posted November 12 1999 by Zoe Skye
RED SKY AT MORNING (Hold the phone line, I’m downloading history!)
Music: Beastie Boys - Intergalactic (Obviously)
Mood: HYPERVENTILATING (Scientifically)
Hey BeyondGravity Family,
Okay, nobody pick up the landline. Seriously. If my dad calls right now and interrupts this download, I am going to scream loud enough to be heard in a vacuum.
Why? Because the starship Mudder's Boy just got back from the TRAPPIST-1 system and—you guys—it is actually happening.
I’ve been staring at the progress bar for forty-five minutes. It’s at 98%. I have chewed three fingernails down. But if the raw telemetry text is right, what is hiding behind this "loading..." icon is going to change everything.
(Science Interlude: Why should you care about TRAPPIST?) We always thought our solar system was the standard model. You know: rocky stuff in the middle, gas giants in the back, one nice yellow sun. Standard suburbia.
TRAPPIST is the downtown apartment complex equivalent. It’s a dim, ultra-cool red dwarf star, and it has packed SEVEN Earth-sized planets into an orbit tighter than a Tokyo subway car.
If you stood on the surface of TRAPPIST-1e, the other planets wouldn't just be dots like Mars is to us. They would look like moons. Giant, hanging worlds in the sky. You could wave to your neighbors.
Okay, the image just finished rendering. (Thanks, 28.8k modem, you are the true hero).
It’s Planet 1d.
There’s a horizon. Sharp, jagged rocks. And hanging right above the crags is a crescent. Not a moon. It’s Planet 1e. You can see cloud swirls. Cloud swirls, people.
While we’re down here arguing about dial-up speeds and waiting for The Phantom Menace trailer to buffer, there are humans—actual human beings running on bloo-engines—who have orbited a red star 39 light-years away, looking out a porthole at a sky full of other Earths.
It makes you feel small, doesn't it? But like... a good small. The kind of small where you realize the universe is crowded and waiting for us.
I’m going to convert this to a smaller JPEG so you don’t have to wait an hour to see it. Refresh the page in 5 mins.
Don’t forget to look up tonight.
- Zoe
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posted March 23 1999 by Zoe Skye
SURF REPORT: The Best of The Stuff You Haven't Seen Yet (Spread the Love to my Friends)
Music: LEN - Steal My Sunshine (Don't judge me, it's catchy)
Mood: Caffeinated
Happy Tuesday, Star-Gazers!
I’ve been trawling the World Wide Web so you don't have to.
It’s wild down here on Earth right now. Between the bloo price spikes and the Y2K panic, everyone seems a little tense. Up on Star Garden Station, we can bet the lettuce is growing, the stars are quiet, and the only bug they have to worry about is an actual aphid infestation in the greenhouse.
Here are five tabs currently crashing my Netscape Navigator.
1. Physics for Poets and Pets: How "The Eightfold Way" Actually Works My friend over at QuantumTeacup finally wrote an explainer on how the Eastern League's space-bending and mind-bending engine works that doesn’t require a PhD in imaginary numbers.
Zoe’s Take: She uses a donut and a straw metaphor that actually makes sense. Note: Do not try this with a real donut in zero-g. Crumbs are the enemy.
2. The bloo conspiracy webring: Found this via a Geocities search. This guy "Astro-Dave" in Nevada thinks the alien fuel isn't bacteria, but—get this—liquefied ghosts.
Zoe’s Take: Come on, Dave - my brother installs cannisters of bloo bio-fuel for a living. If they’re ghosts, they smell like gym socks and sulfur. But hey, cool animated flame gifs on your intro page.
3. SPACE FASHION DISASTER: The Vogue Shoot Did you see the spread in Vanity Fair? "Chic in the Vacuum"? They have a model wearing a spacesuit without the helmet ring.
Zoe’s Take: If she stepped out the airlock like that, she wouldn’t look "pouty and mysterious," she would look "explosively decompressed." Architects of the aesthetic, please consult an engineer next time.
4. Slashdot: Microsoft vs. The DOJ Okay, serious link. The antitrust stuff is heating up.
Zoe’s Take: I know I’m supposed to be Team Open Source, (rocking a Linux server for this website) but can we just appreciate that without Windows 98, I wouldn't be able to play Minesweeper while waiting for deep-space telemetry to download? It’s a complex relationship.
5. Recipe: Zero-G Brownies From the "Galactic Gourmet" newsletter.
Zoe’s Take: I tried this last night. They are less "brownies" and more "dense chocolate projectiles." If your gravity ever fails, these things could take out a satellite. Delicious, though.
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