Spaceship Earth

Very few people realize that planet Earth in its motion around the Sun, with Sun moving around the center of the galaxy at incredible speeds and have been circling the galaxy around 18 times since... well, since time began for it, our planet dances with the stars and the Moon. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_year

So all celestial bodies sort of tango around, like Earth and Moon, Earth and planets and stuff. So no big need to go to Mars only a few of us cause we all may sometimes be where Mars has passed by and beyond...

Or try to go in the Delta Quadrant with Kathryn Janeway's Voyager since we all are going to be there in about a 100 million years or so anyways... Or maybe not, cause the galaxy itself might move around the Universe and stuff with other galaxies...

I'm saying Earth tangos with Moon because since Moon is one sixth of Earth's weight, it pulls it too a little bit and Earth rotates around Moon about 6 times less then Moon around Earth, together forming some sort of wobbling pair, locked in a sort of like gravity pull, never too far, never too close, for like eons...



Actually the motion of the Earth in space is very complex and it takes a lot of differentials and computer power just to figure the path of a satellite. Not talking about going to the Moon and stuff.

By the way, i thing it's impossible to go to Mars since going to the Moon for three men took a rocket about 2.8 million kilograms (6.2 million pounds), the weight of about 400 elephants. If light takes about 1 second to travel from Earth to Moon, to Mars, depending on the position on the trajectory of both, well, they wrote better than me here http://blogs.esa.int/mex/2012/08/05/time-delay-between-mars-and-earth/

4 minutes, that is 240 seconds, 240 x farther than Moon at the closest point, you will need a 240 times bigger rocket. 96000 elephant-power.

But let's come back here on Earth and talk about our spaceship for 7 billions.

Many times i think... Well... There are so many things that if would miss we couldn't be here that sometimes i think the whole damned thing is engineered.

If we only speak about magnetic field that deflects, together with the Solar magnetic field the cosmic rays, particles coming from cosmic cataclysms with near the speed of light that would fry everything on Earth if it wasn't for those two magnetic fields...

http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/2013/08/08/nasa-says-the-magnetic-field-of-the-sun-is-about-to-change-polarity/

By the way, Sun's magnetic field is about to reverse polarity, it does so every 11 years or so and that takes about 3 month in which time Earth will be less protected...

Life on Mars is not possible just because of missing of a Magnetic field... Let's say if they could figure a way to dissociate water, if there was water there like in the movie with Schwarzenegger, and make an atmosphere, that would be soon swept away by the cosmic rays and the solar wind (a different story)...

I believe if they could start a magnetic field, maybe Mars will catch an atmosphere in time, from comets and stuff...

The thing is nobody knows exactly why Earth has a magnetic field. There is a theory, about the motion of magma inside Earth and creating an electric current that in turn creates this huge magnetic field, but that theory could not explain why Venus that does not have a molten core has a magnetic field, though weak, about 1% of that of Earth, still capable of maintaining an atmosphere, although made of CO2 and an average of 460 Celsius degrees (at which temperature structured objects, like rocks usually start to glow or radiate in visible red!).

I used to know this geological engineer in Romania, Emil Rusu, who once told me, nobody went yet in there (center of the Earth) so we can't know for sure what's going on...

By the way, Venus is about the same size as Earth and Mars about the same size of Moon, with twice the gravity of Moon but still 38% of that of Earth... So colonists in there would jump around not walk, LOL.

But the reason i wrote all these is i wanted to say something about the theory of convection inside the Earth and tectonic plates.



In other words, i never heard of an explanation like why the plates raise and separate from each other in the middle of the continents and bump into each other and sink in the middle of the Ocean... I always thought the other way around and plates are raising because bumping into each other in the middle of the continent...

The explanation may be because in the middle of the Oceans there is a different rate of cooling of the plates, the oceans carrying at the bottom, through currents, some coolness from Poles, much more efficient than air through winds and stuff, and cooling the plates. Then magma being cooled through the mantle as well, it sinks in that area, only to raise, after being heated again after traveling to the center of the Earth, in the middle of the continents. That's why.

The ridges in the middle of the Paicific Ocean, where plates meet and bump into each other...

However, according to this theory, at any point at the surface of the Earth, the temperature is lower than at the bottom of the mantle, some 100 km... down, where rock is actually molten and much hotter magma raises from the center of the Earth. That proves there is a constant transfer of heat from under the mantle to surface and radiating in the cold space surrounding us. Cause nothing, including the mantle, is not a perfect insulator... Some heat will travel through it... (If that wouldn't be so, there would be no convection in magma, cause if there's no heating at the bottom and cooling at the top, there's no convection)
Because of this, after billions of years since Earth has reach the current thermal balance, there is a source of heat at the center of the Earth, otherwise it would have frozen, like Venus, long time ago. (Venus is hot at the surface due to runaway greenhouse effect) but one piece of solid rock as a whole. Well, many pieces, of course, cause it is fragmented. (One more proof that appearances are sometimes misleading.) (Or maybe it has in the middle some tiny molten part and it still moves around a bit thus the residual magnetic field).

Isn't our Spaceship Earth wonderfully engineered? Isn't all this exciting?