There’s a new Disney movie coming out in which the cast is not all white, so naturally, the right-wingers are throwing a fit about “wokeness” and the alleged evils of race-mixing–sorry, race-swapping.
I hope you’re standing near your fainting couch because in the new live-action Peter Pan & Wendy movie, debuting on Disney+ in April, Peter is brown, Tinkerbell is black, some of the Lost Boys are girls–and some of these girls aren’t white! Sure, most of the main characters in the film remain white, but this proves cold comfort for the film’s critics, some of whom took to Twitter to complain that the beloved childhood classic that none of them had thought about for years was … different than what they remembered. And not just because Peter is played by an actual boy.
Meanwhile, more than a million angry downvoters clicked “thumbs down” on the trailer on YouTube and posted vaguely racist things in the comments.
The right-wing press jumped on board the hater train. The Daily Wire proclaimed that “Disney, apparently ever eager to implement their woke agenda into their productions, has now altered the immortal story of Peter Pan by making his band of Lost Boys include girls.” Breitbart complained that “the results are as woke as you would expect.” And Bounding Into Comics sniffed that “Disney has gone all-in on bastardizing their original animated classics to their altar of contemporary revisionism.”
But the racism behind the complaints was nowhere so evident as in a lengthy article on the film in the far-right Western Journal. There, writer Jared Miller lambasted “the woke culture warriors at The Walt Disney Company” for
distort[ing] the memory of more beloved stories and characters in the name of social justice.”
Unable to come up with narratives that are new or interesting that minorities could be cast in, these woke executives seem content to simply race- and gender-swap popular stories from the past.
Miller began with a swipe at Black Ariel.
Disney is soon to release a remake of “The Little Mermaid,” with a black actress playing the main character — Ariel — in stark contrast to the traditional blue-eyed, fair-skinned mermaid of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s fable.
Evidently, mermaids–who are, by the way, imaginary creatures–should all be as white as the Klan’s bedsheets.
Miller quickly moved on to the latest outrage:
This week Disney also released the trailer for “Peter Pan & Wendy,” a live-action remake of the timeless tale of Peter Pan with the same types of character re-imaginations.
For the role of Peter, Disney’s producers chose a young British actor whose professional call sheet describes his appearance as suited to characters who are “Indian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Mixed Race, Latin American.”
It’s doubtful that’s what anyone pictures when they think of the Boy Who Never Grew Up and his dealings with the Darling children.
Well, the Darling children and their parents are still all white, so enjoy that, at least.
A traditionally white Tinkerbell has also been replaced by black actress Yara Shahidi who starred in the race-baiting, gentrification-themed comedy show “Black-ish.”
These recasts weren’t enough for Disney, however, as even the twins in Pan’s band of Lost Boys, who were white males who wore matching raccoon skin cloaks in the Disney animated movie, have been recast as black girls.
The horror!
Much like the left has actively torn down institutions like the Boy Scouts, the Lost Boys also appear to have been infiltrated by “wokeness.”
Hate to break it to you, dude, but the thing that “tore down” the Boy Scouts wasn’t “wokeness.” It was the fact that scoutmasters kept sexually abusing children, leaving the Scouts on the hook for $850 million in restitution payments.
The main antagonist of the story remains white, with Jude Law being cast as the villainous Captain Hook.
Much like the mindlessly celebrated play “Hamilton” recast the Founding Fathers as black but kept King George as a white villain, “Peter Pan & Wendy” follows the intersectional pattern of keeping whites cast as villains and the protagonists recast as various minorities.
Uh, Wendy is the heroine of the movie, and she’s white. Most of the main cast is white.
The dangerous narrative being propagated here is that to be white is to be evil by nature, while to be non-white is to occupy the moral and spiritual high ground solely on the basis of skin color.
Oh lord. I guess all movie villains should be black, then?
