Oh, I get why Jupiter our biggest planet is not here. Because its surface is made from gas, not land
It took me a split second but Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants with really no solid core. It always blows my mind.
Doesn’t Jupiter have a diamond core lol
I guess after searching, that is why we sent Juno to Jupiter?
Being a fan of The Expanse this is really cool. It really puts the size of a lot of the moons and dwarf planets from the series into perspective. Ganymede for example, was used by pregnant mothers in the outer-system because it was large enough to still have an active core and thus a magnetosphere. Shielding the surface from a lot of radiation. Their main food crops were grown there for the same reason.
Io, Callisto, Europa, Eris, Titan, Ceres, and a few others all make appearances too. It's an amazing series, for those who haven't read/seen it, whether you read the books or watch the show.
It’s generally a great series but it reminds me of Wheel of Time, in that some of the main characters are incredibly stupid and don’t seem to get any better. James Holden in particular is one whose stupidity is hard to withstand sometimes. I ended up not being able to finish both of those because of that.
Yeah, most of James' issues are just him trying to do the right thing. He tends to jump in head first at that point.
spoiler
Like him walking into a clearly radioactive room, despite warning signs being everywhere and a literal siren going off. All because he saw some injured/sick people lying on the ground and he didn't hesitate to help.
Or flying the ship into a pile of ruble looking for the hybrid (that doesn't happen in the book).
Holden's favourite book, if I recall correctly, is Don Quixote... but instead of seeing it as a satire of sixteenth century Spain and chivalric tradition he sees the antics of the evidently senile and deranged protagonist as a manual of how to act.
The whole series is Holden tilting at windmills.
They're quite well written and engaging windmills, though, and there's a lot of great Sancho Panzas to accompany and provide a contrast to our knight errand, so it's still a great series.
I guess it's easy to forget just how much smaller Mars is until comparisons like this help put it in perspective.
mars' surface area is approximately as big as earth's land surface area, i.e. everything excluding oceans. since oceans cover a large part of earth's surface, there's that.
I can't readily recall the Earth's actual sq. km surface area, and can't remember ever having heard the figure for Mars. Time to drop into Wikipedia and take a gander, I think.
EDIT: I'll be damned, TIL that the Earth has an area of 510.06 10^6 km², but Mars' is only 144.37 10^6 km², only about 1⁄3 the size (28.3%).
The circumference is roughly 40,000 kilometers. The original definition for a meter was such that 10,000 kilometers was the distance from the equator to the poles (so a quarter of the circumference). They got the math slightly wrong and didn't want to people to think the process was wrong so they didn't correct it. I forget the actual circumference but that is close enough for very rough estimates.
the distance from the equator to the poles is a quarter of the circumference
Damm Earth is big
There really is an xkcd for everything.
Thank you! It looked very XKCD to me, so I was surprised when the source link wasn't to that.
Edit: oops... Meant to reply to the comment with the xkcd link.
TIL Ganymede is bigger than Mercury?
So is Titan.
Hard to say with the irregular shape, but they're close.
What really gets me is how small Mars is relative to Earth and Venus.
The picture got me curious, so I went to check on Wikipedia. It's just bonkers that moons are bigger than planets.
I guess fact it's mostly gas means I don't have to ask, "where's Uranus?"
But if we're counting the liquid parts of Earth, shouldn't we include the squashy centers of Uranus and Jupiter?
They aren't necessarily counting the oceans, but rather the ocean floor.
Welp, there's my next TTRPG map.
Pangea is bigger than anyone thought. Cool.
Source states:
All Human Skin
Where?
E: found it. Tiny spot northeast of Australia.
Why does this look like bootleg Tamriel sans the high elf island I can't remember the name of fuck off Sheogorath it is not the Shivering Isles.
Why does earth include the oceans though?
For the map enthused!
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