Light travels very quickly, about 30 million metres per second, but that is only when traveling through a vacuum. Now we know how fast light is let us get some figures of relative relevance. If you were to perform the calculations you would find that light takes all of eight minutes to get from the sun to the earth.
That is 150 million kilometres in not very long at all, that is however, far from the full story. Light is not made on the surface of the sun, instead it emerges from the core of the sun, which is a little bit further.
Using the previous figures we find that is should only take an extra 3 seconds to escape the sun and head for earth, unfortunately light doesn’t always travel at light speed. It slows down occasionally, especially when it hits stuff. Unfortunately for the little rays of light the sun happens to be made of stuff. This changes the whole deal rather substantially.
In 1971 a small group of Soviet Scientists were rooting around the small village of Dervaza. The village crucially lies in the Ahal Province of Turkmenistan, an area known for its abundance in one useful resource… Natural Gas. They found it. A site was identified next to the village and preparations were made for the drilling rig and camp to be set up on site, so as to facilitate the gathering of the sweet combustible resource.
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There is the misconception that the largest creature on Earth is the Blue Whale. Measuring in at 180,000kg it is certainly a sizeable beast but it is far from the largest. For the larger creatures we must delve into the world of super-organisms. Many individuals connected to form a single whole. The largest of these, that has so far been discovered, is a forest made only of one tree. Pando.