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Land-centric

 


When we were kids, we used to talk about digging a hole all the way to China. In my teens the movie The China Syndrome came out. The title comes from a hyperbolic story that if a nuclear meltdown occurs, the reactor contents could melt through the Earth all the way to China. This is clearly a fanciful notion because even if it could melt all the way through the Earth, it would only fall down to the center. It would not start falling up to China. But China is the bigger problem. The point on the opposite side of the Earth from where you are standing is called the antipodes. The antipodal point for almost anywhere in North America would be in the Indian Ocean. And since North America is in the Northern hemisphere, our antipode would be in the southern hemisphere, somewhere between the southern tip of Africa and the southern tip of Australia, and there is a lot of open ocean between those two points.

Since humans live on land, we tend to be prejudiced toward land. We tend to think in terms of land. When we think of Earth, we think of solid ground, after all the word “earth” also means soil. We don’t use the word “earth” to describe water. But the surface of the Earth is 2/3 water. If an alien craft were going to land at a random point on Earth it will be on hard ground (there is that word “land” again. We assume if something is going to “land” it is going to land on land. But the odds are far more likely that it will splash down in the water.)

If I may borrow and do some nifty transposition from Douglas Adams’ the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy here: The ocean is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it is a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts compared to the size of the ocean. And the Pacific Ocean is the largest of all the oceans on Earth. When Magellan decided to cross it to get to the Indies (we won’t even talk about that Columbus guy, who miscalculated so badly that he was fortunate there was a continent in his way) he naturally assumed that crossing the Pacific would three or four days (Magellan. Like everyone else had a land-centric view of the world). It took them almost four months to cross it. At least 30 of the crew perished in the passage.

It is human nature to have a bias toward what you know. We know land, so that’s how we think. It is kind of the same thing with space. The universe is almost entirely empty space. In the words of Douglas Adams “Space is big. Really big . . . “

Star Liner

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