If you’ve ever looked up at the moon, what you see is a pocked-marked satellite that is obviously old and worn. By contrast, Planet Earth looks refreshingly youthful. “Earth owes its youthful appearance to the fact that its outermost layer is constantly renewing itself, hiding its age,” says Henry Reich of MinuteEarth. In this episode, Reich discusses Earth’s age and how scientists go about dating a planet.
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Everything we know about Earth’s surface says we should be bone dry, yet our planet is 70 percent water. So where did all the moisture come from. Henry Reich reveals the unusual source that made us wet and wild in this version of MinuteEarth.
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About 45 million years ago, this rock that we live on coalesced from the dust and debris left over from the formation of our sun. And the rest, according to MinuteEarth, is a brief but entertaining history of our planet.
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Six-hundred million years ago Earth was basically composed of three huge landmasses and a lot of water. Then the planet evolved into seven continents as the Earth’s crustal plates shifted and collided over long periods of time. In this edition of SpaceRip, see what Planet Earth will look like in 100 million years.
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Astronaut Jerry Carr knows space. As commander of Skylab, he spent more than 2,000 hours in space, orbiting the Earth over 1,000 times. Recounting his life story, Carr remembers the enchanting years he spent at NASA in an animated video from TEDEducation.
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How could we save the planet if an asteroid was careening toward Earth? Nuke the rogue Earth-crosser? How about bombarding the asteroid with millions of paintballs? That’s actually a legitimate option, or at least one being considered by the United Nations’ Space Generation Advisory Council and explored in this edition of SourceFed.
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Behold the Earth through the vantage point of the International Space Station. This newly released time-lapse reel from NASA shows scenes captured from orbit of lightning strikes, auroras and brightly lit cities as they swirl in and out of focus. H/T Geek Press
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