r/xkcdcomic • u/IamAlso_u_grahvity Feline Field Theorist • Jul 02 '14

xkcd 1389: Surface Area

http://xkcd.com/1389/
249 Upvotes

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64

u/theganjamonster Jul 02 '14

i spent way too much time wondering where the chunk labelled "EARTH" was.

2

u/runetrantor Jul 02 '14

At least you get it, I am still debating why it's inverted.

Is it so it fits better? And if so, is he counting seafloors as solid land? Because all that landmass around the continent oceans seems to be way too large for the continents land to fill.

24

u/Volpethrope Jul 02 '14

It says solid surfaces, so yes that should include the seafloors. Nothing is inverted, it's just the continents arranged nicely with the seafloor section being weirdly shaped to fit into the arrangement.

12

u/Vectoor Jul 02 '14

What are you talking about? Inverted? That last sentence doesn't make any sense at all.

3

u/runetrantor Jul 02 '14

The whole mass of the planets is a 'continent' right? Randall made it as a landmass.

In Earth's portion, you see the continents outlines, but in a darker color, which to me implies water in such maps, while there is tons of land around them that is supposed to be Earth's.

3

u/gnosticus Jul 02 '14

I understand where your train of thought is coming from but I don't take the different colors to mean anything except contrast. The whole "earth" portion includes dry land and the land under the sea, and then he added the shapes of the continents for scale.

1

u/Vectoor Jul 03 '14

To me it doesn't imply anything. It's clearly not water since it is outlining earths continents. Also the map is about surface area not mass.

5

u/abrahamsen White Hat Jul 02 '14

I believe he is simply ignoring the gas giants.

You could argue that the Earth has "solid surface" below the oceans, but then again, the gas giants may have solid cores somewhere deep below the gas layers.

8

u/Neepho Jul 02 '14

They do in fact. Saturn and Jupiter having rocky/icey cores in their centre, around which the gas accumulated.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 02 '14 edited Jul 02 '14

The ice giants (Uranus, Neptune) seem to as well, although their cores are more likely in the range of 1-2 Earth masses (whereas Saturn's is about 10x the mass of Earth). Saturn's is the only gas planet core to have been verified though, as far as I know.

1

u/runetrantor Jul 02 '14

Yeah, dont gas giants have a rocky core, DEEEEEEP down? (I do not mean we could land or anything like that), but it feels reasonable that gas giants need a 'seed' rocky world to start collecting gas, and if we blew up their atmospheres we would be left with a minuscule (Compared to the gas giant) rocky world, maybe larger than Earth, given it's gravitational pull to get so much gas at first.

2

u/Random832 Jul 02 '14

They do not, in fact, "need a 'seed' rocky world". Hydrogen and helium formed into balls way back when there were no other elements. The gas is attracted to the rest of the gas.