“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
-Neil Armstrong
I work in a job where my specialty is… information. And “helping” people, sadly, not hoarding the information as I should be doing. So people come in, they have questions and curiosities, and I try to help them out, and in turn, it helps me out. The desire for knowledge, to always know more, is the first step towards seeing the hidden map of the world, and as cliche as it is, even a moron’s stupid question can be enlightening about something.
The other day a man came in asking for help trying to find pictures of the Earth and the moon, all in relation to the rest of the solar system. He was really quite insistent about this, in fact. I warned him that it might not be the easiest thing to find, not impossible, but not easy, and I mentioned this because he kept telling me what a hurry he was in. But we gave it a look and…
Most pictures of the solar system of planets we reside in just don’t include our moon, or most other moons, matter of fact. Our moon is just too small to make it to that scale, for one reason, and for another, it’s a glimpse at planets, not their orbiting moons. I tried to explain this to him, but he was still hung up on my earlier attempt to explain to him that the planets themselves orbit and rotate around the sun (which, in turn, rotates around the center of our galaxy, which rotates will all the other galaxies, etc.), and finally he allowed me to ask an all too important question: “What exactly are you looking for and why?”
He mentioned that he had heard President Obama speaking earlier in the day about how we were going to Mars next and that Obama was going to fund it. Having seen parts of that particular speech, I tried to tell the guy that I think he had misheard what it was exactly that Obama had said, but he was convinced: Obama was going to direct NASA to go to Mars next. I then tried to explain that that was not going to be an easy mission. The trip alone would be a matter of years, in fact. And that’s one way. All this logic and reason didn’t impress this man though. His next question: “So how far away is the Moon?”
Off the top of my head, I guessed that it was about 250, 000 miles. I wasn’t terribly far off, but the guy distrusted the velocity of my answer. I said, “Trust me, I know a little something about the moon,” but he didn’t like that answer either. And, well, I guess I didn’t blame him.
But again, I pressed for him to continue with the why of all this and he told me that he was tired of being curious about the larger universe and not being able to add anything to the search to answer all those questions man had. So, he wanted to add his unique brain to this particular quest, the quest for Mars. “How so?” I asked. And he told me that he wanted to write a letter to NASA and suggest to them, since he couldn’t figure out how far the moon was from the Earth or where it was in relation to the Earth and Mars, that a manned mission to Mars shouldn’t launch from Earth towards the red planet, but instead, it should launch from the moon!
I thought about explaining about how that wouldn’t really make sense or cut down on time or fuel or… well, anything, really. And I didn’t add that it would add a mountain of costs on top of a continent of costs that would already lead to a mission towards Mars. I just smiled and nodded my head and said, “Sounds great.”
As Hemingway said, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” And there are something like 6 billion people on this planet, and though I don’t know the exact statistics of it, I’m willing to bet that at least something like 60% of those people are fucking morons. Just gloriously stupid people walking around, watching TV, and procreating like there is no tomorrow. But some of them are curious about things and want to help, even if they are years late to the party. I think I admire that. I should be talking about other things on Earth Day, like ecological preservation and shit like that, but I don’t know that Earth Day is really solving that problem. We’re either too stupid and oblivious of the problems our planet has, the problems we tend to be the cause of, but we’re curious and we want to help. Actions make speak louder than words, but this is the internet. Outside of LOLcats, stock quotes, music, videos of fat people getting hit in the nuts with footballs thrown by children, and pornography, all we have is our words.
“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls.”
You’re wide awake, the time is now, and we’re all living in the future. Up next: Liquid hard drives, jetpacks, giving extraterrestrials reality shows about breaking into the music industry, and death rays!
Some facts about our friendly little satellite up there:
It’s the belief of science that the moon was created via something called the Big Whack, which sounds like a mafia-themed porno. The gist of it: About 4.6 billion years, not long after our solar system was born, an object the size of Mars probably hit the Earth and large chunks of it split off from the rest of the planet. Some of those chunks mixed with other space junk and started to coalesce into a smaller, larger body, and when cooled, was formed together in the shape of our lovely moon.
That lovely shape, by the way, is not round. It’s more egg-ish. When looking up at the moon, you’re seeing one of the ends pointing at you. That’s what the moonface is. Just like Earth, the moon gets fatter in it’s middle.
“One of these days… POW! Right to the MOON!”
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) launched on June 18 to begin mapping the surface of the moon from orbit with a never been seen clarity of detail. The technology is so fucking good now that it’ll be taking gorgeous pictures of the tracks left in the moon by lunar rovers, and even imaging the Apollo equipment left behind up there. Oh, in case I didn’t mention it, the LRO is a robot, part of the Lunar Precursor Robotic Program. What a lovely sci fi type of name.
And then in a few months time, we’ll have the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which is part of the LPRP, and is intended to crash into Shackleton Crater, on the moon’s south pole. The purpose of that is to kick up dust that’s just been sitting there dormant for something in the neighborhood of 2 billion years and study it. Then, shortly after, they’ll crash another probe into a different spot on the moon and study that.
The above is one of my absolute favorite images of comic art ever. It’s by the wonderfully talent and incredibly tragic Wally Wood. No matter how many accolades he got, for me, it was never enough.
