Saturday, June 27, 2009
News Straight Dope
Posted by Web Editor on Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 2:00 PM
— CAMERON BARR, EDMONTON
You nailed it, friend. Most astronaut field trips were about geology, not getting used to a bleak hell unfit for life. For that they could have stayed in Houston.
The astronauts trained at lots of sites in the U.S. and around the world, at least a couple of which humans had turned into wildernesses. According to Diamond, "Since human settlement began, most of [Iceland's] original trees and vegetation have been destroyed, and about half of the original soils have eroded into the ocean. As a result ... large areas ... that were green at the time that Vikings landed are now lifeless brown desert." Similarly, much of the area around Sudbury, Ontario, was a moonscape in the 1960s due to nickel smelting.
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(Illustration by Slug Signorino)
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