The double standard is so appallingly apparent that you have to wonder what the real agenda is as these “woke” movies have not been performing well but continue to be made. (“Lightyear” the “Toy Story” franchise prequel that infamously included a lesbian kiss, and “Strange World,” the science fiction saga featuring an openly gay teenager, both bombed at the box office.)
The agenda is to uproot white, American culture so dramatically that even the stories that have been embraced and cultivated for the world to enjoy have to be subverted to such an extent that anyone who doesn’t like it is a racist.
Apparently, Peter Pan belongs collectively to white people and no one else. No substitutions!
Miller ended by attacking Disney’s “cunning tactics” in
push[ing] woke agendas in these seemingly harmless remakes that are clearly attempts at erasing the culture that made this country the greatest the world has ever seen.
Dude, if you’re an example of the culture that allegedly made this country great, it’s well past time you were replaced.
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Imaginary characters in fairytales are very rarely described as being from specific ethnicities, no?
Including Jesus.
@Full Metal Ox: Point taken, but in the original story Peter does arbitrarily decide a couple of Lost Boys are twins even though they’re not related, and the Fox show may have taken the quickest shorthand.
@Raging Bee
Say what? Jesus is most absolutely described as being ethnically Jewish. His skin tone isn’t specifically mentioned, but his ethnic background is kind of central to the story.
Come to that, many folktales and myths explicitly describe the characters’ appearance in terms of skin tone, hair color, etc. Snow White leaps immediately to mind, but you’ll find milk-white skin and golden hair all through the Brothers Grimm. Further east, Slavic folklore is brimful of explicitly ethnic descriptors: This character is Rus, that one is Tatar, this other fellow is Cossack, etc. I have yet to see any First Nations stories that don’t specify the protagonist as being a member of the culture whose story it is. Etc.
@Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
That is an extremely telling comment when you consider how often white people have appropriated (and bastardized) Black (vernacular), Indian (Yoga), and Indigenous (Names) cultures.It’s almost like that person has no concept whatsoever of history!
Even today we regularly have to castigate Gen Z and others for being Culture Vultures of Black vernacular. There was a dance boycott on TikTok a couple of years ago because of this exact issue.
(Oh, that’s right. According to that guy, other groups of people don’t have culture. That’s something only white people have.)
@bcb: One of my people! A friend went to Philadelphia one summer (it was indeed hot as hell) and brought me back a Beanie Baby style John and Abigail.
@FM Ox: Also my people! I have been known to still run through a Schoolhouse Rock number occasionally, and love Tom Lehrer and Animaniacs, including CDs of the latter. Let us all join hands and sing “Conjunction Junction”.
The BFF once asked if I had any cash on me, and my reply was “ten-dollar founding father.”
@Moon Custafer: Jim Gaffigan is Smee, quite the contrast with Jude Law.
Tiger Lily’s actually Cree (for once!), Peter’s British, the Darlings are entirely White, and there have been PoC in Britain since at least Roman times. Not counting the very early inhabitants, some of whom had blue eyes and dark skin.
@Crip Dyke: Of course. There are variations on a theme in all cultures, as we see through the ATU index (which mostly covers Europe, the Near East). We think of Aladdin as an Arab, but the earliest version we know of is set in “China”, maybe Muslim China. The whole point is to make it feel local so it can be better understood/enjoyed.
The US has a lot more German-set tales than Britain does; an English pal didn’t know the story of the Bremen musicians till well into adulthood, yet I remembered it from my single-digit years. And of course gobs of tales from Native Americans and enslaved Africans, including combinations of the two like B’rer Rabbit, plus everyone knows Coyote is a trickster. Raven stories are circumpolar. John Henry was a steel drivin’ man. My brother and I had a book of Japanese fairy tales from the 50s, which meant when the Mr. got into anime I was able to tell him the original ones the anime was riffing on. Like, you’re 50 years old and you don’t know Peach Boy/Momotaro?
Some of them go back to the Indo-European Bronze Age, and maybe even Neolithic.
