GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #985: THE EATER OF WORLDS

 

Okay, okay, I know. A lot of you would have preferred I went with Galactus, but I've never been a Marvel Comics guy. Or a DC Comics guy, for that matter. But when I was a kid, Marvel published Transformers comics, and I'm definitely a Transformers kind of guy. So you're stuck with Unicron.

File this one under the world (or perhaps I should say the universe in this case) is a strange fuckin' place.

Many years ago I wrote a story called "Evolutionary Transubstantiation," which was eventually published by the Art Times (you can read it here on page 11). Before they took it, I'd sent it to Analog, where I got a nice reject letter back. I mean that, I'm not being an asshole. The editor, who didn't often take the time to write personal notes, decided to inform me that the ending of my story couldn't have happened because our sun isn't going to supernova. It's going to expand and swallow the earth, instead. I found that exceptionally helpful, but at the same time, I write fiction. I kept the ending due to artistic license. But now I knew that not every star ends their lives with supernovas.

Which brings me to the James Webb Telescope. I love this thing. We're making all sorts of great observations about the universe with the most sophisticated equipment we can come up with at this time. And it recorded the death of a planet 12,000 lightyears away.

THE FUCKING PLANET WAS EATEN.

If you're looking at a star in the night sky, you are seeing the past. It took however many lightyears to get to you, so it's essentially a window into the past, so this planet died 12,000 years ago if we're just seeing it now.

The universe is a fuckin' strange place.

The planet in question strayed a little from its orbit, but it was enough to get sucked into the star's orbit. Then, over the course of who knows how long, it got closer and closer to the star until the star flared and ate that planet whole.

This is a great article on the matter. Also, keep in mind that this planet was apparently the size of Jupiter. As a point of reference, Jupiter is about as big as 1,300 earths.

Typically when a planet breaks from its orbit (much like Cybertron at the beginning of the Marvel Transformers comics), it becomes a rogue planet, wandering throughout the cosmos. In this case the planet revolved too closely around the sun, so when it broke free, it got stuck immediately. Out of the frying pan, into the 10,000-degree Fahrenheit fire. I imagine something similar would happen if Mercury slipped loose from its orbit in our own solar system.

I wish the footage of this was public, though. That article has an artist's rendering, which looks pretty cool, but I wish I could have watched a whole planet get devoured before my very eyes. You don't see that every day, not even in this strange fuckin' universe.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #968: THE WORLD IS A FUCKIN' STRANGE PLACE

 It is. I know it's hard to remember that sometimes, since we're all stuck with our boring daily routines. It's maybe even hard to notice in the first place. So I always keep an open mind about the world itself. A lot of weird shit happens here.

Ordinarily I'd point to the platypus and exclaim my shock that such a creature really does exist. As it turns out, scientists 200 years ago thought the platypus was a hoax. Back then a lot of science hoaxes were tried. Like the Piltdown Man, for example. I can't help but quote from the article I read on platypuses:

[H]ere was somebody from a land on the other side of the world submitting a new take on the legendary chimera, an animal composed of distinct parts of other animals.

The creature — if indeed it was a real creature — possessed a duck’s bill, fur like a mole, an otter-like body and a beaver’s tail. Eventually, it would be determined that it also laid eggs in the manner of a bird or a reptile. But when its young hatched from those eggs, the creature produced milk to feed it — a mammalian trait.

Yeah, you’d be skeptical, too.

And they're not alone! When you think about it, giraffes are really fuckin' weird. So are elephants. We commonly accept weird shit so often that we don't recognize our planet as a weird fuckin' planet.

Do you know what a brinicle is? I didn't either until I researched the Antarctica Ice Finger of Death. Seriously, that's a real thing. Brinicles are ice shapes resembling a finger that grow beneath sea ice. To learn more than you ever cared to know about it, here's a quote from an article I read:

Unlike frozen fresh water, ice on ocean surface is composed of two elements. The ice crystal is relatively pure, as the water excludes most of the salt during the freezing process. The remaining salty water stays liquid due to its lowered freezing temperature, and creates highly saline brine channels within the porous ice block.

A brinicle is formed when this sea ice cracks and leaks out the saline water to the open oceans. As the brine is heavier than the water around it, it sinks to the ocean floor while freezing the relatively fresh water it comes into contact with. This process lets the brinicle grow downward.

What makes the Ice Finger of Death so special is that anything it touches freezes instantly, hence the "death" part of its name. Can you imagine something so cold that touching it not only kills you but also freezes you in seconds? It's a good thing you're not likely to stumble across something like this. Unless you like diving in the ocean, which I don't. I have a strict policy regarding the oceans: stay the fuck out of them.

But since we've been talking about Greenland this week, there's another interesting thing that happened there last year. Scientists noticed the earth making a strange noise, and it was trembling when it shouldn't have been. Our lovely mother did this for 9 days, which understandably made those scientists nervous, considering that climate change is currently helping us reap our whirlwind.

It turned out that there was a rockslide in Greenland, which caused a tsunami within a fjord. Which sounds impossible, but imagine you're a kid about to go into the bathtub. Your mom has filled the tub with soap and water, and then you jump in. The water sloshes back and forth in the tub, right?

That's what happened in the fjord. For nine fucking days. Nine days of massive amounts of water crashing against the high cliffs on each side of the fjord. And that's what caused the noise and the trembling.

What a weird fucking thing to happen, right? But this oddball event caused great concern among scientists for a few days.

Is that really any weirder than a fuckin' platypus?

Weird shit happens here all the time, and most people aren't curious enough to notice. It's too bad. This planet's strange tendencies have kept me at least somewhat entertained for most of my life. Try it sometime. Look for the weird. Really look for it. See what you find. Report back to me, because I want to know all about it.