First Pictures of Earth Mark-I and Orpheus

[ElPelado]

I have a question: I saw the movie "The Time Machine". in one moment(in the future) the humanity wanted to do something on the moon(i dont remember what) and they had to use nuclear bombs. when the bombs exploded, the moon broke up. this event had also terrible consecuences on Earth.
WHY?

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

I have a question: I saw the movie "The Time Machine". in one moment(in the future) the humanity wanted to do something on the moon(i dont remember what) and they had to use nuclear bombs. when the bombs exploded, the moon broke up. this event had also terrible consecuences on Earth.
WHY?

Because it was a silly film that had no grounding in reality? It's like Armageddon, where they blow up an asteroid the size of Texas by planting a couple of nukes about 800 ft below the surface. Yeah. Right.

Still, the broken up moon in The Time Machine did look cool though.

[ElPelado]

I thought that maybe the incident affect the earth-moon system because the atraction force between them, the gravity and all of that stuff.

Still, the broken up moon in The Time Machine did look cool though.

I MUST AGREE WITH THAT!!

[granthutchison]

this event had also terrible consecuences on Earth.
WHY?

Might it not have something to do with whacking great chunks of the disintegrating Moon banging into the Earth? I think it would have to be a surprisingly well-controlled planet-busting explosion to place all the debris from the Moon in orbits that didn't intersect the Earth.

Grant

[Don. Edwards]

The Moon stabalizs the Earth. No Moon and the Earth would wobble allot more as it spins and would cause severe climatic changes. The old series Space 1999 talked occasionaly about how the Earth would have been effected by the Moons departure.

[ElPelado]

And what would have happened if Opherus hadn't crashed with earth?? would be human life now as we know it?

[JackHiggins]

The Moon stabalizs the Earth. No Moon and the Earth would wobble allot more as it spins and would cause severe climatic changes. The old series Space 1999 talked occasionaly about how the Earth would have been effected by the Moons departure.

I've always wondered about this- if the moon keeps the earth stabilised, why is it that venus & mars, without any large moon(s) don't go through these severe wobbles...? (Or do they?) I guess venus' slow rotation period would help stop it happening, but how about Mars?

I think the moon moves away from us at a rate of about 1 inch per year (that could be wrong) so I wouldn't worry about it for a little while yet...

[chris]

The Moon stabalizs the Earth. No Moon and the Earth would wobble allot more as it spins and would cause severe climatic changes. The old series Space 1999 talked occasionaly about how the Earth would have been effected by the Moons departure.

I've always wondered about this- if the moon keeps the earth stabilised, why is it that venus & mars, without any large moon(s) don't go through these severe wobbles...? (Or do they?) I guess venus' slow rotation period would help stop it happening, but how about Mars?

Mars is thought to undergo significant changes in obliquity over long periods of time, varying between 15 and 35 degrees (or more) over a 125,000. It's only a coincidence that it happens to have roughly the same obliquity as Earth right now.

I think the moon moves away from us at a rate of about 1 inch per year (that could be wrong) so I wouldn't worry about it for a little while yet...

The Earth-Moon system will eventually evolve to a super-synchronous state, where the Earth and Moon both have keep the same hemisphere toward each other, just as Pluto and Charon do now. I don't recall over what time scale this is supposed to happen . . . In any case, the Earth's axial tilt should become more stable, not less.

--Chris

[bh]

Ooooh!...great stuff!

[Don. Edwards]

The reining theory is that if Orpheus had not hit the Earth we would not be here. The Earth would actually be Oceanus, almost entirely covered with water. Most of the life forms if there were any would be strictly oceanic for the most part. There would probably be vegetation on the small land masses and maybe small animals but it would be very different than the Earth we know. It is just like the what if scenario about the asteroid that hit 65 million years ago. If it had not hit Earth would we all be descended from the Raptor family of dinosaurs instead? We would all be Dinosaurian instead of Homo Sapiens.

Don.

[ElPelado]

Yesterday at 3 am I saw a TV program called SPACE. I saw two "episodes". The first one(that I didnt see complete) talke dabout stars, how they born, how they explode, and how our sun was borned and with it, all the solat system. when they talked about the formation of the Earth they showed an animation: the Earth was not like we see in Don's textures, it was a ball of fire+rocks+magma. and nothing more, no water, no clouds, no lands. and then Opherus came(it was just like the Earth, but smaller) and hit the Earth. then they said that many of the rocks that flew to the psace are now what we call asteroids. they didnt talk about the moon.
So either Don's textures or SPACE animation are wrong...

[selden]

So either Don's textures or SPACE animation are wrong...

or both.

[ElPelado]

the point is that the animation showed a very very very young Earth, that in his first days was hitted by that planet. and Don shows an older Earth.