@GSS ex-noob
My people!
My parents loved 1776 and I remember watching it with them as a kid.
We can’t stop the singalong at “Conjunction Junction.” Gotta include “Sufferin’ Until Suffrage.” Have you heard Etta James’ cover?
@GSS ex-noob
I grew up on multiple books of folklore and fairytales from around the world, as well. It’s what started my interest in history. And is part of why I’ve had a long running joke with friends that I might have an unfair advantage if I ever ended up a Master in the Holy Grail Wars of the Nasuverse.
@Victorious Parasol
You know I immediately started singing those songs at the top of my lungs!
My two favorites were Verb! That’s what’s Happening and Interjections!
*sigh* yeah, I know all the words to the songs and even bought the full disc set and the remix CDs. (SMH)
Ah, for the Good Ole Days when Peter Pan was played as intended- by someone who was white, and a… girl(?)- uh, let me come in again.
@GSS ex-noob, FMO:
It has long been my hypothesis that music and song are an instinctual, evolved behavior in humans as much as language-learning and use is, and that its purpose is as a “salience signal” and that’s why we remember music much better than we do a random, non-musical conversation. Before writing, music would have served as the vehicle for transmission of important information, such as the characteristics by which local edible and poisonous plants could be told apart and certain steps in assorted tool-making procedures. The latter would have given rise to work songs, serving both to remind of the procedure steps to follow and their correct order, and to synchronize group efforts; after writing, work songs persisted as synchronizing signals, but their content drifted away from being directly mnemonic about how to do the job. That moved into the realm of writing: manuals, checklists, recipe books.
What did a cook use 70,000 years ago for a recipe? Some sort of a song. Fragments of those survive, usually associated with witchcraft. (Did you know “eye of newt” and other such icky-sounding ingredients were herbs? Hey, it’s not like hawkweed has actual hawk in it. Just orange flowers. Common names for plants often mention animals, either because of some ecological relation between them or because of a spurious resemblance. Deadly nightshade flowers look like a raven’s face feathers and beak, and ravens are sometimes carrion eaters, so I bet someone somewhere called it raven-weed or some similar name in whatever the local tongue was. Both to tell people to avoid using it in food and perhaps to include it in a medicinal recipe: since the dose makes the poison, most plants that are dangerous are pharmacologically useful in much smaller quantities. Atropine and digitalin both come from poisonous weeds, and aspirin from willow bark, though we can make them all synthetically nowadays.)
I continue to maintain that language (and its close kin, music, rooted in the homologous brain structures on the opposite side from language’s) is the thing that enabled us to bust through the glass ceiling that all the other smart social tool-users (including the afore-mentioned ravens, as well as baboons and chimpanzees) seem to be bumping up against. Well, it was either that or fire, or maybe even both. Using fire basically let us use cellulosic energy without needing all the digestive baggage a ruminant has to haul around everywhere it goes. We could partly pre-digest tough foods with it, freeing up energy in our own bodies to be used by our brains instead of our digestive tracts. Maybe that was needed to reach the brainpower needed for language, in turn. We could really use to find out which came first, fire use or language … in the long term, though, language is a game changer far beyond anything usually envisioned.
It’s like the Borg: everything will eventually be assimilated. The previous big innovation in evolved-evolvability was sex, but that was limited to sufficiently genetically similar organisms, so it created discrete species, and the barriers between them. Language isn’t like that. Language barriers aren’t absolute, as any immigrant can tell you. That Tower of Babel story envisions language as dividing, but in reality it unites. History, for the past six thousand years, is a long arc of humans from disparate regions fighting less and talking more as time goes on, however much today’s lurid headlines might make it seem otherwise. The largest-reach trading network went from regional scale, to continent-spanning, to globe-engirdling over that span.
