth´s representant for honey bees ....image from David Ertl/WDR, Germany. For more enjoyable information go to http://www.express.de/bonn/schnellste-biene-bundesbiene-rast-mit-28-000-km-h-durchs-all,2860,27484722.html
	Earth´s location in the observable universe....
	About 10-1000 million kg of meteorites of meteorites strike Earth per year....
	Planets everywhere.... Amount of planets in Universe,discovered so far: 4826 For more information, see e.g. http://exoplanets.org/ To view a larger version of the image, go to: http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1204a/
	A map of so far observed dead stars - to view a larger version of the image, go to: http://www.katiepaterson.org/deadstars/

Source of images: All the images have been downloaded from the internet from various, random sources, for only educational, non-commercial purposes (see list below). If you have any further questions about the sources of these images, please email the webmaster.

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Snottites: Photo A. S. Engel, UTK Knoxville USA, http://eps.utk.edu/faculty/engel.php
https://denkbonus.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/geobacter-kopie.jpg
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