COVID-19: The Most Amazing Creature on Planet Earth

From Worldometer, I have adjusted this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

May   1         0    269   1897      281          113               1        5624
          2         0    474    1691     276            76               2        5215
          3         0    174    1154     164            54               0        3481
          4         0    195    1324     164          127               2        4096
          5         0    236    2350     185              ?               2        5787
          6         0    369    2528     244          282               1        6811

          7         0    274    2129     213          117               1        5589
          8         0    243    1687     229          118               0        5550
          9         0    194    1422     179            39               0        4248
        10         0    165      750     143            20               0        3510
        11         0    179    1008     123            92               0        3403
        12         0    172    1630     176            77               2        5328
        13         0    195    1772     184          123               1        5314

Summary:

• Not a particularly good day for Humanity, for new deaths mostly went up, save for China and South Korea.
• The new death rate for the USA is increasing (750...1008...1630...1772), with Brazil the second worst yesterday at 754 new deaths.
• Brazil also has the second most new cases with 11,555, to the USA with 21,712.

• Those Senate and House hearings this week further nailed Trump's COVID-19 coffin, especially highlighted by Dr. Richard Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, who early on was a pain in the ear for the Administration, expressing concern from February about personal protective equipment, testing and pace of vaccine development, leading to his demotion and subsequent whistleblower status.

Switching to part 3 of my virus story, following up on an introduction 20 March 2020 and elaboration yesterday (scroll down to next article).  Today, the conclusion.

The most amazing creatures on Planet Earth are either us (Homo sapiens) or viruses or dinosaurs.  But let's eliminate the latter because they largely became extinct, and are now mostly birds.

Viruses could well be why we are even here, for giant viruses might have been our link to the origin of life.  A pithovirus (left) has been speculated to have initiated cellular life.

I will largely give away the punchline to the above title here:

If all the 1×1031 viruses on earth were laid end to end, 

they would stretch for 100 million light years. 

Here's how humans compare.  Say each human is 5 feet 4 inches tall.  Actually, we're shorter when we consider babies, etc.  But, let's be generous to us.  So laying every human end to end, we stretch out about 8 million miles.  Wow!  We can go to the Moon and come back 33.5 times.  However, that long line would only get us 8.6% to our Sun, which is 93 (varies from 91 to 94) million miles away.

The furthest we have sent out a satellite is Voyager 1, still traveling at 38,000 miles/hour, the fastest anything made by humans has ever travelled.  No commercial jetliner gets close to that, nor the speed of sound, which is 767 MPH.  But a bullet can travel as fast as 1800 MPH.

Voyager 1 was launched 43 years ago and left our solar system in 2012, a distance of 11.25 billion miles.  Today it is 14 billion miles away.  But the closest star is Alpha Centauri, 25 trillion miles away.  Were Voyager 1 heading in that direction (it is not), it would take more than 6,000 years to get to that nearest star.

So how do humans compare to viruses in terms of dominance?  First of all, some are unfamiliar that one light year is a measurement of distance:  six trillion miles.  So multiply that by 100 million, and you get the length of all the viruses laid end to end.  This distance is so long that I need to lead up to the conclusion.  First of all, light, something that moves 18,000 times faster than Voyager 1, takes 100,000 light years to travel just from one end of our Universe to the other.

Homo sapiens were early in our evolutionary state 100,000 years ago.  Remember, farming was invented only 10,000 years ago, and Jesus Christ appeared about 2,000 years ago.

But a hundred million light years, the length of our viruses laid end to end, is a thousand times longer than the diameter of our Milky Way.  There are 50,000 galaxies within 100 million light years from us, with a total of 200 trillion suns (or stars).

In summary, then, all the viruses on Planet Earth laid end to end would stretch from one end of the circle in the visual above to the other.  Actually, I was being conservative by using those data.  Others have calculated that the length of all the viruses extend 250 billion light years long.  That is as far as Earth is from the Perseus Cluster.