In the long run, language-using life will be able to absorb anything, meld with any other language-using life, and create superorganisms out of whatever it encounters. It’s already begun: we have an array of domesticated life forms that combine with us and with inorganic components made with materials fixed from the environment to produce civilizations, and many of the domesticated animals have picked up rudimentary language abilities of their own, at least to recognize their own names and simple commands; dogs being the farthest along. That’s in the past few tens of thousands of years. What will this do to the world, and to life, when it’s been more than a mere paleontological eye-blink? I expect by then everything we’ve touched will be talking and part of some expanding superorganism.
Which makes the Fermi paradox all the more troubling: why didn’t we find the sky already full of voices? Of course, someone has to be first and maybe it’s us …
@GSS ex-noob
It’s hard to say how many PoC there were in Roman times because nobody thought it was worth writing down. It would have been weird if there were none.
But only in small numbers until the 1960s. Rich British people owned slaves, but on plantations in the Caribbean. Much easier to dehumanise people you never see. Victorian London must have had quite a few PoC around the docks because it was the largest port in the world at the time, but well-to-do families, like Barrie, the Darlings and his target audience would have had almost nothing to do with them because of the class barrier. And then people travelled around less, so they saw fewer people in total.
I grew up in Leeds in the 1960s. I remember a thin sprinkling of South Asian shopkeepers and some university students, and the other 99.9% of people that I saw were white. Once you got out into the countryside I believe it was 100%. I used to think about race as much as a fish thinks about water.
@ surplus
Once again you make some very interesting points. I very much agree with you there. A much clever friend did a video on this very topic. See below.
I do keep meaning to ask him about the evolution of music, and how it ties to language. I suspect music was first. If you’re doing a big communal task, singing along may well have ensured everyone followed the same rhythm and worked in step. Like how in the great days of sail, sailors used shanties as they were working together to run the rigging.
Also music helps memory. We were chatting about epic sagas recently. The question arose as to the memory of the bards. Someone asked ‘how many songs do you know the lyrics to?’. We all knew loads (when I watch old episodes of Top of the Pops I usually know the words to nearly all the songs in that week’s top 20). So just string a bunch of pop songs together and you’ve got Beowulf.
@ surplus
I also subscribe to the idea that we may be the first intelligence in the universe. It’s just statistically the most likely scenario. When you consider the lifespan of the habitable universe, we arose pretty much instantly. In the first fraction of a percent of the timeline.
And whilst I think life in its simplest form will be ubiquitous. Anywhere there’s liquid water and an energy source, evolving intelligence (or even multi cellular life) seems a lot trickier. Of course, we only have one example to extrapolate from. But I don’t see any major advantages in intelligence.
If you asked a T Rex what the most useful adaptation was, he’d have said big teeth. And had it not been for that pesky asteroid, he’d have been right. And it’s only recently that we’ve demonstrated a possibility of avoiding a similar fate.
I do have another explanation for the Fermi paradox though. Again we can extrapolate from our own experience. SETI researchers believe the 21cm line is the obvious frequency to use for signalling. So that wavelength (and some harmonics) gets the most attention. But to ensure that we have the least terrestrial interference, it’s a frequency we avoid using ourselves.
But what if everyone has had the same idea? The universe might be full of SETI researchers on other worlds. But everyone is listening and nobody is transmitting.
@Surplus to Requirements: The idea that sapient life will eventually “borgify” the universe is known as Omega Point hypothesis. Though the original concept of it was pseudoscience, more theology than theory – the idea was that God created the universe to birth another God. Of course there are more modern versions of it which do away with the religious aspect.
Though given that most of the terrestrial planets which we have spotted so far appear to be “too light” for their size, one wonders if maybe they’re actually spherical or semi-spherical megastructures. Or even giant artificial lifeforms. I mean, spheres are efficient in multiple respects, and above the point of hydrostatic equilibrium, you have to make a special effort for things to not be spherical anyway. More likely, either we’re just currently bad at measuring the size or mass or both, or that iron-based planets like our inner solar system aren’t common (or at least not commonly close enough to their star to easily detect and measure). As they say, it’s not aliens until it’s aliens. (That is, don’t assume aliens until the alternatives are exhausted. Or they tell us themselves.)
