Forest fires are so weird. On what other planet do you just suddenly have such a violent chemical reaction? Idk probably none cause on what other planet do you have a bunch of carbon-carbon bonds sitting immersed in a bunch of oxygen? It’s not a stable situation, and after the fire has to be restored with solar power
Venus!
Fun Venus fact: it has fewer craters on its surface than you’d expect, and they all look suspiciously young. As far as we can tell, the whole surface of Venus is not that much more than a half billion years old. So what makes this so?
It is Earth-sized, which is theoretically enough to sustain tectonic activity. But we don’t see traditional plates there. Remember that Earth’s tectonic plates come in two flavors: continental plates, which are long-lived and low density, floating high in the mantle, and oceanic plates, which are heavier, younger, and are continually refreshed, spreading out from the center of the oceans and being subducted back in to the mantle where they collide with the continents.
As an incidental consequence, this means that a lot of ocean water gets sucked up in to the mantle during the subduction process. Water is very much unstable at tectonic pressures and temperatures, so it usually finds its way back out to the surface as a volcanic gas or something, but in the meantime there’s enough of it down there to lubricate the movement of the plates. Basically on the same principle that makes wastewater injection cause small earthquakes during the fracking process.
Now, Venus is likely to have had liquid water oceans at some point, but the runaway greenhouse effect has long since boiled them off. This means that a)the weight of the oceans doesn’t land disproportionately on a subsets of the plates, and b)there’s no water being pulled down there to keep the plates well-greased. So nowadays on Venus, subduction just… doesn’t happen. The plates are too rigid and dry, too homogeneous. So they stay locked in place relative to one another.
That means Venus has volcanoes but not really earthquakes. The energy that would be released in the motion of plates just builds, and builds, and builds. Until it doesn’t any more. Every [n] hundred million years or so, Venus has its one earthquake, which carries all the accumulated energy of all the earthquakes that ever happened on Earth between now and the Cambrian era, all at once.
This is enough to melt the entire surface and then some. The whole crust, all the mountains and valley networks and continents and basins and everything that floats on the fluid mantle, is subducted all at once, falling back in the planet’s interior. Then, with the whole planet molten, the surface can cool enough to form a new crust.
Anyway, that’s why global warming is bad.
Holy fuck
The whole crust
Melts
All at once????
#amazing
alarming for my Venusian real estate portfolio if true
RT @Pompangledangle: CHICAGO TODAY ✈️✈️✈️
CAN’T WAIT TO STOMP AROUND IN THIS BOI AND HUG PEEPS!! 💕💖
✂️ @LupeSuits
📸 @Boxer_Fox https://t.co/gBratWUx3B (Source)
“There is a copy of the NES game Golf in the firmware of every Switch system”
Me: Oh haha, what a weird thing, probably some remnant from the debugging process –
“Since that was a game that Satoru Iwata programmed himself, this could have been intended as a way of saying that Iwata is spiritually a part of every Switch and is watching over and protecting every system.”
On July 11th*, the date of Iwata’s passing, doing Iwata’s “directly to you” motion with the Joy-Cons on the home screen will play a sound clip of Iwata and launch the game.
(* Before you try this yourself, note that simply changing the date on your system will not work, as this runs off the Switch’s internal internet-synced clock, meaning that changing the date manually will only work if the system has never been connected to the internet)
I… I can’t…
It goes even further than that.
Firstly, opening the game like this person is in the video is only possible with a brand new unit on system version 1.0.0 that has never been connected to the Internet. Because of this, opening it is pretty hard to replicate, unless if you have a completely brand new Switch. So, even if the system’s internal date is on July 11, it still won’t open if the system version is up to date.
The thing is, it’s not supposed to be opened.
The hidden Golf game has been described as an omamori, which, in Japanese culture, is a charm usually bought at shrines that offers spiritual protection and good luck if you keep it close to you.
Sometimes they’re made of cloth, and look like a tiny bag, which can contain a written prayer. People often tie them to something like a purse or a backpack, so that it’s always with them. Here are a bunch of different ones:
Omamori are not supposed to be opened, as doing so is said to remove its blessing.
Seeing as the hidden Golf game on the Switch is so difficult to run under normal circumstances, it’s probably not supposed to be opened in the first place. It’s likely meant to represent an omamori in Iwata’s honor. Its very fitting, because of how portable the Switch is, since people are likely to take it with them like they would with an omamori strapped to a purse or backpack.
Hey, everyone. Since we’re now in July and this post is still making the rounds, I’m sure there are people who are going to want to try to activate the Golf game on their Switch on the 11th. So I wanted to provide an update to this:
As @lunarhalo24 helpfully pointed out, this inclusion of Golf in the Switch system was meant to be an omamori, a blessing from Iwata. And there’s another important cultural thing about omamori to note here:
An omamori’s blessing is only good until the end of the year, after which it expires and the omamori is traditionally disposed of in a sacred fire. So the files being deleted at the end of last year seems as though it was symbolic of the blessing’s time expiring.
So yes, there is now almost no way to actually access it. Because it was never meant to be accessed.
Reblogging because this is a really interesting way of combining tradition and technology in someone’s memory and as a good luck charm.
spacemaverick archive 