Bill Boom age 10, of Denver Colorado, for his question:
Is the world really getting smaller?
About 180 years ago, it took George Washington several days to make the trip from his home near Washington to meet with his friends in Philadelphia or New York. The early Pilgrims expected an ocean trip of about three months from the old World to the New. And the first automobiles kicked up the dust at the shocking speed of 15 miles per hour.
Today train time from Washington to Philadelphia is under two hours, A. fast plane zooms from Canada to Ireland in about four hours and we have speed laws to keep our high powered autos down to about 70 miles per hour.
The Pilgrim Fathers,._George Washington and those first motorists¬ might indeed think our world has shrunk. But, of course, the distance across the Atlantic has not changed and the very same number of miles separate the Capitol in Washington from Independence Hall in, Philadelphia. And the distance from your front door to the corner is the same when you run it now as it was when you first toddled it.
Faster traveling just seems to make the world smaller though it actually doesn’t. In fact, the world is really getting bigger. Day by day, hour by hour, the round world is adding little bits to itself. This it is a slow process, too slow to show any difference in many hundreds of years. We even wouldn't notice any difference in a million years.
Day and night our earth is bombarded by minute fragments of dust. Ile call them meteors. When they strike our atmospheres they blaze into fire and arch their backs as they plummet to the ground. They are those shooting stars which are so useful for making wishes.
Most of these meteors, captured and pulled down by earth's gravity, turn to cinders and ashes before they reach the grounds A few are big enough to make the whole trip without being entirely burnt up. These strike the ground as solid chunks called meteorites. Most of those add only a few ounces to the weight of the world. Once a big one weighing 36 ton's landed in Greenland and there is one buried in Africa thought to weigh 50 tons.
But the steady weight that is added to the earth is made by the millions and millions of minute meteors that fall every day; True, they are consumed to ashes before they reach the ground but this ash falls in a steady shower. Gradually it sifts down to the earth adding its weight.
Of course, nobody has actually weighed all this meteor ash,, but estimates have been made as to how much fall on the entire earth in an average day. The figure is usually given as between 1000 and 2,000 pounds, This is about as heavy as a fair sized car and would seem a lot if plunked down in one swoop. However, it is spread over the land and oceans of the entire earth and it drifts down gently; When compared with the entire weight of the worlds which is about six billion trillion tons, it hardly counts at all. It wouldn’t change the distance between Philadelphia and Washington in a billion years.