@Alan
Turns out that our radiosphere attenuates much more rapidly than previously believed, and isn’t really discernable from background radio noise even at the edge of the solar system, let alone somewhere far enough away that there might be aliens there.
@ dali
Indeed. Looks like only military radar has any sort of real legs. Even the double flash of an atomic explosion wouldn’t be detectable well before you got to the nearest star.
JWST might be able to pick up some technosignatures though. Like obviously artificial pollution in a planet’s atmosphere.
Personally I think the solution to the great silence is we keep sending aliens unsolicited dick pics, so they’ve blocked us.
@Vicky P: I have not heard Etta’s version and must go find it now.
Language on the whole is important. Yeah, you can teach chimps to sign or push buttons (they can only produce limited ideas, though). Lots of birds can sing* but it’s only a few like parrots who can use our spoken languages, and the ravens and crows are big on tool use and have excellent memories.
My cat will never evolve full sentience. He’s barely got enough brains to function as an indoor-only cat who gets medicated every day
*except hummingbirds, because… I’ll get me coat. I saw an Anna’s on Thursday, so spring will be here soon if the li’l guys are out of torpor. Cheeky smol guys; he was eyeing me suspiciously to make sure I didn’t come too near the early-flowering bird of paradise.
In other douchebag news, snowflake Jordy Pete has just tried to explain Christianity.
To the Pope.
The Jesuit Pope.
THE POPE!
@various re: intelligence and language
It clearly has some, because it’s arisen a few independent times on Earth, sometimes in association with sociality (corvids, great apes, proboscids) and sometimes not (octopodes), and sometimes in association with tool use (corvids, great apes, and octopodes) and sometimes not (proboscids).
The animals with sufficient smarts to have reached the “glass ceiling” have one thing in common: they derive sustenance from a variety of food sources distributed patchily in both space and time, and need a good geographic memory and at least a rudimentary world-model to remember where and anticipate when a given food source will be available. The tool users have, among their food sources, ones that are more accessible to those with tool-using skills: octopodes can open containers, and clams; apes use termite sticks; corvids drop things onto hard surfaces or even place them in the path of car traffic to nutcrack them; etc.
Intelligence tends to be much weaker in animals who are one-trick ponies when it comes to diet: just graze grass all day, or chase gazelles, or etc. … the next smartest “tier” tend to be ambush hunters like cats and some spiders (and the smartest tier commonly incorporate ambush hunting into their food procurement repertoire, though are usually omnivores with lots of other options, though too little of any single option to specialize exclusively in that).
Or, we could look at generalists and note that they fall into two broad groups: biggish smart ones (like us), and small fast-reproducing ones (like mice and cockroaches, which the biggish smart ones tend to regard as vermin). The more specialized something is in its diet, the dumber it tends to be, because it has little use for creativity. At the farthest extreme of that you find plants, which just sit there and soak up light, water, and some gases and dissolved minerals for sustenance and have no use for even the most rudimentary sort of brains. Filter-feeding animals that root themselves to one spot (barnacles, anemones, tunicates) are nearly as brainless, both literally and figuratively, though ones that move are relatively smart (whales), probably because they too need to find their food in space and time: plankton blooms are geographically patchy and often seasonal, like a lot of primate food sources.
There are some animals in the big-omnivore niche that don’t seem to have gotten particularly smart though. Bears, for one. Varied food sources, but not exactly known for cleverness. They may be too large, resulting in low population densities and each individual having a large range, so they can make up for lower intelligence on volume. (Proboscids are also large, but social, which may make a difference.) Raccoons show greater intelligence and tool use capacity than bears but are not reputed to be as smart as apes or corvids. They also don’t seem especially social: call them the land octopus, clever at getting into containers but unlikely to build a civilization in a future where we’ve blown our shot. (Or simply abandoned the Earth, leaving it to go fallow, because being at the bottom of a significant gravity well is inconvenient?) The remaining apes and the corvids all are likelier prospects for being our successors.
