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Earth Formation Site

Title text: It's not far from the sign marking the exact latitude and longitude of the Earth's core.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a BLUE PLAQUE COMMITTEE - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.

In this comic, Cueball stands in front of a sign that declares itself to be an historical location. Typically, these signs are placed at precise locations where historical, religious and even mythological events happened (such as where battles have been fought, or where people of note were born, or resided, or accomplished something, or died, or where something supposedly happened). In some cases, multiple locations lay "claim" to events whose true locations are uncertain (or, of course, when events span multiple locations, such as where people resided). However, the event in question on the sign is the formation of the Earth which, due to the Sun's 225-million year long orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy and the movement of the galaxy itself through space relative to other objects, would not have occurred anywhere on Earth. The sign could maybe be referring to where the place of the formation of the Earth would be placed if it corresponded to current Earth coordinates, which would also be strange as the Earth formed in the center of the current Earth, so the sign could not be anywhere in the surface of Earth. The sign could also represent the Earth as a whole, indicating that Earth formed on Earth.

The date on the sign is also ridiculously precise, in keeping with the information usually found on historical markers but absurd in the context of the tens or hundreds of millions of years thought to be required for planet formation. It would require some specific definition of when the gradually-coalescing mass could be considered a planet, as well as the ability to determine when that mass met the definition. The date shown for the formation of the Earth, 4.45 billion years, also differs from the commonly accepted date, 4.54 (±0.05) billion years.

The title text refers to the 'coordinates of the Earth's core'. This is similar to signs marking specific latitudes, longitudes or other notable locations. But, since all coordinates, when superimposed on a globe, theoretically converge at the Earth's core, this reinforces the idea that no singular location can be picked as the exact location where the Earth formed.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Cueball is standing in front of a sign in a field of grass. Rocks and plants are scattered across the ground. The sign reads:]

HISTORICAL MARKER

EARTH

FORMATION SITE

--- 4,450,000,000 BCE ---

At this location in the year 4,450,000,000 BCE, a cloud of dust and gas gravitationally collapsed to form the Earth.

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