This. This Looks Like Something From The Early Internet But This Is A New Thing Apparently Oh My GOD

Is this my macroeconomics professor asking me to write economic fanfic?

Travel to Exotic Destinations in our Galaxy!

The planets beyond our solar system – exoplanets – are so far away, often trillions of miles, that we don’t have the technology to truly see them. Even the best photos show the planets as little more than bright dots. We’ve confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets, but we think there are billions. Space telescopes like Hubble aren’t able to take photos of these far-off worlds, but by studying them in different wavelengths of light (colors), we’ve learned enough about conditions on these planets that we can illustrate them.

We know, thanks to the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, that there is a thick atmosphere on a planet called 55 Cancri e about 40 light-years away. And Hubble found silicate vapor in the atmosphere of this rocky world. We also know it’s scorching-close to its Sun-like star, so … lava. Lots and lots of lava. This planet is just one of the many that the James Webb Space Telescope will soon study, telling us even more about the lava world!

You can take a guided tour of this planet (and others) and see 360-degree simulations at our new Exoplanet Travel Bureau.

Travel to the most exotic destinations in our galaxy, including:

Kepler-16b, a planet with two suns.

Then there’s PSO J318.5-22, a world with no sun that wanders the galaxy alone. The nightlife would never end on a planet without a star.

TRAPPIST-1e, which will also be studied by the Webb Space Telescope, is one of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a star about 40 light-years from Earth. It’s close enough that, if you were standing on this exoplanet, you could see our Sun as a star in the Leo constellation! You can also see it on the poster below: look for a yellow star to the right of the top person’s eye.

We haven’t found life beyond Earth (yet) but we’re looking. Meanwhile, we can imagine the possibility of red grass and other plants on Kepler-186f, a planet orbiting a red dwarf star.

We can also imagine what it might be like to skydive on a super-Earth about seven times more massive than our home planet. You would fall about 35% faster on a super-Earth like HD 40307g, making for a thrilling ride!

Any traveler is going to want to pick up souvenirs, and we have you covered. You can find free downloads of all the posters here and others! What are you waiting for? Come explore with us!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Tintin v. Indy, Adam Murphy

The Atlantic

How the Snowflakes Won

The soft, sad freaks on an unprofitable website claimed victory in the battle for the internet’s soul and defined the worldview of a generat

I suppose this is a good opportunity to let people know that I'll be running Tumblr personally for a while, and it will be my top priority within Automattic. There is a ton of opportunity for improvements the community has asked for and deserves, and I'm excited to work on it.

‘Thoth and the Chief Magician’, 1925. Evelyn Pau

I think one of the biggest obstacles to getting a social media platform off the ground in 2023 is that big sites like Twitter and YouTube have created an expectation that registering an account should automatically come with effectively unlimited storage and bandwidth for whatever media you care to post, which creates a hard entry barrier for any platform without major financial backing. Like, we can wax rhapsodic about early 2000s forum culture all we like, but one of the main unwritten rules that allowed smaller forums to survive was never turning image hosting on for free accounts – either you made people figure out their own solutions for hosting images, or you charged a fee. If you were lucky, a forum with free registration might have let you host a banner for your signature on their servers, but that was it! Unless someone manages to convince large numbers of folks that a text-only social media platform is worth participating in, I'm not sure there's any good way forward for smaller outfits at this point.