Biodiversity - Challenges and Opportunities

Gadagkar, Raghavendra (1995) Biodiversity - Challenges and Opportunities. In: Seminar on United Nations for a Better World, 26-28th June, Bangalore,India.

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Abstract

The most reliable guess of scientists is that the universe, as we know today, began as a great explosion of truly cosmic proportions about 25 billion years ago. Before this explosion, all matter of the universe is believed to have existed as a highly condensed "cosmic egg". This explosion, somewhat moderately termed the "big bang" is expected to have sent the matter in the "cosmic egg" flying out into the universe to form countless numbers of stars. Many such groups of stars constitute a galaxy and galaxies are known to be clustered into groups. Our own so-called cluster of galaxies called the "local group" consists of some 24 galaxies one of which is milkyway. The milkyway itself consists of over a hundred billions of stars one of which deserves special attention - this is what we call the sun. The sun, being one of these millions of stars , has 9 plnets revolving around it. The third such palnet, counted by distance from the sun is the earth , an approximately spherical body with a diameter of 12,754 kms and a surface area of over 510 million sq.kms. As far as we know our earth is the only planet among the many hundreds of billions that must be around, to possess that remarkable entity called Life.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences
Date Deposited:	09 Jan 2007
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 04:33
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/9243

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