Another Earth is flat, hollow and completely unimaginable: As science fiction writers, scientists and visionaries described the Earth

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Earth is a ball, the third planet from the Sun. It would seem that there is nothing to argue about. But there are dissenters to this day. While these statements make scientists clutch their heads, writers and screenwriters often serve as material for inspiration.

1. And yet it is flat

There is a misconception that people thought the Earth was flat, at least before Copernicus. This is not true. The fact that the Earth is spherical was already known in Ancient Greece.

In the 19th century, Englishman Samuel Rowbotham was the first in many centuries to speak about the flat Earth, who lectured on the flat Earth under the pseudonym Parallax. His tongue was suspended well and he found his circle of admirers. The Flat Earth Society also emerged and continues to this day. Its adherents assure that the Earth is a flat disk, gravity does not exist, like Antarctica. it's just an ice wall.

In culture and literature, the image of a flat earth is most often used in fairy tales and works based on folklore motives. In Tolkien's Arda - the Earth in legendary times - was created flat, but then the world still became round. Narnia was also flat - this, of course, is not quite our world, but it is closely connected with us.

Of course, one cannot but recall Pratchett's Discworld. He also stands on elephants, and elephants - on a turtle. And in the book by Lyubov and Yevgeny Lukins "We rolled your sun!" the world is supported by whales. At the same time, the sun is rolled there by hand.

2. And yet it is round! But hollow

Not only storytellers told about adventures inside the Earth - in the 19th century it was a controversial, but still scientific, concept. Both Edgar Poe and Jules Verne wrote about this. In "Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Verne, the heroes penetrate the interior of the planet through the mouth of a volcano in Iceland. It is light underground, there is land and oceans, and giant shepherds of mastodons roam in the forests - people who are about twice the height of the terrestrial ones.

The underground country also inspired the geologist V. A. Obruchev, who wrote a novel about a similar expedition. In "Plutonia" - as Russian travelers called the underground space - the sun-core also shines, there are forests, seas and ancient fauna. Unlike the world of Jules Verne, in Plutonia everything is ordered: the further travelers sail, the more ancient the world around. Having reached the Jurassic period, they turn back.

The novel "The Coming Race" by Bulwer-Lytton was very popular in its time. In it, under the surface of the Earth, lived a race that mastered a fantastic power called "vril". It is difficult to explain what it is. The character says that vril "kills like a thunderbolt and at the same time … excites life, heals and preserves."

The readers liked the description of the race so much that they created the "Vril" society and began to train in order to master the magical energy. In pre-war Germany, they even planned the construction of spaceships flying with this force. Later, legends about Nazi occultism will grow on these materials.

One of the modern legends says that the Nazis (and Hitler among them) hid in the underworld. This myth is played up by the authors of the film "Iron Skies-2", in which they promise to show both the hollow Earth and Hitler the reptilian. An underground reptilian settlement is also found in Doctor Who - an intelligent race of Silurians lives underground.

There is an even more exotic version of the hollow Earth - that we are the inhabitants of the inner surface. This idea was proposed by the American Cyrus Teed in 1869. He managed to create a whole cult, which was given the name "Koreshan Union".

The concave earth is less popular than the hollow and inhabited by a different race. The writers are also not very inspired by it: among the Strugatsky brothers, the inhabitants of the planet Saraksh believe that their world is arranged this way, but this is a mistake: Saraksh is an ordinary planet of the terrestrial type. Sometimes in science fiction there are hollow planets, including artificial ones, but this, again, is not Earth.

3. Hollow! But not the Earth, but the Moon

The fact that the moon is empty inside was suspected back in the 19th century. A new surge of interest in this theory emerged when, in 1962, Dr. Gordon MacDonald of NASA suggested that the moon was hollow. For a while, the hypothesis was working, but it was soon refuted.

Some of the supporters of the hollow moon believe that it is an artificial object. They wrote about this even in the Soviet press - in 1968, in the "Komsomolskaya Pravda". The authors of the article "The moon is an artificial satellite!" assured readers that the moon was a giant starship that had arrived out of nowhere.

In the Lunar series of novels by ER Burroughs, the Moon is inhabited from within. Both primitive animals and intelligent creatures live here: cannibals similar to centaurs and flying people.

The moon became home to short-lived capitalists in Nosov's famous book "Dunno on the Moon". The hollow moon also appears in Vladislav Krapivin's story-tale "The Hole Moon", but nothing is said about the lunar inhabitants.

But the most original interpretation of the idea of a hollow moon appears in Doctor Who - the Moon turns out to be a giant egg, a huge creature hatches from it, which lays the next Moon in orbit.

4. There are actually two of them …

The counter-earth, the twin of the Earth, was invented in antiquity. The idea was not widely spread, but it was not forgotten. According to a later version, the twin planet is in the orbit of the Earth, but we cannot see it, since it hides behind the Sun all the time. Alas, no celestial bodies were found at this point.

In Russia, the idea of Anti-Earth was put forward by a certain Kirill Butusov, an engineer who once worked as a laboratory assistant at the Pulkovo Observatory (he called himself an astrophysicist). He argued that there is not only the anti-earth (called Gloria), but also the opposite sun - the Raja-Sun.

Contactee Truman Beturum, famous for his stories of encounters with aliens, assured that his friends came from counter-earth - he called her Clarion. The Clarions were pagans, opposed to nuclear weapons and loved to dance, especially the polka.

In science fiction, the motive of the Earth's double was used by the infamous John Norman. On the planet of Horus people live, similar to the earth. Sometimes they kidnap dugouts and turn them into slavery.

The twin of our planet appears in the film "Another Earth". Counter-earth is also found in the Marvel universe. The planet is called Wundagor-two, it is inhabited by the beastmen created by the Evolutionary.

5. Not two, but a lot

The idea of parallel worlds, perhaps, was first proposed by John Dee, an outstanding mathematician and geographer, as well as the creator of the first artificial language.

Dee believed that the Earth is a string of superimposed spheres, lined up along another dimension. At points of contact, you can move from one Earth to another.

In literature, the idea of parallel worlds captivated many, here are just a few names: Clifford Simack, Max Fry, Diana Wynn Jones, Cornelia Funke, Clive Lewis, Vladislav Krapivin … Roger Zelazny with a cycle of novels about Amber was probably the closest to the idea of John Dee.