According to the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD+5, 1999) 27,000 or more living organisms (plant and animal) become extinct each year. Extinction has not occurred at this speed/scale since the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

airplanes took off for the skies...

Adding up the figures for the number of takeoffs and landings from major airports around the world published by the International Civil Aviation Organization (http://www.icao.org/) for the year 1995, and dividing by two, yields 7,739,700 takeoffs. As smaller airports and cargo flights were not included, the actual total is probably much higher.

land mines were dismantled...

Websites such as, http://www.landmines.org/GlobalCrisis/MineFacts/index.htm do not give figures for the number of mines dismantled. Association for Aid and Relief, Japan (http://www.aarjapan.gr.jp) vice president Tadamasa Fukiura, however, mentions something to the effect of removing 100,000 mines per year, in his commentary for the picture book "Not mines but Flowers."

Europe moved mm northeast...

Strictly speaking, different areas of Europe move different degrees. Germany moves north but 0.1mm/year, which is virtually static. Despite being on the same Eurasian plate, the region near China moves southeast, while Europe moves northeast--an interesting discovery. Data is obtained via GPS (Global Positioning System), and/or VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry), the process of measuring distance and movement on earth by reference to radio signals from distant stars (http://lupus.gsfc.nasa.gov/plots/maps/gif/World_Wide_Totals.gif ). Other interesting shifts include: the Atlantic Ocean widening up to 2cm/yr, North America and Europe being 15m further apart than they were when Columbus sailed in 1492, the Greek Islands moving away from the rest of Europe 40mm/yr, and Hawaii moving west 6.4cm/yr.

The world population increased by ...

According to the United States Department of Commerce website, (http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/pcwe), the world population increases at a rate of 76,987,204 per year, or an average of 2.4 people per second.

stars ceased to shine...

According to "Dokyumento choshinsei bakuhatsu (Document supernova explosions)" by Haruo Nomoto, there is one supernova explosion every 50 years in a single galactic system. As there are an estimated 125 billion galaxies in the universe, simple arithmetic yields an average of 79 stars dying out every second.

the average temperature around the world rose degrees...

According to World Meteorological Organization (WMO; http://www.wmo.ch/ ) reference data at http://www.tabisland.ne.jp/future/nature/warm01.htm, the average temperature of the world has increased by 0.5 degrees over the past 40 years.

refrigerators were produced...

According to "Sekai kokusei zue 1999/2000" (Kokuseisha) the number of refrigerators produced worldwide in 1996 was 60,684,000, an average of 1.9 per second. By comparison the number of washing machines was 49,463,000 (1.5/sec), and televisions 137,141,000 (4.3/sec), surpassing that of human births (4.2/sec)!

people died of starvation...

According to The Hunger Site (http://www.thehungersite.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/HungerSite) 0.3 people starve to death every second; 75% of those are children under the age of six.

quadrillion neutrinos emitted from the sun passed through your body...

Neutrinos are subatomic particles, the properties of which are yet to be fully explained. According to High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (http://ccwww.kek.jp/public/topics/k2k/k2k-1.html), 10 trillion neutrinos--generated and emitted by hydrogen nuclear fusion reactions of the sun--pass through our bodies every second. From the perspective of these minute particles, our bodies are a vast open space.

The alps rose mm...

We encountered http://homepage.boku.ac.at/h9440283/eindex.htm in a web search through which we inquired about the rise of the alps. Their answer... "The rising of the Central Alps has been well quantified at about 1mm/year (movement of the Adriactic plate causes squeezing and upthrusting)"; although there are areas where there is almost no rise at all. By comparison, the Himalayas rise 4 mm/year. Also of interest:
http://www.platetectonics.com/
http://pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/dynamic.html

babies were born without citizenship....

A countless number of people live without citizenship in any country. World War II, the dissolution of federation states, and a rise in ethnic consciousness, among other circumstances, have contributed to worldwide increases. Although extremely difficult to define, statistics published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR; http://www.unhcr.ch/statist/98oview/intro.htm) for 1998 show an estimated 1,357,810 persons. Their children have no citizenship from birth, hence cannot leave the country, and receive no public health or educational benefits. Adding an estimated 8,000,000 Rroma (Gypsies) in Europe (UNHCR World Refugee White Paper 1997/98), and dividing this by the average world birthrate of 22.6% (Imidas'99), yields a (very roughly) estimated 2,114,865 babies born each year without citizenship.

tons of space dust fell to earth...

According to "Incredible Comparisons" by Russell Ash, the total amount of asteroid fragments forming meteorites, dust from comets forming shooting stars, and other particles that do not burn up completely upon entering the atmosphere that fall to earth from outer space reaches 40,000 tons per year. A truism, but... the sky really is connected to outer space!

languages disappeared from the world...

There are presently as many as 6760 languages in the world, although 96% of humanity uses only 269 (4%) of them. Specialists predict 95 to 100 percent of the remaining 6491 will probably vanish within 100 years, which through simple averaging yields a rate of 62 languages per year. There are a number of websites on the subject of endangered languages including,
http://www.sal.tohoku.ac.jp/~gothit/diversity.html

The earth flew km on its orbit around the sun...

According to the visual dictionary, "Universe" (A Dorling Kindersley Book), the earth travels at an orbital velocity of 29.79km/sec. Please also visit Sensorium's "Star Place"

The border between day and night shifted this far along the earth's surface...**

The circumference of the earth at the equator is about 40,000 km; the sun's shadow traverses the earth's surface at a rate of approximately 1700km/hour, or 460m/sec (numerical values for the equatorial region on the solstices).

You breathed approximately this much air...**

According to "Incredible Comparisons" by Russell Ash, people take about 15 breaths per minute, inhaling and exhaling about 500 sq. cm in each breath. In a life span of 75 years, a person breathes approximately 300,000 sq. meters of air. Amounts vary slightly by age and sex.