Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it
wasn't always
so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.
How things have changed. (Yours now,
$110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of
two planets and
one moon (with a
second in the works). Actually,
we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.
Maybe Not.
posted by absalom
on Jan 27, 2005 -
17 comments
NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory
recently detected [reg required] the largest explosion ever detected in the universe: an eruption releasing the energy of hundreds of millions of
gamma ray bursts. Just to put it in perspective, a single
GRB releases enough radiation to
wipe out just about everything human beings would require for survival in a 1000 light year radius. (The Milky Way spans ~100,000 light years, while the
United Federation of Planets spans about 8,000). Arthur C. Clarke has gone so far as suggesting that GRBs might be one of the reasons for Extra-Terrestrial silence:
Gamma Ray Bursts are so large and inescapable, a single one would wipe out even an enormous galactic empire. Makes
killer asteroids seem downright
quaint.
posted by absalom
on Jan 8, 2005 -
24 comments
