The sky is blue!
It’s the easiest thing to take for granted. But there is no guarantee that a planet gets a blue sky. How did we get so lucky? We look at the science behind our blue sky and end up amazed and grateful.
For more information check out That Time Oxygen Almost Killed Everything from the awesome folks at PBS Eons.
Carbon dioxide deepens the color of the atmosphere in the infrared portion of the spectrum (both by increasing the atmosphere’s opacity and reradiating energy in the infrared part of the spectrum). Check out this cool data visualization to see how carbon dioxide and other gases affect the “color” of the atmosphere.
Send me a message. (ben@iheartthispodcast.com) Tell me what you love about Earth’s blue sky.
I want to talk about the blue sky.
But to do that, I think it’s helpful to talk about Mars first.
For more than 40 years now, human beings have been sending robots with cameras to Mars.
And the pictures they send back are so awesomely cool.
These robots give us a chance to see how Mars looks–not from an orbit in nearby space, but from the perspective you’d have if you were literally shuffling through the dust and clambering over the rocks on another world. A world so far away that it can take up to 20 minutes to send a radio signal back to Earth just to say hello.
Those pictures are ruggedly beautiful. Like the rocky landscapes of southern Utah. That dust, those hills, those rust-red rocks
I heart you! Thanks for making the world more beautiful!