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ready for what the next week brings...

when i was a kid my parents bought me an inflatable doll of the Scream by Edvard Munch (??) that was significantly taller than i was at the time and i used to slow-dance with it and pretend it was my boyfriend. It had its hands attached to its head obviously so it felt like he was always a bit horrified to be forced to dance with me

spectrometrie

i didn't need no imaginary friends i had Screaming Joe right here !

omgeddon-deactivated20260424

I love this website I love it when people tell us what's wrong with them

enba-and-luka

hometoursandotherstuff

hms-no-fun

so i feel the urge to add a bit of context here because i find the vague on-screen text deeply underwhelming.

this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.

AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.

this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:

it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.

but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:

this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.

here's an original:

and here's Mitchell's version:

i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!

which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.

so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.

and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.

so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.

the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.

here, feel it for yourself:

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[P.S.: before you lament that this is an "AI" problem, while yes "AI" has radically increased the volume of low-value (often negative-value) inspiration bait like this, know that this has been a problem in online science education for a LOT longer than chatgpt's been around. this example isn't extraordinary, just close to my heart. nothing new under the sun and all that]

hms-no-fun

lmao someone else got their knocks in on this post before i could finish writing mine. clearly we are hand in hand re: Talk About How Cool Voyager 1 Is You Fucks

💬 0 🔁 109 ❤️ 245 · Okay, I need to add some clarification and correction to this. This photo is known as The Pale Blue Dot. It was take

kosmogrl

iguessweallcrazyithinktho

spacemancharisma

elbiotipo

we don't hate J.J. Abrams enough

elbiotipo

Branson Reese, whoever you are, I keep your words in my heart all the time.

kaijuerotica

"branson reese, whoever you are" put some respect on the smooth sharks one fear man's name

anarchistmemedistro

we should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don't dream can't comprehend

ketrinadrawsalot

"Whose Larva Is This?"

A quick guide to figure out what you're looking at when you find something that resembles a worm or a Zerg unit crawling around.

i love making art

-1hp

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donuts-multifandom-hellhole

Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating

sleepymccoy

@makaeru peer review cos this made me check when the Sumerians happened and I forget how recent history is for every other continent. 7000 - 8000 years ago just isn't that long when you're in Australia, and the amount of detailed history we have access to here is wonderful and should be recognised more internationally

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

Source (the rest of the interview is really interesting and all transcribed, have a look if you're curious)

chaotic-archaeologist

This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I've learned so many incredible things about Australia's past and it's been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.

aggressivelybicaptainamerica

My favorite fact about Aboriginal oral history is the fact that we pretty recently discovered that the Aboriginal myth of the 7 Sisters, an origin story for the Pleiades star cluster, accurately reflects a point TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO when two stars in the constellation got close enough together to no longer be distinguishable by the naked eye.

The story? 6 sisters running from something that took their 7th sister.

jinkohhh

as a gilgar gunditj woman, i was not expecting to see my culture on my dash.

thank you for spreading our words and treating our culture with respect.

thoodleoo

reading about ancient egyptian artifacts that have meaningless hieroglyphics on them and (aside from it being really cool as an example of the interaction between written language as a cultural feature with the fact that many people could not read and write) i'm very charmed that there were people bullshitting scripts they didn't know for the aesthetic back then too

vintagegeekculture

When did the term "Earthling" come from?

Though people associate it with very old science fiction, you won't see any occurrence of the term in its current meaning (a human inhabitant of the planet Earth, as opposed to an extraterrestrial) prior to 1949.

Actually, the term was first used by the Old Man himself, Robert E. Heinlein, in his 1949 novel "Red Planet" (a novel remembered for a weird digression where they explain the ethics of adults responsibly allowing children to carry loaded firearms). This all the way back when the Old Man was not quite so old yet, when RAH was actually a hotshot young lion looking to make a name for himself in the pages of the greatest scifi pulp of them all, Astounding Science Fiction under John W. Campbell, right at the dawn of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Heinlein created the term Earthling and used it in a lot of his work instead of human because it was very important to distinguish in his stories between humans from Earth and, say, colonists of human stock from Mars, like in Podkayne of Mars. Hello, Mars used another interesting term with the same origin, where humans born in space referred to humans that lived their entire life on earth (semi-derogatorily) as "groundhogs."

The term caught on because Heinlein used it in his juveniles (what today we'd call "young adult" books), and to every generation prior to the Millennials, Heinlein was THE science fiction writer, much like how Agatha Christie is THE mystery author. It's a strange irony that, now that young adult books run the world, the young adult scifi author has mostly vanished from prominence.

Prior to 1949, scifi writers used a lot of other variant terms for humans from Earth. E.E. Smith, who Heinlein admired and listed as his single biggest influence (and from who Heinlein got the idea of space marines in power armor, an idea the Old Man used in Starship Troopers), used the term Tellurian to refer to humans from Earth in the Lensman novels, as Earth in his future era was known as Tellus, an erudite term for a god of Earth in Greek Myth used in Hamlet. Humanoids in the Lensman series were known as "Tellus-type lifeforms."

(You know, I feel like Tellurian for human and Tellus for Planet Earth should make a comeback.)

That said, where did the term Earthling come from originally? The Old Man didn't make it up. "Earthling" is an old term going back to Old English and predated the modern English language. It came from eorþe (earth) and yrþling (farmer). The term yrþling (ling) literally means farmer, but since that was the most common occupation in the old days, "earthling" acquired a secondary meaning to just refer to a person, a mortal human in general, a meaning similar to "guy," "dude," or "fella." And -ling also became a suffix to indicate a noun or person, same as terms like "hireling" and "underling" and "weakling."