That’s an interesting possibility, that Earth is among the earliest terrestrial planets to have a substantial iron core. (This should get more common as the cosmos ages, as heavier stars pump out heavy elements and metallicities go up.)
It could explain the Fermi paradox as a variant of the “rare Earth” family of explanations: having a big iron core allows a planet to produce a strong geo-dynamo magnetic field, which in turn helps it to hold onto atmosphere — especially if it is close to its star. It also shields the land from nasty radiation. So, the planet’s habitability-lifespan is extended, and life can crawl out of the oceans, the latter likely being needed to get technological in a big, potentially-star-colonizing way. (Octopodes might build crude huts out of rocks and unscrew jars, but it’s unlikely they’d be building radio transmitters or spaceships even if they got social and a whole lot smarter.)
Our own solar system only has the one terrestrial planet with a strong, dynamo-induced magnetic field. Mars’s core was too small and cooled too fast for its dynamo to last, Mercury is just the solidified core without the rest of the planet probably because something blew the outer layers off during the late heavy bombardment, and Venus, despite having a comparable size to the Earth and comparable interior heat (enough to drive volcanism, notably), seems to lack a strong magnetic field. The other obvious things Venus lacks are liquid water and a large moon, and perhaps one of these things is required: water for plate tectonics and perhaps as a fluxing agent down deeper, one or both of which might be needed to stir the outer core up enough to make a dynamo develop; or the moon, to stir it up with its tides. Venus rotates much more slowly than Earth, which is probably the proximate cause of the lack of a strong internal dynamo. The impact that birthed the Earth’s moon may also have spun up the planet, since it was a glancing blow and not a head-on collision. So Earth may have a combination of very unusual circumstances (high iron content and high volatiles at the same time; a big impact to spin things up; plus being in the CHZ) that are all required for complex land life to develop. Earth has another probably-unusual thing: enough water for large, climate-stabilizing and life-cradling water bodies to develop (and lubricate plate tectonics, which cycles carbon and various mineral nutrients and extends habitability lifespan), but not so much as to lack dry land. The range of water amounts high enough to get plate tectonics and low enough to have large expanses of dry land is fairly narrow. The other terrestrial planets here are dry and the exoplanets with detectable water thus far seem likely to all be all-ocean.
Frankly, Earth isn’t a normal terrestrial planet at all, but a weird hybrid between a terrestrial planet (iron-rich, has land, but dry) and an outer-system moon (water-rich, but low in heavier elements and no land). Cross Venus with Titan and you get Earth.
So you may need this weird crossbreed planet type, and for it to have landed smack dab in the CHZ, and for a big glancing impact to have spun it up enough for it to throw off a decent magnetic field, to get complex life developing on land. Earth itself didn’t have this until the cosmologically recent past: roughly 400 million years ago, the most recent 8% or so of its total lifespan-thus-far. There may be two reasons for this: lack of much land until relatively recently (as the planet has been slowly losing volatiles) and lack of a dynamo, which may only have really got going when the inner core began to form. That might have been as recently as 500 million years ago. The heat of crystallization emitted as the inner core forms heats the bottom of the outer core, at the same time the top of the outer core is cooled by the rest of the earth (with the mantle stirred up by plate tectonics) acting as a heat-sink. That’s a recipe for convection, and, besides the large coriolis forces from the Earth’s prodigous spin, it’s the other major ingredient needed for the geodynamo to exist. So for the past 500 million years the outer core has been like water in a pot on a hot plate. Before that it may have been stagnant, with the cooling at the top alone not being sufficient to start it convecting. No magnetic field, too much radiation for life on land or even in the shallow continental shelves. Once the field ramped up, bam, Cambrian explosion as life roared into these newly-available niches and rapidly diversified, first adapting to the continental shelves and then, by 100 more million years later, invading the land itself.