There is actually no dark side of the moon. Well, there will always be The Dark Side of The Moon, cause that’s just a classic, wonderful album, but as far as the actual moon goes: No dark side. There’s the side we can see, and the other side, the far side, which is usually illuminated by the sun. We can’t see it though and we tend to think that things are only lit up by us, but no, it’s there.
But there is more than one of The Far Side out there:
Under the category of things everyone knows: gravity is a lot less on the moon.
The moon is about 27% the size of the Earth and it’s gravity is about 1/6 of ours. If you weigh 300 pounds here on your home planet, you’ll only weigh about 50 up there. Nice, right?
A slight digression from the moon to… Rockets! For a lot of people, celebrating things like Apollo 11 isn’t so much about going to the moon and back, but about rockets. Seriously, just take a google image search at hits for “rocket porn.” Fun stuff.
Dr. Wernher von Braun in his office, from here and here.
And I should add to that digression, one of the fathers of the space going rocket: Werner von Braun. Just look at his office up above. How cool is that? von Braun has always fascinated me, not just because he helped make being a rocket scientist look cool, but his background is still so interesting and full of intrigued. He was one of the many scientists snatched away from the Nazis at the end of World War II and was a prominent name on the Osenberg list and in Operation Paperclip. And thanks to him, we escaped Earth’s gravity and finally went to space and to the moon.
There’s moonquakes! The Apollo 11 and following missions left some seismographic equipment on the moon that monitored until the 70s when it was shut off, but showed that the moon does do a little shake, rattling, and rolling. Good thing to keep in mind for when we start building moon bases.
As things tend to always go in my life, the moon is leaving us. But slowly. It drifts away from the Earth about 3.8 cm a year.
The drift into space is actually caused by the Earth’s tides, which the moon itself regulates. High tides, spring tides, I’m not going to pretend to fully understand all of it, nor be able to explain it properly, but here’s how it works. And the moon does steal a bit of our rotational energy, slowly the spinning of the Earth down about a milisecond every year. Story of my life.
At some point, we’re going to go back to the moon (and mind you, we haven’t been back there since the 70s, so it could have reverted back to being made of cheese!), but in a big way, possibly setting up the aforementioned moonbases and having astronauts living up there for months at a time. It’s a notion that gets a lot of criticism since it would be beyond extremely costly and we’re living in harsh economic times, but on the other hand, we seem to have gently drifted into the beginnings of another space race with the Russians and the Chinese. And everyone wants to knock the moon notch off their belts once more before heading to Mars.
Mars would be cool, to sound like a geeky little kid (which, honestly, is what I really, really am). But Luna? I still love ya. And not just because you gave us the setting for this excellent book:
Studies found that obese women have as many sex partners as non-obese women, that obese men have fewer sex partners than non-obese men, and that men will spend more money on a date with a lady in red. Researchers discovered that handsome fathers pass on pretty faces to daughters but not to sons, and that facial scars make men more appealing to women for short-term but not long-term relationships, with women preferring scars that suggest violence or trauma rather than acne or chicken pox. Roosters that have had sex recently make more noise at dawn, and male antelopes click their knees loudly to demonstrate sexual prowess. Entomologists found that sex between male flour beetles may allow the males, by dribbling semen onto their partners, to impregnate the females those males later have sex with. San Francisco scientists grew a new prostate in a mouse from a single stem cell. Monoga mous male mice were found to be less likely to suf fer from diabetes than were their polyamorous counterparts, and an elephant in Texas came down with a fatal case of herpes. After thirty-six years of celibacy, George, the last living Pinta Island tortoise, mated. Dutch researchers identified a premature-ejaculation gene.
Severely depressed pregnant women are twice as likely to give birth prematurely, and infants warmed in incubators are less likely to be depressed as adults. Proto-humans may have learned to create fire as early as 790,000 years ago. Middle-aged white Americans were killing themselves at a higher rate, and a third of heart attacks worldwide were blamed on unhealthy Western eating habits. Computer scientists who hijacked part of a large spam network established that one in 12.5 million junk emails results in a sale. Neurologists found that many people’s brains contain a designated neuron for identifying Jennifer Aniston. Scientists studying a stalagmite in Wangxiang Cave linked the fall of China’s Ming, Tang, and Yuan dynasties to weak monsoons. An Indian probe, Chandrayaan I, landed on the moon, and NASA’s solar- powered Phoenix lander on Mars went dead with the coming of the Martian winter. Global warming may stop Norwegian lemmings from jumping off cliffs.
The passages above are from the “Findings” section in the January 2009 issue of Harper’s and were written by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi. The image at the top of the page is Untitled (three men standing), 2007, by Johannes Kahrs, and was also used in that issue of Harper’s.
Ugh. Lost is a repeat tonight . Wasn’t the whole point of these 24-style super runs in bunches that there would be a signifigant lack of repeats? Guess not (supposedly there’ll be another break week after episode 12). But now I can’t wait for next week’s episode, entitled “Namaste,” not so much for the reunion of Sawyer and Kate, but for the continuation of the 1970′s Geronimo Jackson dance party!
from here.
by Kelly Reemtsen, from here.
from here.
via Boing Boing.
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Visualizing the deletion process on Wikipedia.
from here.
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The Crescent Earth, from
“One of these days… POW! Right to the MOON!”
The above is one of my absolute favorite images of comic art ever. It’s by the wonderfully talent and incredibly tragic 
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