In conclusion, we would not be here were it not for viruses.  Then, too, viruses have flourished from the beginning of life to the present.  Dinosaurs did well, existing for 165 million years.  Us?  Way less than a million.  As you gloat over being the most successful specie in the world, you might want to pause about us being superior to an entity that might not be alive.

Moving along to my daily feature, tracing my life, the year is 1982.  I was still in Washington, D.C

Senator Matsunaga wanted me to stay with him, but University of Hawaii President Fudge Matsuda wrote to me and said if I didn't return, for the three year leave period was soon to expire, I would lose my tenure.  Frankly, life in the U.S. Senate was too consuming, so I took the easier path and came home to the Manoa Campus.

This turned out to be a real estate circus, for we had purchased a condominium where we lived through those years, but had won a lottery selection for a penthouse overlooking the Potomac River and the Washington Monument, where construction was just about to finish, to be accompanied by an adjacent Metro station also close to completion.  It would have made getting to work and back a lot easier.  In Hawaii, our penthouse was leased for another year.

However, in an incredible series of minor miracles, we were able to get into a Craigside penthouse only because it became available the morning I went searching, for I had temporarily gone back to Hawaii to prepare for our return.  Our six neighbors on our floor were all part owners of the building.  First Hawaiian Bank looked at our financial status and noted that we really couldn't afford another property, but learning that I was working for Senator Matsunaga, merely said, sign here.  I lived there for 32 years until moving into 15 Craigside six years ago.

Working in DC and getting to know congressional members/staff plus the process, and Federal officials, clearly made a huge difference in my academic life.  I was pretty much the only one at the University of Hawaii with this experience.  I was subsequently selected as directors of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and Environmental Center, leading to Dean of Engineering Paul Yuen and I creating our own funding agency, the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research.  With considerable congressional assistance, we funneled a hundred million dollars into the state from the U.S. and Japan, with no interference from the university.  Created were mega-projects leading to the first ocean thermal energy conversion plant to produce net-positive electricity at the Natural Laboratory of Hawaii Authority on the Big Island and a biomass to methanol facility on Maui.

In 14 minutes, here are Billboard's top 100 songs of 1982.  It was also a memorable year:

• On January 13, when I was still working in the Senate, it was snowing all day, and Air Florida 90 crashed in the Potomac, killing 78.  Coincidentally, the Metro train line I caught derailed, killing three people, the system's first fatal accident.  I couldn't get home until past midnight.

• Within that same week, all four Thunderbirds crashed in Nevada, killing all four pilots.
• The San Francisco 49ers led by Joe Montana won its first NFL championship.  Later in the year, players went on strike, reducing the number of games from 16 to 9.
• In February Japan Airlines 350 crashed in Tokyo Bay, killing 24.

• March 10:  all 9 planets on the same side aligned with the Sun.  A closer syzygy of 8 planets (Pluto is no longer one) will occur in 2492.
• UK invades Falkland Islands, where a study earlier that year was selected as the safest place on Earth to live.  The war went on for 74 days.
• I went to give a talk in Minnesota and the town closed down because of a snowstorm...the first snowfall of the entire year!

• I went to the Worlds Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Next?  Dubai this year and early next.
• Weather Channel airs for first time.
• Movie ET became the biggest box-office hit for the rest of the decade.
• Prince William born.  He will be 38 this year.
• Dow Jones Industrials reached an all-time high at 1065.  Note, though, that it was 1052 in 1973.  In February the Dow almost ended at 30,000, but has since dropped to 23,500 or so.

• The infamous Cal-Stanford football game where Cal completed a 57-yard kickoff return for victory when time ran out with five laterals and mowing through the Stanford band into the end zone.
• Time's Man of the Year was the computer, the first time awarded to a non-human.
• ABBA makes final public appearance.

Here are all the ABBA hits in less than 8 minutes.  Not enough?  Another 58 minutes of ABBA.

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Typhoon Vong Fong, the first ocean storm this season, is now at 100 MPH and just slammed into the Philippines.  The path will then be on a northeast track, moving through the country, and heading towards Taiwan.

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