Hugh Bollinger / Sunday, April 17, 2011

The cameras and the mystery

The unknowns still outnumber the knowns

By Reilly Capps Google Maps knows what America looks like, and so the world is becoming more known. Google can get you from the ice cream shop to the coffee place to the supermarket, tell you how many seconds exactly until the bus arrives, let you see a 360 degree view of streets you're not even on. It's an engineering marvel, and one of the reasons that Google will someday be as powerful as many countries. When Google Maps starts to operate in real time, which isn't unlikely, we'll have an eye on the world everywhere all the time, a Panopticon that will keep people in line, and also rob the Earth of some of its mysteries. But this is relatively new phenomenon, a known Earth. It was just in 1953, only 58 years ago, that we first stood at the top of the tallest mountain in the world. Now, about 1,200 people have seen the sight. And, thanks to cameras, everyone can get an idea of what it looks like from the top, this bright Earth, jagged and covered in water. To view this picture below, scroll right to see the 360 degree sight. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="4103" caption="Everest in 1989. Copyright Roddy Mackenzie"]

[/caption] Fewer parts of the Earth need the label Europeans used to put on maps: "there be dragons." Those parts of the world that do are chiefly in the deep sea, and, down there, there really could be dragons. The deepest part of the sea is 35,840 feet deep, deeper than Everest is tall. If there are gigantic new creatures to be found -- like a giant squid -- they'll be in the sea. The sea is the great unknown, its sounds as mysterious as its sights. There is the infamous Bloop from 1997 -- click here to hear the sound -- which burbled up from some unknown part of the Pacific, and which was heard as far away as 5,000 kilometers. No one knows if it was the sound of ice chunks falling off of glaciers in Antarctica. No one knows if it was a giant, unknown animal breathing. No one knows if it was something else. And the sea is constantly making unidentifiable sounds. There's The Hum. There's the Slow Down. There's Julia. All real sounds. All unidentified. It's enough to supply Sci-Fi and X-Files writers with plots for a year. And enough for regular citizens to demand more funding for scientific research, so we can get past speculations to theories. And maybe answers. And that's just on this planet. Boring, sterile, dusty Mars has mountains that are actually taller than Everest. Olympus Mons is more than 12,000 meters above the average altitude of Mars -- what you might call the Martian "sea level." (Everest is just shy of 9,000 meters.) And we've never sent even a robot to the top of that mountain. Wouldn't it be cool to someday drop an astronaut up there, have him plant a flag and proclaim Mars conquered, then take a panorama photo like the one above of the tallest mountain in the solar system.

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Tags: reilly capps Bloop deep sea Everest giant squid Google Maps Hum Julia Olympus Mons RiledUp Slow Down

1 comments on article "The cameras and the mystery"

Hugh Bollinger

Your new posts are really cool, Reilly.

Welcome back!

Hugh

4/17/2011 2:26 PM

The cameras and the mystery

The unknowns still outnumber the knowns

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1 comments on article "The cameras and the mystery"

Hugh Bollinger

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