The Internet may be crumbling, but think of the time that would free up! [via Futurismic]

“Junk DNA” science may cure HIV, probably won’t create race of superhuman mutants.   [via SciFi Scanner]

Migrant workers may soon be able to telecommute.  [via SciFiWire ]

SciNoFi is not alone.  Terminator TV fans mobilize to save their show. [via eonline.com]

And the first Star Wars may have been 30+ years ago, but its spirit lives on in the hearts of harp music loving pre-teens everywhere [via The Website at the End of the Universe] :

Most planets featured in science fiction tend to be rather generic. These planets are usually convenient celestial bodies upon which to pitch a narrative tent for a few scenes before the plot moves on. Generic planets also tend to be one-note, reflecting some particular environment on Earth. You have your ice-worlds, desert worlds, lava worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, city worlds, forest worlds (in particular, forests that look like those near the city of Vancouver), earthquake worlds, and so on.

But sometimes an author will create a world whose presence has a weight and ring of truth, a world that feels like it could happily go on existing on its own terms, with or without a protagonist or antagonist strolling around on its surface. Setting aside obviously artificial habitats like ring words or hollowed out asteroids, here are my top ten best science fiction planets, in chronological order:

1. Solaris (1961): You may or may not have liked the films, but Stanislaw Lem’s conception of a world so utterly alien that it defies any genuine human comprehension still resonates.
2. Dune (1965): Best Planet Ever. At first glance, it’s just one of those one-note desert worlds. But Frank Herbert created a complete ecosytem, deep geological history, and a complex native society to go with his sand-covered planet. Dune is no mere backdrop, it drives the plot of Herbert’s complex saga as inexorably as the law of gravity.
3. Annares (1974): Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed featured two worlds, a more-or-less straightforward analog for cold-war era Earth, and the far more interesting Annares, where settlers established an anarcho-syndicate-based society in a bid to be free from authoritarian government. LeGuin created a believable society for Annares—including the unpleasant side effects (such as intellectual conservatism) of trying to create a human utopia.
4. Mote Prime (1974): In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye, this is the homeworld of the Moties, a species that, due to cosmic happenstance, has been bottled up in its solar system ever since it evolved. Mote Prime is planet which has become a palimpsest, mutely testifying to the endless cycles of technological development and collapse experienced by the trapped Moties.
5. LV-426 (1979): The dread planet that featured briefly in Alien, and was the location for 1986’s Aliens. In both movies, LV-426 is perfectly portrayed as part of a cosmos utterly indifferent to human concerns, such as staying alive.
6. Dagobah (1980): The Star Wars franchise is a planet-producing machine: Tatooine, Yavin IV, Alderan, Hoth, Endor, Coruscant, Naboo, etc, etc. But Dagobah sticks out for its organic messiness and claustrophobic atmosphere that stands in contrast to the typical open spaces that provide the large stages for the movies’ space opera.
7. Lusitania (1986): The setting of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, Lusitania is the exception that proves the rule—it is fascinating not because it is a rich world, but because its ecosystem has so little diversity, and the implications that has for the book’s characters.
8. Red, Green and Blue Mars (1993-1996): Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy has become the standard against which all hard science fiction books about Mars are weighed. Beginning in the near future, with the founding of the first permanent outpost on the red planet, and continuing for two centuries as Mars is terraformed, Robinson’s Mars is a meticulously researched and believable fictional version of our solar system neighbor.
9. P2 (2004): P2 is a world orbiting the nearby Barnard’s star, and it is settled by fantastically advanced exiles from the solar system in Wil McCarthy’s Lost in Transmission. Unfortunately, all their technology can’t make up for some basic deficiencies in the carrying capacity of the Barnard system, and what happens to P2 is reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon, but on a planetary scale.
10. Nasqueron (2004): A gas giant, home of the maddeningly unconcerned Dwellers, and location of much of Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist. Nasqueron becomes not just the huge canvas the Banks requires for his sprawling tales, but also becomes an integral element in the plot, as the protagonist struggles to understand the Dwellers.

Image: promotional poster for Dune

As described by David Standish in his entertaining book Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface, before Halley, most people assumed that the Earth underfoot was pretty much solid rock all the way through, with some lava and water thrown for good measure. In the late 17th century, Halley was interesed in observations that showed that the Earth’s magnetic poles wandered around. To explain this motion, Halley suggested that the Earth wasn’t solid, but instead composed of a series of concentric shells. One or more of these shells produced the Earth’s magnetic field, and its movement relative to our, outermost, shell resulted in the changes to the position of the magentic poles. Halley further went on to suggest that each of these shells could be inhabited.

The “inhabited” notion went on to provoke quite a bit of science fiction, as well as some real attempts to find an entrance to these inner worlds and get at their postulated wealth, but otherwise turned out to be a dud. But Halley’s basic idea that the Earth wasn’t a homogenous block of rock, but instead had a structure in the form of moving concentric spherical shells, ultimately did find expression in our modern understanding of Earth.

We now know our planet is composed of a thin outer crust wrapped around a thick mantle, which is in turn wrapped around a liquid outer core of molten rock, at the heart of which is the Earth’s solid inner core. Circulating electrical currents within the outer core gives rise to the Earth’s magnetic field and are responsible for the slow motion of the magnetic poles. It’s also believed that Earth’s inner core is “superrotating” — that is, turning faster on the Earth’s axis than the surface–and this rotation may also play a part in maintaining Earth’s maganetic field. So while the movie may be pure fantasy, its worth remembering a time when even the suggestion that we could really know what the center of the Earth is like was a fantastic thought.