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Why didn't geologists take Snider- Pelligrini seriously in 1858? Partly because of the lack of a known mechanism for plate techtonics. Partly because of his involvement in a wonky French plan to colonize Texas.

Almost as strange as the fact that the fax came before the telephone.

Well, let's say it was possible that early astronauts were not up to date in education and science findings about plate tectonics which alreday started before 1920 and was measured by finding a.o. the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the 1940ies and established as joint theory in the 1950ies

i mean, since it was given scientific validity people have known about pangea and continental drift since the earliest known human history; it's talked about in the Babylonian creation myth on cuneiform tablets which influenced the creation myths of many religions then a guy went "wait a second"

The ghost of Arthur Holmes saying “speak for yourself”

I did not know that. Born 68 I never heard anything else in school. That was accepted quite quickly then 🤯

I remember being taught this "new science" in elementary school!

I hope you have 'sharks are older than the rings of Saturn' in there too 😀

Presumably this also means that we went into space before we knew what causes earthquakes.

A significant number of people in Texas still think this.

And they still had this to look forward to… svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30613

Gondwana. Pangea.

Time is more challenging than space

Wut

Damn.

Things might have been different if there was some sort of 'Tectonic Plate Race'

True, which is why it took 100 years from theory to practice. And so is probably the experimental verification of tectonic plate movement, though Wikipedia had it at number of decades between theory and validation

Observations from orbit didn't really have any connection to arguments for plate tectonics. The observations that drove its acceptance were mostly from marine geophysics and seismology.

Eventually, GPS satellites in orbit allowed us to "see" the plates moving in real time. Geodesy is a vibrant part of the geosciences!

Airplanes might have gotten high enough to be able to see the bow wave.

I would loved to have a samurai on board as well (My kids expect them in this kind of comparisons nowerdays)

Can't believe we learned everything before we learned how to live peacefully

I was in 2nd grade (1959-60) when I noticed on our wall map that South America & Africa would fit together like puzzle pieces. My teacher was not amused when I interrupted our lesson to point this out. 😂

At one point I had an old Time Life book about mountains from the 50s which mentioned continental drift as one hypothesis among several, although I can’t recall what the others were.

We've also developed technology that could wipe us out before we have a reliable energy source for the other stuff we made. Humans very much have a tendency to get ahead of ourselves.

As was seen with Oceangate's Titan.

Nope! Maybe you should actually read the papers at the time, any of the personal accounts of the major players involved, or the work of historians subsequently. Measurements of current plate rates came, much, much later.

This is such a weird feeling. By the time I went to school, tectonics were an established fact. But then I discovered it is a relatively recent discovery and my parents weren't taught that.

My favorite recent historical revelation is that the Milky Way is not the entire universe.

Ah, ok, several theories regarding expansion. No Hollow Earth, but "accumulating æther from sorrounding space" is also nice. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expandi...

In fairness, they don't move very quickly.

That’s pretty wild, but I think seeing the Earth as it actually is was pretty eye-opening.

And that moon landing was (I am assuming as much) with less computing power than what I'm using to post this reply.

It sure was! Learnt something today

It’s a great story. Ted Irving failed his PhD at Cambridge but the Australian National University gave him a job anyway and he ended up with a stellar career. Cambridge later gave him a DSc.

Pretty sure our astronauts are smarter than that.

Fortunately for US oil and minerals firms there was often a difference between the AAPG and commercial field geologists. I understand many such geologists used plate tectonics to find oil deposits as early as the 50s, but those guys didn’t write papers for the AAPG, they just found oil.

I have read the outcomes of the AAPG conference held after WWI, and it is clear they set out to discredit Wegener and maintain the status quo. It worked.

Couldn't have been very long. I was reading books from my library about continental drift in the late 70's.

Well TBH they are quite heavy.

Gotta' be ready to move ourselves before they move again :)

Since I have so many awesome people knowledgeable about satellites, weird two part question: 1: Would the moon have the necessary resources to refule and refurbish/repair (or replace) satellites? 2: If humans were not a factor, would it be easier to maintain satellites from the moon than earth?

I'm still waiting for you moon landing was closer to X than Y that makes me just give up and wait for the grim reaper to show up. Its flittering.

Reminds me of the interesting fact that we put the man on the moon (1969) before we put wheels on luggage (1970).

I have old school textbooks, that I have had to be careful about using in classes, that still treat it as controversy.

As a non-scientist, I think this shows how cool science is and why changing your opinion about, and understanding of, things when the information you have access to invites that change is so important.

I have the feeling that it may become an opinion again. If a number of people still dispute that earth is round!!!

No no, its better with bears. I imagine they have much to discuss around their pic-a-nic baskets

Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong is currently doing a series of youtube shorts about the history of it but if it weren't for that, yeah it would've been so many years since I thought about it at all

You will :-)

What does the bottom actually say?

And the continents looked back up at the rocket, and one of them said... "Race you!"

We just learned this in my dynamic earth class! When I showed my professor, he said he's gonna add it to next year's presentation

BUT I AM OPEN TO BEING WRONG

“The concept was independently and more fully developed by Alfred Wegener in his 1915 publication, "The Origin of Continents and Oceans".[5]” from the wikipedia entry on continental drift

We went to space before 1596??? Wow

today we're blaming the retreated glaciers letting Scandewegia rise for (part of) our (NL's) sinking. *shakes fist* damn you, isostasy!

Today I learned

Alfred Wegener died in 1930.

Even crazier IMHO is that there wasn't a consensus that large asteroids still hit the Earth until the early 1980s. Back in the late 1960s there was still a lot of debate.

Given that date, I'd love it to be canon that in the For All Mankind universe, plate tectonics is not a thing.

Although, to refute my point, Earth reformed after that impact. Like, entirely.

my brain took a moment to process this and I immediately thought "wow that sounds incredibly stupid and wrong, what happened to Randall" and then i booted up and realized that I was, in fact, the stoopid one