slug: "latbs/earth"
lang: en
title: Earth
category: geography
pageCreated: "2023-10-01"
pageUpdated: "2024-12-30"
extends ../../../views/latbs/layout.pug
append presets
- hero = "earth.webp";
- heroAlt = "The Earth, its disc blue with water, Africa’s green forests and golden deserts just about peeking out under a sheet of white clouds";
- heroCaption = "Humanity’s first and forever home, pictured in 1972."
- crumbs = [{url: "solar-system", text: "Solar System"}]
block content
.infobox
.infobox-head
| Earth (Sun
span.all-sc III
| )
br
small
span(lang="pcm") Ɛt
| ,
abbr(lang="zh-Hans" title="Díqìu") 地球
| , Mother Earth, the Pale Blue Dirt
div
b Population:
| 35.1 billion Earthlings or mudeaters
div
b Geology:
| Arcadian rocky planet
div
b Habitability:
| Perfect in every regard
div
b Governance:
| 90-odd squabbling nation-states and confederations, mostly representative democratic republics
div
b First crewed visit:
| Humans arose circa 200,000
span.all-sc BCE
div
b Most spoken languages:
| Naija, Mandarin, English, Swahili
div
b Major religions:
| Christianity, Islam, various folk beliefs
div
b Largest city:
| Di Kos, the Kurufaba (101mn)
div
b Surface area:
|
abbr(title="197 million square miles") 510 square megametres
| (1,580 Polands)
div
b Orbit distance:
|
abbr(title="91.4–94.5 million miles") 147–152 gigametres
| (8m10s–8m27s)
div
b Day length:
| 1
a.science(href="/latbs/converter")
span.all-sc T
| -day
div
b Year length:
| 365.24 days
div
b Calendar:
| Gregorian: 365–366 days = 12 months = 1 year, current date 26 May 2558
div
b Satellites:
| Selene, the Astrapelago
p
strong.dateline 2558 #[+sc("CE")]
|
b Earth
| is the third planet from the sun and the original homeworld of #[a.sapiens(href="/latbs/humans") humankind]. For billions of years, it was the only place in the universe known to harbour any kind of life; even now, it is the only one of our ten planets where intelligent life sprung up by natural means.
p
| Some 35 billion people are embodied
+sn(1)
| on Earth, which continues to be the cultural and religious capital of the solar system. Around six thousand tongues are estimated to be spoken across its surface, and the vast majority of religious texts and traditions can trace their way back to the “pale blue dirt”.
+sn(1)
p
| The rise of technogenic intelligence threw a wrench into the idea of an exact population count. This figure includes technogens who make personal use of an individual robot body or are otherwise subject to continuity identity, but there are potential trillions of copies of pattern-based intelligences who nevertheless have all the rights of any other sapien.
p “Mother Earth” is the only place in the solar system with a natural coating of liquid water, a naturally breathable atmosphere, and a natural abundance of verdant vegetation — and the only reason for all those qualifications is that Mars spent trillions of drachmæ to make itself more like Earth.
p
| Earth is orbited by one moon — Selene, known to Earthlings as simply “
em the
| Moon” — and a constellation of habitats and satellites called the Astrapelago.
+h2("Geology")
p Earth is an idyllic rocky planet, nestled in the inner solar system’s “Goldilocks belt”#[+sn(2)] between Venus and Mars. Around two thirds of its surface is covered in a great saltwater ocean, while the land that remains ranges from barren deserts to damp woods and freezing tundras. Its northern and southern poles are blanketed by thickets of ice and snow, albethey thinner than they were prior to the industrial revolution.
