Where to escape to

Lonesome

Photo by Uday1254

The place in North America that is farthest from any coast is in a gully on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation between Allen (famous for being the poorest town in the country) and Kyle, South Dakota. It's the farthest you can get away from the edge of the continent.

Called "Poles of Inacessability," every land mass and every ocean has one. If you really want to get "far from the madding crowd" and meditate on the meaning of life, one of these might be your best choice. The complete list can be found here with a Google Map for each one.

Jupiter takes one for the Gipper!

Jupiter does its stuff!

You may have heard about the planet Jupiter's altruistic ways, how it protects the Earth from gigantic planet-killing rocks by flinging them back out of the solar system, using its mighty, mighty gravity.

Actually there's some debate about this. Spoil sport astronomers (the same ones that demoted Pluto from being a planet no doubt. Jerks!) like to point out that, while Jupiter does a good job of catching asteroids rocketing in from the depths of space, it also has this habit of bumping into friendly, stable rocks already here, sending them in our direction.

But, however that may be, our planetary big-brother did take a bullet for us the other day.  While the ever-ready amateur astronomers accidentally watched on March 17th, something smashed into Jupiter and blew up!

Thanks, bro!

Back in 70,000

Remember the last time we survived the Apocalypse? Probably not. But as it turns out the universe really had it in for us in 70,000 BC. Scientists have just detected a really small, dim star 20 light years away with an even smaller, dimmer star orbiting it, and they are heading straight away from the Earth. That means, if you rewind their path, they came perilously close to hitting us 70,000 years ago. I assume we didn't actually collide because we're still here.

Korg reacts

Meanwhile, in other 70,000 BC news, the weather had whittled us humans down so far that there were only 40 mating pairs of us left on the earth. That's a verge-of-extinction sized population. And it wasn't just the famous Ice Age, oh no. We also had a Super-Volcano go off and fill the air with badness.

Knowing all this gives me new respect for Korg!

Korg

"To Boldly Go Where Lots of People Have Gone Before!"

Photo from  The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth

We've had people in space since 1961, and they've all been taking pictures with wild abandon ever since -- even in the dark! NASA now has almost 2 billion photos stored up at, and about 1/3rd of them were taken at night, which in the space flight biz is whenever you're on the dark side of the Earth.

But unfortunately in all their training our camera-happy astronauts have never learned to jot down what it was that they were trying to capture for posterity. The end result is that we now have 666 million high tech photos of black. Black with a splotch of yellow and white in the middle, and no idea what they're of.

Then there's the fact that until 2003, they were mostly blurry.

And so now, citizens of planet earth, a lonely space agency turns their eyes to you and asks for your help. They figure that if you happen to live in that blotch of yellow and white you're more likely to recognize it, or at least can tell the difference between that and a random picture of some stars. Computers are lousy at doing that but we humans are great, so rather than building a robot to do this NASA needs your eyeballs. But if you don't feel like doing that job, the also have some nice grunt work for you sorting photos into buckets.

Interested in widening the frontiers of knowledge? Sign up at www.CitiesAtNight.org.

I Can See My House From Here!

NASA looks at my house

NASA has finally done what I always wished they'd do: let me see my house from space!  Sure we've had Google Earth for years but some of those photos are years old. I want to look down upon what's happening right now.

Now they've mounted high definition cameras on the outside of the Space Station pointed at the Earth and are leaving them on 24 hours a day. So as long as they're overhead (I'm sure that must happen sometimes, right?) I can peer down at myself -- and everything else in the world! Even at night!

I call that progress!

All we need now are some really, really powerful zoom lenses...