In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

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Pluto is a very active ice world that's covered in glaciers, mountains of ice water, icy dunes and possibly even cryovolcanoes that erupt icy lava made of water, methane or ammonia. Moons have come to exist around most planets and many other Solar System bodies. These natural satellites originated by one of three possible mechanisms: One unresolved issue with this model is that it cannot explain how the initial orbits of the proto-terrestrial planets, which would have needed to be highly eccentric to collide, produced the remarkably stable and nearly circular orbits they have today. [49] One hypothesis for this "eccentricity dumping" is that terrestrials formed in a disc of gas still not expelled by the Sun. The " gravitational drag" of this residual gas would have eventually lowered the planets' energy, smoothing out their orbits. [50] However, such gas, if it existed, would have prevented the terrestrial planets' orbits from becoming so eccentric in the first place. [35] Another hypothesis is that gravitational drag occurred not between the planets and residual gas but between the planets and the remaining small bodies. As the large bodies moved through the crowd of smaller objects, the smaller objects, attracted by the larger planets' gravity, formed a region of higher density, a "gravitational wake", in the larger objects' path. As they did so, the increased gravity of the wake slowed the larger objects down into more regular orbits. [52] Asteroid belt [ edit ] The images reveal a particular phenomenon on Mars. They show that the martian dust storms are made up of regularly spaced smaller cloud cells, arranged like grains or pebbles. The texture is also seen in clouds in Earth’s atmosphere.

Uranus holds the record for the coldest temperature ever measured in the solar system — minus 371.56 degrees F (minus 224.2 degrees C). The average temperature of Uranus is minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (-195 degrees Celsius).Leper Creativity: The Cyclonopedia Symposium, co-edited with Ed Keller and Nicola Masciandaro. Punctum Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0615600468. One key insight made possible with the VMC images is the measurement of the altitude of dust clouds. The length of the shadows they cast are measured and combined with knowledge of the Sun’s position to measure the height of the clouds above the martian surface. Results revealed that dust can reach approximately 6–11 km above the ground and the cells have typical horizontal sizes of 20–40 km.

See also “Nekros; or, the Poetics of Biopolitics” in Zombie Theory: A Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); “Necrologies: The Death of the Body Politic” in Beyond Biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2011). This model, known as the nebular hypothesis, was first developed in the 18th century by Emanuel Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant, and Pierre-Simon Laplace. Its subsequent development has interwoven a variety of scientific disciplines including astronomy, chemistry, geology, physics, and planetary science. Since the dawn of the Space Age in the 1950s and the discovery of exoplanets in the 1990s, the model has been both challenged and refined to account for new observations. Astronomers believe an object twice the size of Earth collided with Uranus roughly 4 billion years ago, causing Uranus to tilt. That tilt causes extreme seasons that last 20-plus years, and the sun beats down on one pole or the other for 84 Earth-years at a time. Main article: History of Solar System formation and evolution hypotheses Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the originators of the nebular hypothesis Ultimately, the Solar System is stable in that none of the planets are likely to collide with each other or be ejected from the system in the next few billion years. [102] Beyond this, within fivebillion years or so, Mars's eccentricity may grow to around 0.2, such that it lies on an Earth-crossing orbit, leading to a potential collision. In the same timescale, Mercury's eccentricity may grow even further, and a close encounter with Venus could theoretically eject it from the Solar System altogether [99] or send it on a collision course with Venus or Earth. [104] This could happen within a billion years, according to numerical simulations in which Mercury's orbit is perturbed. [105] Moon–ring systems [ edit ]

Gravitational collapse

If the reader is already vaguely familiar with horror literature and the history of philosophy, then this book shouldn’t pose too much of a challenge. If, however, one is completely uninterested in the connections between philosophy, horror, and mystical theology, then this book will probably not engage your interest at all. Yet, even if you are incredibly engaged and interested in this topic, you might still be disappointed by the repetitiveness of his analysis in this volume. The formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. [1] Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun, while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary disk out of which the planets, moons, asteroids, and other small Solar System bodies formed.