+sn(2)
p That’s the Earthling folk tale, not the Jovian thriller film.
figure.left
img(src="/latbs/media/riftvalley.webp" alt="A luscious green valley")
figcaption Eastafrica’s Great Rift Valley is a prototypically Earthling landscape, being where humans first evolved.
p The surface of Earth may strike viewers from other planets as being remarkably smooth, with gently sloping mountains and a distinct lack of craters. The reason lies underneath the surface, where a searing, seething sea of lava roils and shifts the cracked continents above into shape, quietly slipping any comet-borne pock-marks underneath the crust.
p Even further beneath lies the planet’s stout metal core, a kiln of viscous iron and nickel radiating the powerful natural magnetic field that shields the life above from the electric solar wind.
p All of this is topped by the atmosphere, an amicable mix of nitrogen and oxygen that holds the surface down, keeps it warm, and filters the sun’s light to what we still call ”sky blue”. All these things add up to a perfect environment for organic life to flourish — and so it did.
+h2("Geography")
:rubric-unsafe
Traditionally Earth’s inhabitants have divided it into seven continents and five oceans. This is the sort of sentence that should have many, many, asterisks after every word, but it’s been a good enough system for the past several millennia, so there’s no point in letting it go to waste.
Civilisation got its start in *Africa*, an equatorial hothouse which spent much of the second millennium lagging behind its contemporaries in wealth and power. Politically, modern Africa is dominated by the ::Kurufaba::, an allegiance of overlapping city-states sharing a common currency and institutions which covers the area from the Gulf of Guinea up to the south of the great Sahara desert, where an army of gardening drones and aqueducts work to spring up ever more oases for the continent’s fast-growing population. Across the Sahara and to the east is the ::Nilotic Federation::, its inhabitants housed in megacities clinging on to dear life along the land’s namesake river; south from there lies ::East­af­ri­ca::, a historic rocket superpower which prides itself in being humanity’s birthplace and, not to be too smug (they absolutely mean to be too smug), its finest cultural hotspot.
By far the greatest landmass in both land and population is twelve-billion-strong *Asia*, so large that a single-sentence summary would make a mockery of its diversity. From the west to the east — the confusingly named Middle East, the holiest place in the universe to billions across the solar system, had a tumultuous twenty-first century; its once booming oil industry crushed under the weight of war and promise of fusion power, it has reinvented itself as a place of pilgrimage and paradise, where tourists from all around come to honour the past and live it up in the present. Giving the Middle East a run for its money is India[^3], where faiths rise and empires fall. The predominant powers here are the ::Indic Union::, a polite confederation that will occasionally spit out an absolutely insane feat of geoengineering — yes, half of Bengal used to be oceanic saltwater; no, the tigers don’t care — and ::Dravidia::, which has been living it up as the premier launchpad for the eastern hemisphere for half a millennium.
[^3]: Readers of industrial-age texts should take note that “India” was then used in a more restrictive sense, referring to a sovereign state whose territory included what is now Dravidia and the core of the Indic Union.
Then to the north, over the mountains of ::Tibet:: and the deserts of ::Altishahr::, we come to the ::Federal Republic of China::, history’s first great empire \[/To be continued…/\]
Skittering all the way back to the west, just past the end of the Sahara and fanning of the Nile, we have *Europe* \[/To be continued…/\]
+h2("History")
p #[i Under construction…]
aside.note-to-self
ul
li Starting in 1980 would probably be advisable, but it might be interesting to see how 2558’ers treat our recent past
li Honestly a lot of this is up in the air right now. WW3 in the late 2090s between blocs led by Nigeria (yay geoengineering) and Brazil (please help my Amazon is dying) is fairly set in stone and just needs some polishing, but after that it gets real wibbly-wobbly
+h2("Society")
p #[i Under construction…]
aside.note-to-self
ul
li I imagine Earth as quite a conservative world, in the grand scheme of things — of course 2558’s conservative is practically our revolutionary, but they have a strong attachment to their traditions and such, being the oldest inhabited planet
li Really need to figure out how many people live in the Astrapelago though. I can’t imagine it getting up into the billions, but that might be more a failure of the imagination than anything…
+h2("Culture")
p #[i Under construction…]
+h2("Interplanetary relations")
p #[i Under construction…]