RDP Friday: ALIGN
There is a school of thought that says when Mars, Venus and Pluto align a certain way in the sky, it affects our lives and our destiny, our creativity and in some cases our electronic devices.
I say if those are the guideposts you look for to get through your day, happy trails.
However, take a look at the surfaces of these planets and bear with me to the end of this post:
This is Venus:
VENUS
Source: NASA/JPL
Published: February 10, 2012
“Crater Farm”
This is Mercury:
North Pole of planet Mercury. This image is a composite.
Original caption: “NASA
The dark region at the center of this image, pieced together from photographs taken by NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, includes the north pole of Mercury. Because Mercury’s spin axis is almost exactly vertical, sunlight never reaches the bottoms of craters near the poles, and water ice can persist in the ultra cold temperatures there.
And this is the surface of Pluto:
An image of the bladed terrain of Pluto’s informally named the Tartarus Dorsa region, imaged by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. Image Credit: New Horizons.
These worlds would drop you stone cold dead if you managed to make it to their surfaces. They would show you zero mercy and I mean NONE.
To illustrate my point let’s pretend you stood on the surfaces of Mercury, Pluto and Venus with no space suit:
Artist Unknown
Venus has a very dense atmosphere so she would squash you like a bug and then she would vaporize you. You might live for a second on her surface. But by ‘live’ I think that means as long as your heart is pumping and you have a glimmner of brain activity then you are ‘alive’. Venus is clearly not a human friendly world.
Depending on where you landed on Mercury you would either instantly freeze or be turned into a carbon brick ( which is a nice way of saying you’d be roasted ). Mercury has no atmosphere so unlike Venus you wouldn’t get that second to live. Mercury might be little but it has two very distinct ways to kill you, so don’t underestimate its committment to homicide.
As for Pluto- it’s 3.7 billion miles from the Sun. It’s super cold and on top of that Pluto has no magnetic field so radiation would rip your cells apart in seconds. I mean Cell shredding is a grusome way to dispatch a living organism.
Title: George Stubbs, A Horse Affrighted by a Lion, an etching
Date Created: 1777/1777
Speaking strictly for myself, if I were going to chose something to guide me through life and explain the world around me- I wouldn’t look to three worlds who in the grand scheme of things are bloodless killers.
Just think about it the next time you look up and wonder what tomorrow will bring and find that Venus is looking right back at you and it looks like she’s winking.