ESP Biography

Did you know that there are as many coronavirus particles in an infected person as the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy? Yet, all the coronavirus produced in the past year weighs less than a gallon of water! Life on Earth is described by vastly different scales than our own. In this class we will come to grips with these scales by making comparisons to things more familiar to ourselves: How many movies could be stored in your genome? How much space in a cell does your genome occupy? What organisms produce most of the oxygen on Earth? In the process, we’ll gain humbling new perspectives about life and its evolution on Earth.