This also puts a size range on planets that might produce intelligent life, narrower than one might previously have thought. The planet can’t be too small or the dynamo never gets going or cools and shuts down too fast (Mars); it can’t be too big or the pressure at the top of the core will be too high for a liquid outer core, and no dynamo again. Big also means less terrain relief due to stronger surface gravity, and that narrows the allowed range of water content to have plate tectonics without drowning all the land, and again plate tectonics might be needed to get the dynamo going (lest the top of the core not be cooled strongly enough) and certainly seems needed for long-term habitability (lest all of some key element, such as phosphorus, get buried forever). Small also means faster volatile loss. Super-earths may tend toward being either all-ocean or no-dynamo, and infra-earths may tend toward being either frozen and no-dynamo (Mars) or moist greenhouses. And only two terrestial planets out of four here got the needed rotational kick from early impacts, too. Those big early impacts really set a planet’s destiny: they can blow off the mantle and crust outright (Mercury), miss it completely (Venus), or give a planet some moons and a nice fast spin, all depending on the size and angle of the strike. (Note though: Mars’s current moons appear to be captured asteroids from the main belt, not impact-formed. If Mars had impact-formed moons it lost them long ago. It certainly had an impact, with a large basin in the north and a spin nearly as fast as Earth. Another strike against infra-Earths is that the range of impact parameters that will give them enough spin for a dynamo without blowing off most of the atmosphere is narrower. Mars had too big an impact for its small size, and still didn’t quite end up spinning as fast as Earth.)
@ surplus
So it wasn’t so much that Yogi was particularly smart, just that all the other bears being thick drove the average down?
And yeah, I tend towards rare earth hypothesis. Especially for intelligence. It seems that, unlike unicellular life, multi cellular life, isn’t something almost immediately inevitable. It took about 3 billion years before cells started getting it on with each other, and intelligent life took another billion years or so.
Assuming those timelines aren’t atypical and it takes 4 billion years of uninterrupted habitability for a planet to get to this stage, it may be most planets aren’t that stable on those sorts of timescales. For the reasons you point out.
And there’s also the whole moon/tides/tidal pools thing.
Whatever the truth may be, I find it amazing that I’m part of how the universe observes itself.
@ gss ex-noob
I like his video where he tells Yogi Bear to grab some loo roll and follow him into the forest.
Yeah, that moon-forming impact did a lot of heavy lifting — and not just literally. It also spun up the planet enough to have a decent dynamo, but not so much that the land was whipped by permanent 400kph winds; it stripped off a lot of volatiles, so we didn’t end up a landless ocean-world super-Earth or a Venusian steam-bath, but left enough that there are oceans instead of all the water being in the more porous among the rocks, and the continental interiors get enough rain to be mostly-not-desert; it avoided blowing too much of the non-core rocky material away; and even the moon itself might be helping, by making the axial tilt more stable in the long term, providing tidal stirring and mixing in the shallow waters, and generating some supplemental geothermal heating that extends the “geodynamic lifespan” (after which no more tectonics, no more dynamo), while not being so large or close that it braked away too much of the spin too quickly, or even fell back and blew everything up.
Earth is in every conceivable Goldilocks zone. Distance from sun: just right. Spin: just right. Size: just right. Volatile %: just right. Moon size and distance: just right. Iron-to-silicate ratio: just right (not enough iron and no dynamo, not enough silicate and no surface tectonics, plus not enough insulation above the core so the dynamo is quickly lost; too much silicate and the core is too insulated and no dynamo, or under enough pressure it’s solid through and through and no dynamo; too much of both and surface gravity is too high, the surface is too flat, and wet enough = no land).
