[This is part of an occasional series of updates on new and cool science. Most of the links in this post take you to news about a new discovery]
“Space: the final frontier” it says at the beginning of the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Yes, yes, very exciting and everything. And I grant you, space is…‘quite large’. So, there is still lots of frontier left for Captains Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer, & Burnham to explore.1
But do you know how easy it is to look into space? (or actually, I guess they really look into time - deep, historic time). We have telescopes that can see hundreds of billions of light years (Hubble), and a new one (James Webb Telescope) that will take us the rest of the way to the center of the universe (shortly), and the Roman telescope, scheduled for launch in 2027, that will have a field of view 216 times that of Hubble.
Ok, so maybe it’s not THAT easy to build and run these telescopes and then to digest and interpret the supermassive black holes and the hidden galaxies, and dark matter, and the expansion rate of the universe (new data on that too by the way. Turns out to be speedier than we thought).
But we can at least launch satellites and send telescopes off into the empty(ish) beyond to explore space relatively unimpeded.
But Earth. OMG, so many obstacles. Such a frontier. So difficult.
Do you know that there are still blobs (literally the term they use) of stuff, somewhere between the Earth’s crust and the inner core that we know hardly anything about?
GIANT unidentified, continent-sized blobs. Under our feet. We don’t know what they’re made of or why they’re there.
They might be bits of a ghost planet called Theia, they might have leaked out of the core (not a favored explanation), they may be bits of subducted crust that didn’t ‘melt’.
These blobs might account for why Hawaii exists where it does, their heaviness may be keeping our axis roughly between the Arctic and the Antarctic (otherwise, why would it stay there? We don’t know).
In other news, we are still discovering THOUSANDS of species every single year. Like, more than 18,000 species a year on average. One estimate suggested that there are about 8.7 million species on Earth, and we have discovered about 1.6 million of them. First of all - we know 1.6 million species?! Wow. Secondly, it seems as though a career as a research biologist could still be quite secure. And fun. Especially if you like digging around to find new bugs.
Just this week, a new salamander was found in Mississippi/Alabama. One of about 750 species of salamander, by the way. (They’re very cool, but really, how many salamanders do we need?) Though I am glad to have over 30 species on my back doorstep in the ‘Salamander Capital of the World’ - the Great Smoky Mountains)
In short, there is SO MUCH cool stuff left to learn about our geology, our oceans, our biosphere, our atmosphere, and of course, ourselves - the human race.
We’re all still explorers if we choose to be. Don’t give up exploring.
I might be a Trekkie. A chill one though - I would not win a trivia contest against a serious Trekkie.