Name: What Does Earth Look Like?
Uploaded: 2016-02-24T17:02:02.000Z
Duration: 10 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Here's an image taken only 45,000 kilometres away,

Well, it depends on how you define "look".

The word look comes from the old Breton word "lagud",

And that's part of the problem. Images like this are based on light

everything. There's a fantastic episode of Radiolab that uses

sound to illustrate just how different other creature

visual spaces are from our our own. When we talk about the way something

we are talking about the visual perception of emitted

Light we perceive as red has a longer wavelength

than blue or violet. But what if I crank the wavelength

gamma rays. Going the other way, you get infrared,

But even within the range of wavelengths we observe,

the breadth is breathtaking. If the entire

practical spectrum of wavelengths was laid out

linearly from New York to Los Angeles, the visual portion we see

to slip through a surgical mask. Point is,

when it comes to what their is to see, our

take a look a remote control. Many of  these things communicate with light

of wavelengths we can't see but mobile phone cameras

can. Try this at home. Push a button on a remote control and you won't see much

but use a mobile phone camera to detect wavelengths you can't see

and have them rendered visible. There's a whole lot going on

frequencies we can't see with our eyes alone

your vision. This is the Milky Way as we see it,

the visible light it gives off. But slide

to see how it would look if our eyes sensed other frequencies.

Of course, we are having to represent these other frequencies

with visible colours because even electromagnetic pretend time

As for Earth, if we only saw infrared frequencies it might look something

like this in our minds. Ultraviolet and extreme

ultraviolet vision would return unrecognizable spheres.

With X-ray vision auroras around the poles would shine brightly

and gamma ray vision would give Earth a bright edge

from high-energy electromagnetic radiation hitting the atmosphere

Look back at the Blue Marble. What's with the tyranny

it's because we often equate "up" with "better"

and many early map makers were from North of the equator.

no matter how strange day may seem to us. Funny enough,

the famous Blue Marble itself is a product of North equals

up bias. It didn't originally look like this.

fit our traditional idea of up after the fact.

Here's a visual birth that comes from the US Naval Observatory's live

animation of our planet. You can see exactly what parts are

in its shadow at this very moment. Other shadows fall

on Earth as well, like the Moon's shadow.

Last week @BadAstronomer shared this image. The dark smudges on the left is

as seen from above Earth. There's another problem with

the Blue Marble - it's flat and the Earth

is three-dimensional. A  globe is the best way to represent the Earth

but globes are difficult to carry around and even when displayed in two

well, you just can't see everything at once.

A flat map of the Earth is really convenient

but requires projecting a globe onto something

flat. And a sphere's surface cannot be represented on a plane

without distortion. The West Wing famously pointed out

There's no such thing as a perfect flat map of the entire

world. Some maps are useful for some things and other maps for other things

but it is really fun to pick on the Mercator projection,

mainly because it's so popular and is even used by Google Maps,

mainly because it's so easy to zoom in on.

It preserves shape decently well but suffers

when it comes to area. As I've shown before, Africa

is huge. Its area is so large the entire contiguous United States could

fit inside of it, along with all of China,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

What Does Earth Look Like?

straight

flat

line

surface