The nebular hypothesis says that the Solar System formed from the gravitational collapse of a fragment of a giant molecular cloud, [9] most likely at the edge of a Wolf-Rayet bubble. [10] The cloud was about 20 parsecs (65 light years) across, [9] while the fragments were roughly 1parsec (three and a quarter light-years) across. [11] The further collapse of the fragments led to the formation of dense cores 0.01–0.1parsec (2,000–20,000 AU) in size. [a] [9] [12] One of these collapsing fragments (known as the presolar nebula) formed what became the Solar System. [13] The composition of this region with a mass just over that of the Sun ( M ☉) was about the same as that of the Sun today, with hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of lithium produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, forming about 98% of its mass. The remaining 2% of the mass consisted of heavier elements that were created by nucleosynthesis in earlier generations of stars. [14] Late in the life of these stars, they ejected heavier elements into the interstellar medium. [15] Some scientists have given the name Coatlicue to a hypothetical star that went supernova and created the presolar nebula. The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us. A significant part of this paradoxical world-in-itself is grounded by scientific inquiry – both the production of scientific knowledge of the world and the technical means of acting on and intervening in the world. Even though there is something out there that is not the world-for-us, and even though we can name it the world-in-itself, this latter constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility. Tragically, we are most reminded of the world-in-itself when the world-in-itself is manifest in the form of natural disasters. The discussions on the long-term impact of climate change also evoke this reminder of the world-in-itself, as the specter of extinction furtively looms over such discussions. Using advanced predictive models, we have even imagined what would happen to the world if we as human beings were to become extinct. So, while we can never experience the world-in-itself, we seem to be almost fatalistically drawn to it, perhaps as a limit that defines who we are as human beings. Let us call this spectral and speculative world the world-without-us. Astronomers continue to come up empty in their search for Planet 9. A recent 2022 sky survey using the 6-meter Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile found thousands of tentative candidate sources but none could be confirmed.

Hubble image of protoplanetary discs in the Orion Nebula, a light-years-wide stellar nursery probably very similar to the primordial nebula from which the Sun formed The Oort Cloud lies well past the Kuiper Belt, considered to be located between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. The outer edge of the Oort Cloud may reach as far as 10,000 up to 100,000 AU from the sun. One AU is equal to approximately 93,000,000 miles (150 million kilometers). The Oort Cloud is home to billions, or even trillions of objects, according to NASA Science. Solar system formation and discovery

Main article: Late Heavy Bombardment Meteor Crater in Arizona. Created 50,000 years ago by an impactor about 50 metres (160ft) across, it shows that the accretion of the Solar System is not over. It is smaller than Earth's moon; its orbit is highly elliptical, falling inside Neptune's orbit at some points and far beyond it at others; and Pluto's orbit doesn't fall on the same plane as all the other planets —instead, it orbits 17.1 degrees above or below. In The Dust Of This Planet has been translated into several languages, including Spanish (Materia Oscura, 2015), Italian (Nero Editions 2018), Russian (Hyle Press, 2017), and German (Mathes & Seitz, 2019).In a sense, the world-without-us allows us to think the world-in-itself, without getting caught up in a vicious circle of logical paradox. The world-in-itself may co-exist with the world-for-us – indeed the human being is defined by its impressive capacity for not recognizing this distinction. By contrast, the world-without-us cannot co-exist with the human world-for-us; the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world. To say that the world-without-us is antagonistic to the human is to attempt to put things in human terms, in the terms of the world-for-us. To say that the world-without-us is neutral with respect to the human, is to attempt to put things in the terms of the world-in-itself. The world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific. The world-without-us is as much a cultural concept as it is a scientific one, and, as this book attempts to show, it is in the genres of supernatural horror and science fiction that we most frequently find attempts to think about, and to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us. Dark Nights of the Universe, co-authored with Daniel Colucciello Barber, Nicola Masciandaro, Alexander R. Galloway and François Laruelle. [NAME] Publications, 2013. ISBN 978-0984056675. See the essays "Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman," Cultural Critique no. 53 (2003), "Biohorror/Biotech," Paradoxa no. 17 (2002). In the long term, the greatest changes in the Solar System will come from changes in the Sun itself as it ages. As the Sun burns through its hydrogen fuel supply, it gets hotter and burns the remaining fuel even faster. As a result, the Sun is growing brighter at a rate of ten percent every 1.1billion years. [114] In about 600 million years, the Sun's brightness will have disrupted the Earth's carbon cycle to the point where trees and forests (C3 photosynthetic plant life) will no longer be able to survive; and in around 800 million years, the Sun will have killed all complex life on the Earth's surface and in the oceans. In 1.1 billion years, the Sun's increased radiation output will cause its circumstellar habitable zone to move outwards, making the Earth's surface too hot for liquid water to exist there naturally. At this point, all life will be reduced to single-celled organisms. [115] Evaporation of water, a potent greenhouse gas, from the oceans' surface could accelerate temperature increase, potentially ending all life on Earth even sooner. [116] During this time, it is possible that as Mars's surface temperature gradually rises, carbon dioxide and water currently frozen under the surface regolith will release into the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that will heat the planet until it achieves conditions parallel to Earth today, providing a potential future abode for life. [117] By 3.5billion years from now, Earth's surface conditions will be similar to those of Venus today. [114] Relative size of the Sun as it is now (inset) compared to its estimated future size as a red giant Networks, Swarms, Multitudes" Part 1, Part 2, Ctheory (2004), "Biophilosophy for the 21st Century", Ctheory (2005).