Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nature refers to the laws, elements, and phenomena of the physical world, including life. The word is borrowed from the Old French nature and derived from the Latin natura, meaning essential qualities or innate disposition, which in ancient times literally meant birth. The Latin term translated the Greek physis, which first described the intrinsic characteristics of plants, animals, and other features of the world.
Earth is estimated to have formed 4.54 billion years ago from the solar nebula, along with the Sun and other planets. The Moon formed roughly 20 million years later. The molten outer layer cooled into a solid crust, and condensing water vapor, mostly from ice delivered by comets, produced the oceans.
Water covers 71 percent of the Earth's surface. Oceans hold 96.5 percent of surface water, glaciers and polar ice caps hold 2.4 percent, and other land surface water such as rivers and lakes holds 1 percent. The smallest freshwater reserve is the 0.1 percent found in the atmosphere.
Life on Earth is known to have occurred at least 3.5 billion years ago, during the hadean or archean eons. A self-replicating molecule is believed to have appeared around 4 billion years ago. Multicellular life began to proliferate about 530 to 540 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion.
Humans make up a minuscule proportion of living biomass but have a disproportionately large effect on nature. A 2020 study in the journal Nature found that human-made materials now outweigh all living biomass, and roughly 1 million species are threatened with extinction within decades. A 2021 study found only about 3 percent of the planet's terrestrial surface remains ecologically and faunally intact.
The major oceanic divisions, in descending order of size, are the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean. Together they form one global, interconnected body of salt water often called the World Ocean, covering about 361 million square kilometers with average salinity around 35 parts per thousand.
The visible components of the universe are now believed to compose only 4.9 percent of its total mass. The remainder is thought to consist of 26.8 percent cold dark matter and 68.3 percent dark energy, whose exact nature is still under investigation by physicists.