Even the star might be just right: the smaller the star, the closer the CHZ is to it and the stronger the effect of the stellar wind on the atmosphere. The dynamo has to be correspondingly stronger to keep the atmosphere from being rapidly lost, and take that far enough and you’re stuck choosing between no air and 400km/h surface winds. Either option precludes complex land life. Too big a star, though, and the CHZ moves outward too fast for the planet to stay habitable for very long. Some red dwarf planets might be good, stable, long-lived environments for bacteria to arise from abiogenesis, but they are poor prospects for originating a technological civilization. Incubators of spores that might escape to infect more Earthlike planets around larger, bluer stars, at best. Impacts can kick up such spores, and those same strong stellar winds will give them a nice little boost toward the heliopause. Though to get here they’d probably have to hitch a ride on an object like 1I/Ou’muamua or 2I/Borisov, then get dislodged by outgassing (such as was observed when 1I/Ou’muamua passed near the Sun) and drift into Earth’s path. If our solar system is, or is not, awash in alien spores we’ll soon find out, as our ability to do sample returns from comets and the like is rapidly maturing.
But the upshot is: the Sun is just right, too, neither too big nor too small.
Frankly, we couldn’t have asked for a better planet. It might be a long time before we find another that’s even remotely close. We really need to do a better job of taking care of the one we have!
Surplus
One interesting side “road” somebody might like to work on one day, if they aren’t already, would be to look into pre-colonial indigenous societies. And not just Australia.
A couple of “explorers” made rather astonished observations that some corroborees were performed or led by men who had travelled long distances to learn from other groups. The truly amazing feature was that neither the performers nor the audience had any trouble understanding them despite the fact that not one of them understood a single word of the foreign language being used. Though I doubt that any of those indigenous Australians understood anything at all of an Italian song that one group of young men learned – but Sturt (or Mitchell or whoever) reported it to illustrate how accurately they could mimic any foreign language.
The speculation was that all Australian language speakers could gather meaning from a song or a chant in an unfamiliar tongue by paying attention to pitch, rhythm or maybe choreography of the song. There’s a true treasure trove of varied information in old records of surveyors linguists explorers pastoralists census takers from the first couple of decades of each colony being established.
@ surplus
Yes, we are lucky with the Moon. I’m not one for simulation hypothesis or anything like that; but the fact we have total solar eclipses is a coincidence that intrigues me.
It may be though that Theia type impacts are not that rare. There would be a tendency for matter to accumulate at the Trojan points of a planetoid. If there’s a big enough collection so as to form another hydrostatic equilibrium planetoid, then such a collision almost becomes inevitable. So there may be other big mooned plants out there.
As an aside, once the moon has receded enough so the barycentre falls outside the earth then we officially become a double planet. Cool.
And the Sun is special too. It’s often described as a ‘typical’ star. But it seems to be a lot more stable than even other G2 types. It’s also not a binary (that we know of) and that’s moderately unusual too.
And that’s before we even consider the galactic habitable zone.
We do seem to live in a particularly life friendly neighbourhood.
Surplus, Alan
Goldilocks zones. Yay. There’s a fantastic doco series by Brian Cox on how our solar system works /got to be the way it is.
Turns out we’re protected from constant meteor bombardment by the previous inward then outward movement of Jupiter. Swept up, vacuumed up and every which way scattered or removed most of the debris remaining from forming the sun and other planets .
He didn’t however talk much about the other great event leading to us being as we are. The 1st Great Extinction event. The biology of our planet was entirely underwater or in the sunless depths of caves. Until … the waste excreted by those organisms, namely oxygen, accumulated enough to form the ozone layer that allowed life to survive and eventually thrive on the surface free of lethal radiation.
When people talk about finding life on other planets, nobody seems to think of a planet having the Goldilocks conditions but being a couple of billions behind our stage of development. Nor do people fascinated by the possibility that a planet might seethe with life might find all of it under water. Inaccessible invisible to anyone like us.