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earth

FOR WRITERS: A Paucity of Earths

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FOR WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Jim Comer: Earthlike worlds are in a distinct minority in our galaxy. Space travel is likelier to take us to worlds where we’ll live in tunnels and caves. Who has used this in their fiction? Who’s assumed it as a norm? How is life different? Writers: This is a writer chat – you are welcome to share your own book/link, as long as it fits the chat, but please do so as part of a discussion about the topic. Join the chat: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABV MeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf

The Corona Virus Is Making the Earth Vibrate Less

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Earth - pixabay

Once-crowded city streets are now empty. Highway traffic has slowed to a minimum. And fewer and fewer people can be found milling about outside. Global containment measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus have seemingly made the world much quieter. Scientists are noticing it, too. Around the world, seismologists are observing a lot less ambient seismic noise — meaning, the vibrations generated by cars, trains, buses and people going about their daily lives. And in the absence of that noise, Earth’s upper crust is moving just a little less. Thomas Lecocq, a geologist and seismologist at the Royal Observatory … Read more

Is There Dark Matter Inside the Earth?

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super collider

Dark matter is a hypothetical component to our universe, used to explain many strange behaviors of stars and galaxies. Despite the almost overwhelming evidence that dark matter does indeed exist, we still don’t know what it’s made of. Detectors scattered around the world have been operating for decades, trying to catch the faint trace of a passing dark matter particle, but to no avail. A new paper offers an alternative approach: dig deep. We know that dark matter exists through a variety of astronomical observations. Stars are orbiting the centers of their galaxies too fast. Galaxies are whizzing around inside … Read more

SCIENCE: The Global Ocean

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open ocean - pixabay

What did Earth look like 3.2 billion years ago? New evidence suggests the planet was covered by a vast ocean and had no continents at all. Continents appeared later, as plate tectonics thrust enormous, rocky land masses upward to breach the sea surfaces, scientists recently reported. They found clues about this ancient waterworld preserved in a chunk of ancient seafloor, now located in the outback of northwestern Australia. Around 4.5 billion years ago, high-speed collisions between dust and space rocks formed the beginnings of our planet: a bubbling, molten sphere of magma that was thousands of miles deep. Earth cooled … Read more

SPACE: We May Have a MiniMoon!

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minimoon - pixabay

Tumbling through Earth’s increasingly crowded orbit are about 5,000 satellites, half a million pieces of human-made debris and only one confirmed natural object: the moon. Now, astronomers working out of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory think they may have discovered a second natural satellite — or at least a temporary one. Meet 2020 CD3, Earth’s newest possible “minimoon.” A minimoon, also known as a temporarily captured object, is a space rock that gets caught in Earth’s orbit for several months or years before shooting off into the distant solar system again (or burning up in our planet’s atmosphere). Related: … Read more

Thought Experiment: What If Earth Were Supersized?

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Super Earth - Yay Images

For nearly four years, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft whisked through space, surveying our corner of the galaxy. It monitored more than 150,000 stars, looking for planets about the size of Earth that belonged to other solar systems. The mission didn’t disappoint; Kepler found countless examples of a type of planet known as a super-Earth. These faraway planets might remind you of home — they’re rocky, smaller than gas giants, located near their star and sport a relatively thin atmosphere. But they’re way larger than the blue marble: These super-Earths are a honking two to 10 times bigger in mass than our … Read more

SPACE: Has Life From Earth Already Gone to the Stars?

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A pair of Harvard astrophysicists have proposed a wild theory of how life might have spread through the universe. Imagine this: Millions or billions of years ago, back when the solar system was more crowded, a giant comet grazed the outer reaches of our atmosphere. It was moving fast, several tens of miles above the Earth’s surface — too high to burn up as a fireball, but low enough that the atmosphere slowed it down a little bit. Extremely hardy microbes were floating up there in its path, and some of those bugs survived the collision with the ball of … Read more

SPACE: Earth From the Moon

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earth from moon - deposit photo

If you lived on the moon, you’d have to give up lots of things you take for granted on Earth. The feeling of your feet planted firmly on the ground. Your ability to breathe outside without a helmet. And your night-sky view. Humans have spent millennia staring up at the moon, watching it rise and set, charting its phases as it grows and shrinks each month. But from the viewpoint of the moon, how would the Earth look hanging in the sky? Well, first, that depends on where you’re standing. The moon is tidally locked with Earth, meaning the moon’s … Read more

FOR READERS & WRITERS: Fantasy on Earth

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light - fantasy - pixabay

FOR READERS & WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Jana Denardo: For writers, if you’re writing magical settings on earth, do you prefer to keep them segregated from the “normal” humans (Harry Dresden, Harry Potter)? Or do you like to fully integrate them (Sorcerer to the Crown, Temeraire (okay dragons but still)? More importantly, if it’s the latter, how do you handle the integration? Readers, which do you prefer, and why? Writers: This is a reader/writer chat – you are welcome to share your own book/link, as long as it fits the chat, but please do so as part … Read more

Let’s Move the Earth

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Earth - pixabay

In the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, recently released on Netflix, humanity attempts to change the Earth’s orbit using enormous thrusters in order to escape the expanding sun — and prevent a collision with Jupiter. The scenario may one day come true. In five billion years, the sun will run out of fuel and expand, most likely engulfing the Earth. A more immediate threat is a global warming apocalypse. Moving the Earth to a wider orbit could be a solution — and it is possible in theory. But how could we go about it and what are the … Read more