JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
"Extra-Earths" is a very modest category on this blog with only five posts--they do not take up much space in the bulk of the 2,780 full posts and 2,400 "quick posts". The subject rarely comes up, and no wonder! How many times do you see an image of Earth from Earth--and why would this be happening? Obviously the Earths that I am interested in pop into existence in the science fiction/comics/Outsider Logic worlds. There are some who use "extra Earths" as a unit of measure, as in "the global resources consumed would be the equivalent of an extra Earth's production" or some such thing--those don't work for me here, as I am just interested in the visuals of the extra of two Earths.
For example, in an earlier post, "The Battle of the Extra Earths: Mini-Extra-Earth Vs. Full-Sized-Standard-Earth (?)", there is a full-on frontal assault by an Earth-mini, or some such thing (I have not read the story because, frankly, there is only just so much time to burn on these things and I was just interested in the artwork.)
Today's example is more-or-less an Extra-Earth and it is close enough for me: this one appears in the September 1955 issue of Scientific American and is a big full page ad for Remington Rand's UNIVAC. This computer was only about five years old or so at this point and Remington Rand was selling it for computing complex engineering bits, as with that screaming turbine. I assume that the turbine--which is inoperable in outer space of course--is coming from that Earth of the black seas, or something, and that by a very long stretch the UNIVAC has to be somewhere so I guess it could be another Earth. Yes, this really doesn't fit, but it is close enough for me. (Also the business-end of the UNIVAC is not what looks like a monitor facing the machine's main component-it is the longish podium-lookng piece opposite that "monitor", which would be the "supervisory control panel".
I'm told by our son Feliks that there is a "Counter Earth" in the Marvel universe, where there is an "Extra Earth" on the other side of the Sun, neither Earth ever in line of sight to one another...that seems to be another category of its own, too: things that exist but are invisible because they are on the other side of something, like the bizarro story of Nazis escaping to the far side of the Moon. But that's another story.
- To see the other Extra-Earth posts, just enter the term in the site's Google search box.
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