The Worlds We Might Live On 2019
The globe is a quintessential educational prop, the icon of school classrooms the world over, high on a shelf; a model of the place where every creature who has ever lived knows as home.
Contemporary astronomy calls the uniqueness of the Earth into serious question as Earth-like planets in the the so-called Goldilocks Zone continue to be discovered, other worlds with the physical conditions to potentially harbor life of the kind we are familiar with.
Many fantasize about re-locating to one of these unreachable planets - for the sake of adventure and manifest destiny, or in case we succeed in our present trajectory of laying waste to this current one. Others propose we somehow transform a planet devoid of any of the many conditions into one that can support us. We live in a perpetual science-fiction fantasy about the worlds we might live on, all the while neglecting this perfectly fine one.
Go to the companion works in Theory of the Earth Volume IV :
- Deep Time Library & Archive
- Text and Texture, Books of Nature
- Worlds We Might Live On
- Earth, 1934 (definition, Dust Bowl)
- Our Planet-Sized Fact (average global temperature change, 1895–2018, after Ed Hawkins)