DECEMBER 19, 2021 – I’m a person who’s strongly affected by the amount of daily sunlight. At this time of year (northern hemisphere), I struggle to climb out of bed before our late-rising star, and when Helios calls it a day at the end of his short, low-riding, chariot ride, I’m psychologically ill-prepared. It’s only 4:30 in the afternoon.
Yesterday, as the sun descended toward the western horizon, I counted the days until more light smiles upon the northern hemisphere. This thought arose as I stood in our living room, where, among our other earthly possessions is a model of the earth itself—a globe mounted on a floor-stand with northern half tilted, coincidentally but appropriately, away from the setting sun.
It’s the tilt, of course, that creates the earthly seasons. I’m not sure where I acquired this basic knowledge about “how the world works.” Most likely it was from the model of earth, moon, and sun that was a fixture in my elementary school classrooms.
But why the tilt? Curse Google (with the rest of Big Tech) all you want, but in the meantime, the Zeus of search engines yields Olympian results—with the flash of a lightning bolt. What I found shocking, however, is that internet science reveals that the cause of the tilt is the stuff of . . . Greek mythology. Yes, a protoplanet named Theia, a Titaness—daughter of Gaia and . . . don’t laugh . . . Uranus—knocked the earth’s axis a-kilter. The earth-shattering collision of our home and the protoplanet (about the size of Mars) occurred about 4.5 billion years ago, give or take a magaanum or two. I’d heard about that event but hadn’t been schooled in its mythological origins.
For bonus points, we got Selene out of the deal: when Theia smashed into earth, the resulting shrapnel coalesced into a sphere of its own, giving us silver light by night. Scientists also believe that Theia brought water to earth, and gave us additional “core values,” meaning Theia merged with earth, creating a disproportionately large core for a planet the size of earth.
Or so goes the predominant theory about how the earth got its tilt—and how I’ve now put “two-and-two” together: moon and tilt.
What’s most astonishing about all of this is that it’s supremely “ho-hum” compared to the latest “breaking news.” Just imagine the sight and sound of one planet smashing into another—particularly when one of the planets is what we call home. Yet what do I worry about most? Measly climate change.
Nothing rings the bell like Theia delivering a knock-out punch to Gaia (earth), except, as it turned out, Theia is the one who got knocked out—out of existence—and Mother Earth is the planet for which the “right hook” (scientists aren’t entirely sure whether the impact was at a right angle) turned our home into . . . our home. There’s nothing “ho-hum” about that.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