[Don. Edwards]

In the documentary "If We Had No Moon" they show Earth as totally water covered. That’s the direction I was originally going to take the texture but I was asked to dry things up some. What the Earth really looked like depends on many things. How fast did it cool and did a substantial crust form. How far did the atmosphere developed and did it or sis it not have water on its surface?
I have stated several time the texture you are seeing is not completed, not by a long shot. There are going to many changes. It won't look so tranquil when it’s done. Do the shots I posted of Orpheus make it look tranquil? I don’t now about you but I certainly wouldn’t want to get stranded there.

Don.

P.S.
If anyone is interested in the documentary you can find info on it here.
http://shopping.discovery.com/stores/se ... 70000&gs=1

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

In the documentary "If We Had No Moon" they show Earth as totally water covered.

Where does this idea that the Earth would be totally water-covered if the moon hadn't formed come from? This is the first I've heard of it.

[ElPelado]

Don: are you planing to make something for the moment after that opherus crashed???
if you do plant to make something, maybe you should add a ring-system. what do you think???

[Don. Edwards]

According to everything I have read the moon formed very quickly so a ring never real formed. It was a debris field that started to gather up under gravity. According to most estimates they say the moon probably formed within 100 years. On a geologic time scale that is like a split second. I plan to make textures and to use some of the asteroid models to create a debris field closely orbiting the earth and coalescing. However I am no where near that far yet.

Don.

[ElPelado]

I found this on space.com
i think that its not talking about earth-opherus-moon, but it talks about rings:

Earth may once have been surrounded by temporary rings of debris, much like Saturn, according to a new computer model that finds the rings might have cast parts of the planet into a twilight glow all day long.

The idea is not new, but the fresh modeling adds weight to the plausibility of an asteroid impact kicking up a sea of orbiting debris, and it considers how the rings would have cooled Earth's climate.

The new model, based on Saturn’s B-ring scaled down to Earth-size, was produced by Peter Fawcett of the University of New Mexico and Mark Boslough of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. It is based on climate models that had already been developed
The scientists said a ring might form with a glancing blow, in which a space rock and the debris it carves from the planet ricochet into the atmosphere.

An expanding vapor cloud causes some of the debris to go into orbit. Over time, it collapses into a plane that matches Earth's equator. The ring then lasts from about 100,000 years to perhaps 1 million years at most.

Fawcett told SPACE.com the debris ring would have cooled the planet by blocking or reducing the amount of sunlight received in the tropics and subtropics. The rest of the planet would cool, too, because less heat would be transported from tropical regions to higher latitudes. That would mean fewer storms farther north.

The work is speculative, the researchers say, but there is some evidence they might be on the right track.

Geologic records reveal a layer of melted meteorite material thought to be associated with an asteroid impact 35.5 million years ago. Some 100,000 years of cooler global temperatures followed.

"This cooling is longer than one would expect from a large impact alone, so we hypothesized that a temporary ring might have formed," Fawcett said. "The jury is still out on this though."

Had there been any humans on the planet to survive the impact and witness the rings, it's hard to say exactly what they would have seen. But Boslough has some ideas, based on an assumption that the rings would have been semi-transparent, like Saturn's.

"For a person in the shadow of a reasonably opaque ring, it would be dark like twilight or a heavy overcast," he said. "The ring would be scattering light in addition to blocking it. I think the most spectacular view would be after sunset or before sunrise, when the sky is dark but parts of the sunlit ring would be brightly visible in the sky."

[Don. Edwards]

Official Suspension of the Early Earth Project!!

Well I had to inform Frank that my work on these textures is suspended till further notice. I had my first PSU (power-supply-unit) failure and it caused a great deal of data corruption on my new 120gig drive. That was one of the reasons I was late updating the other texture I am working on.
The PSU did give me a kind of warning. It shut my system off twice before the failure but like a dummy I didn't bother to figure out what was doing it. I thought it was my dam video card again. On rare occasions my GeForce4 will shut the system down rather abruptly if it overheats. Usually when I am playing a very 3D intensive game for extended periods of time. I know this is probably not normal either. But the same thing happens on my notebook computer and it too has an NVidia video chipset. So I have just accepted this as a quirk of my cards.
So you may be asking what was lost. Well the most recent build of Orpheus was lost and parts of the Early-Earth texture are gone as well. So I am rather despondent over this and also just plain pissed off. Enough that I really don't want to touch either texture for a while. I also lost a bunch of the Mars Terraforming project. Most of the 8K textures are history as well as some of the 4k textures as well. I am hoping Frank received the CD I made him because if he didn't the project just got smaller by half. I didn't have a recent enough backup to rebuild the project and it would just be to much work. Needless to say I just want to make textures at a more leisurely pace for a while. I was very lucky not to loose any of the HD 28185 system. Well that covers all the bad news for now.

Don.

[Borg Collective]

I am sorry to hear that... I just bought a 120 Gb drive... Hope I won't have the same fate...