Rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions. More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. The total amount of related DNA base pairs on Earth is estimated at 5.0 x 1037, and weighs 50 billion tonnes. In comparison, the total mass of the biosphere has been estimated to be as much as 4 TtC (trillion tons of carbon).
How many species have ever lived on earth?
over five billion species

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Planck was investigating the problem of black-body radiation first posed by Kirchhoff some forty years earlier. It is well known that hot objects glow, and that hotter objects glow brighter than cooler ones. The electromagnetic field obeys laws of motion similarly to a mass on a spring, and can come to thermal equilibrium with hot atoms. The hot object in equilibrium with light absorbs just as much light as it emits. If the object is black, meaning it absorbs all the light that hits it, then its thermal light emission is maximized.
What is required for the electromagnetic field to come to thermal equilibrium?
hot atoms

During World War II, Kansas was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.
During what event did the V-12 program take place?
World War II