Forecast calls for Moonquakes and Light Wishful Thinking

The problem with planetary science or astronomy is that the word "recent" doesn't mean anything to the average human being. Here's why.


1. First imagine one egg. (Not the yolkless kind.)


2. Now imagine 12 eggs.


3. Now imagine 12 million eggs.


I got lost imagining at about 12 eggs. The reason is because we group things. I substituted 12 eggs for a dozen. If you said to me, "Guess what! I have 50 trillion cells in my body!" I wouldn't imagine 50 trillion cells, I would imagine one body. So when I see an article titled "Moon's Scarred Crust Hints at Recent Activity", I get excited and then I get disappointed. Because the "recent" earthquake was 50 million years ago.


I thought for a moment that maybe, just maybe, the Moon was still barely warm enough to have tectonic activity. It's not. It's dead. But it did have earthquakes! 50 million years ago, that is.


The thing is, I want them to say "The moon had an Earthquake YESTERDAY!" Now that would be news. Not 27 pound lobster news. Not $4/gallon for gas  news or $5000 and a trip to Hawaii if you eat astronaut food for 4 months news or Google making Smartphone glasses news. But it would definitely EPIC SPACE NEWS.


Soon, I hope, there will be less of "we found a planet 100 million light years away! With water!" and more of "OMG Dinosaurs on Titan!"


For now, however, I guess I will just have to be satisfied with 50 million year old moon quakes.

How to Survive the End of the World

The first trick to surviving the end of the world is knowing exactly what will happen--telling the future, if you will. Luckily, I, by my great mental prowess and my ability to use Google Search, know exactly what will happen in 11 months and 14 days.

First, the Mayan Calendar will end on December 21, 2012. The calendar began in 3,114 BC and has not stopped ticking for over 5,000 years. Its end marks the Y2K of multiple millenniums as well as the end of the human race, a polar shift, violent earthquakes, and a Venus transit (Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun).

Next, the planet Niribu will return, a planet with a super long and super elliptical orbit that passes through every 3000+ years. On this planet lives a race called the Annunaki, a race who long ago encouraged us to be more civilized, after they enslaved us. They will probably enslave us again. If not, then the return of their planet will probably throw Earth off its axis or they crash into us.

As Niribu approaches, the sun will begin to have massive solar storms. These massive solar flares and spouts will have a dreadful impact on our communications networks and our satellite systems. The massive disruptions in the sun's magnetic field will cause a magnetic field about-face here on Earth. This will cause nuclear power plants to meltdown. That can't be good. For your instruction, take a look at this picture of the sun, borrowed from the National Geographic website:

It's beautiful. But it will probably kill us.

(On the bright side, we are sending the first commercial flight to the space station next month!)

The end of the world promises to be horrendous. But I promised you a method for survival. And I have one. It is so great, so stupendous, that no one has thought of it before. It is a method that is beyond comprehension:

Move to Russia.

Why? Russia is a massive continent with few people and a lot of bears. It is frigidly cold, and has large quantities of untapped resources. But really, why Russia?

If the sun explodes, it won't matter where you live. If the sun flares--well, there's no cell phone service in Siberia anyway, so the it won't disrupt communication. If the planet heats up a lot, well, it's cold up there, so it should just warm up to tolerable temperatures. And if there's a nuclear meltdown, the effects probably won't reach all the way up there. And if the Annunaki come to enslave us, they'll go straight to NYC and Tokyo, because that's where all the people are, while you are building the resistance in the middle of nowhere. Plus, you'll have bears on your side. If the poles switch, your compasses will simply aim at the rest of the world instead of spinning around in circles. Earthquakes? Russia's smack dab on the middle of the Eurasian tectonic plate, so they'll just float around while the rest of the world is torn to shreds.

Learn how to farm, move to Russia, and you can ride out the calamity like a surfer on an epic wave.

I will see you there.

Yes. You've got wrinkles, too. Make sure to name them appropriately.

Everyone gets bags under their eyes and wrinkles. Take Dave for example: he's only twenty four, but give him two weeks of working 12 -15 hour days, and suddenly the bags under his eyes are as big as Chandra's twin black holes, the gray hairs around his ears start reproducing exponentially, and he's got Mariana Trench-sized wrinkles.

The word wrinkle is a funny word, especially if you look at it too long. Like this:

WRINKLE

Or say it too many times like this:

wrinklewrinklewrinklewrinklewrinklewrinklewrinkle

See what I mean? If you google the word, the first thing that pops up is an ad for anti-wrinkle cream; the second is Wikipedia, which only discusses wrinkles on the skin (no disambiguation!), and the third is the Merriam-Webster dictionary which explains that the aging process is not the only definition of wrinkle: it's also a change in a customary procedure or innovation.

This morning I experienced a wrinkle. It started with this picture (which is awesome):

As I gazed at the picture I suddenly noticed, in the upper left hand corner, the word "supershell". To my great horror, I had no idea what that was. Wrinkle! 

So, you ask, what did I do? Well, I took my only possible course of action: I googled it. To my horror, once again, there was no Wikipedia article! In fact, there were no articles at all! Only research papers. Research papers are wonderful things, but please tell me how I'm supposed to learn anything from this: 

"H1 aperture synthesis maps of the LMC have revealed an ISM with a turbulent, fractal structure that is self-similar on scales from tens to hundreds of pc [18], likely due to the energy input of OB stars and supernova explosions. "

I kept looking. The whole process is enough to give me wrinkles.

As far as I can tell, a shell is just the outermost blanket of a star, the burning hydrogen. When a star is dying, it blows off this layer (as I explained here). This is also how stellar winds are created. Really, really, really big stars, like the blue supernovas, emit so much gas and dust that they create bubbles of hot gas-- also called stellar wind bubbles, which explode away from the star during its process of fusion reactions. Supershells are the result of a number of stars right next to each other, all exploding hot gas and dust simultaneously. Some scientists suggest that the Gum Nebula is actually a supershell.

So next time you look in a mirror and worry about getting wrinkles, just be glad that when you die you don't explode into giant clouds of gas and dust. Instead, just for posterity, you should name a wrinkle after every person that you know...