• melfie@lemmy.zip
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    16 hours ago

    They’d probably like to come colonize our planet, but with 2x the gravity of Earth, I bet it’s hard to build a rocket that can actually get them into space, much less travel 1800 light years.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    I wonder if it has plate tectonics. A big part of why our continents look like this is them. That said, yeah that’s a lot of mid continent seas/great lakes

    • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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      12 hours ago

      If you didn’t have plate tectonics, you’d have a lot of problems with the atmosphere, and there’s a decent chance that life wouldn’t evolve, as the energy differentials generated by tectonic activity are those which life hangs onto, from nutrients, to oxidation, to geothermal heat.

    • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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      17 hours ago

      Documentaries and science communication in general has always been waaaay too fucking lax on properly disclosing artists’ renderings. Every field suffers from it, but I have to say astrophysics and astronomy are the absolute worst about it.

  • cartoon meme dog@lemmy.zip
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    21 hours ago

    Fermi paradox solution: aliens approach from a direction where the first part they see is the Philippines and Indonesia, and just say “nah I’m not learning all those names of islands”, and leave.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    23 hours ago

    Because the computer-generated images that symbolize said other planets are generally done with some shitty-shit stupid noise algorithm to generate the surface rather than anything decent (well, at least it’s not uniform noise), whilst the ones for planet Earth just use existing map data for the Earth surface.

    As it so happens I’ve been working on a game that has planets, so here’s a example generated with better algorithms:

    example made up planet

    PS: also note that for game purposes, the athmosphere is unrealistically thick as a proportion of planetary radius, purelly because it looks better. A lot of choices in game making are mainly artistic freedom.

    • Venat0r@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      I think it’s also that we choose the most photogenic angle for earth, if you pick a random angle of earth it sometimes doesn’t look as good.

      e.g. 638

      do you have an algorithm for picking a photogenic angle for your game?

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        19 hours ago

        do you have an algorithm for picking a photogenic angle for your game?

        Nah, the planets are just shown as 3D objects in the game.

        The little icons as the one I linked were made by a special game mode for development which I call the PlanetPhotoStudio that just lets me manually rotate the planet 3D object and take a snapshot, since the planet surfaces are pre-generated using an external program (“Grand Designer”, highly recommended) and only some results are chosen, it’s fine to also make those icons during development time.

        It’s actually less hassle to do make a “photo studio” (especially since most of the work is also used in the main game) and do it manually for each planet like that than to try and come up with an algorithm for “how photogenic a 2D view of a planet looks”.

  • ExtremeUnicorn@feddit.org
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    23 hours ago

    Am I the only one around here who doesn’t think it looks like shit?

    Geoscentific and ecological implications aside, they have a huge ass continent with multiple giant lakes and small peninsulas all around. With a comparable vegetation to earth, this would look amazing in person, I believe.

    • rumba@lemmy.zip
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      21 hours ago

      What I’d actually like to know is how it was chosen. At that distance, we can’t see anything from position and luminosity, and even the luminosity is rough to bake out of other bias. We’re better at telling that there’s a moon. Is this an artists rendition? It is a reasonable calculation due to age and plate tectonics?

      I don’t hate it, but if it’s just art for the sake of art, why not go earth-like?

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      22 hours ago

      Yeah, very geo-centric view. It just looks different than literally the only planet humanity has ever known

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    23 hours ago

    They got a lot more land on that planet. The people who live there don’t appreciate what they’ve got like we will, so we deserve it more. Let’s go kill them and take it from them.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      23 hours ago

      We’ve always done that. Everybody knows our hemisphere is prettier and sexier than theirs. We’ve got the hottest hemisphere on the planet, and that includes whether you break it up North/South, or East/West. We own it, baby.

  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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    1 day ago

    There’s no other life in the entire universe. It’s just us. We’re actually very unique and special. We are, in fact, the center of the universe.

        • timestatic@feddit.org
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          21 hours ago

          Why do you have to know for sure to counter your claim? I am not 100% certain but I think it is likely givern the circumstances for life and the vastness of our universe. But I don’t claim to know for sure. I don’t think just because we want to feel special does this have to mean we’re the only planet with life in the universe

  • Szewek@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    It looks so shit cause they’ve already nuked themselves to planetary death. And because of climate change and rising sea level. Also ecosystem degradation and subsequent soil erosion. I’ve heard you need to prevent these to keep Earth beautiful. Just for the aesthetics. Think about the astronauts, what if they had to look at an ugly Earth?