The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book)

vi

You Looked Like Us But …

… like a bear.

… with blue skin.

… with a longer neck.

… with an insatiable

need for attention.

… with dreads, reptile skin

and a fierce manicure.

… with a more

prominent forehead.

… with pointier ears.

… like a gay bear.

… 50% hotter.

… but somehow smarter.

of space. In which case, mazel tov.

Ah, would that we were still alive; that we
could see you as you really are, talk to
you, learn from you, then take you to one of
our cinemas (more on those later) and share
a laugh together watching Men in Black, or
cry together watching E.T., or feel incredibly
awkward together watching Independence
Day or Aliens or Species or Cloverfield, or … well,
we fought you guys a lot in our movies. Alas,
we’re dead, and that will never happen.

But this book is designed to provide you with
the next best thing to our actual presence: a
comprehensive history of our planet and our
species, conveniently written in the universal
language—American English.

Consider it a user’s guide to our planet.

And once you’ve discovered everything there
is to know about us—as you will over the next
240 or so pages—you might even begin to
wonder what it would have been like to meet us.

If so, feel free to “splurge” and genetically
reconstitute the human race. As you’ll read,
you’ll find a wide selection of our DNA stored in
two convenient locations, Svalbard, Norway, and
Trementina, New Mexico (see next spread). Or
just poke around. There’s probably a thin layer
of us on almost everything.

But for now, take a load off, pick up this book,
position your … let’s say “lower extremities”
comfortably on one of our many level surfaces,
and relax.

We think you’re going to like it here.

We sure did.

Once.

The Authors

vii

Did You Get Our Messages?

We tried to contact you for a long time. We’re
not sure which (if any) of our messages you
received, but taken collectively they tell a sad
tale of unrequited obsession.

1.

The Pioneer plaque
(1973)

Our first attempt to introduce
ourselves was a pair of gold
anodized aluminum plaques we
sent into deep space. The bra
at the top is the transition of
hydrogen; the asterisk thingie is
the map you were supposed to use
to get here; and the couple on the
right is our way of asking if you
guys swing. What can we say? It
was the seventies.

3.

The Voyager
Golden Record
(1977)

Three years had passed, and not
a word, so we did what desperate
suitors do: We made you a mixtape.
This gold record (actually gold-
plated; we didn’t want you to think
we’d spent too much) contains
earth sounds, greetings in 55
languages, and a broad selection of
terrestrial music. Liner notes were
provided by Jimmy Carter, one of
our most accomplished failures,
and Kurt Waldheim, one of our
least culpable Nazi war criminals.

5.

Radio
transmissions
(1999–2010)

For the next 22 years we left you
alone. We figured you needed your
space, i.e., space. But then the
old itch came back. Using a new
generation of radio transmitters
we started drunk-dialing the
universe. Ostensibly the messages
were about prime numbers and
atomic structures. But the real
message was: Hey. Come over. It’s
late and we’ve got weed.

4.

Close Encounters
of the Third Kind
(1977)

Later that year, in one last desperate
stalker-esque move, hundreds of
U.S. government officials gathered
in secrecy in northeastern Wyoming
to play a five-tone musical sequence
they hoped would serve as your
beacon of welcome. In a dry run
filmed for posterity, hundreds of
children dressed as long-necked
translucent creatures mingled freely
with the officials, who also included
one civilian, Academy Award
winner Richard Dreyfuss. But real
aliens never came, and to justify
the ridiculous cost, we repurposed
the footage into a phenomenally
successful film.

2.

The Arecibo
message
(1974)

We hadn’t heard back from you
by the following year, so we
took a different approach: A
three-minute broadcast of 1,679
frequency modulated zeroes and
ones that when arranged form
the picture seen here. Lame, we
know, but to be fair this was about
the coolest thing we could make
computers do in 1974. That was
the same year we put out a digital
game that was nothing but two
oscillating line segments and a dot.
We called it Pong. It was huuuge.

The Pioneer plaque, starring
Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw.

No, you’re not being forgetful! You
never visited Devil’s Tower. The
special effects were just that good.

We swear we weren’t all nerds.
Just the guys who were trying to
get in touch with you.

The Arecibo message. It was not
actually broadcast in color, for as
you can see, that would have been
too dazzling.

The Voyager Golden Record. Later,
we sent out a Voyager Golden
Compact Disc, but it didn’t have
the same soul.

ix

The second location is the Trementina
Base in Trementina, New Mexico (35° 31' 29" N,
104° 34' 20" W). This is where the Church of
Scientology stores the writings and lectures
of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, on engraved
stainless steel tablets encased in titanium
capsules in a huge labyrinth of tunnels built
into a mountainside etched with an enormous
design meant to mark the return point for
deceased church members coming back from
their intergalactic travels. The other half of
the GRAs will be stored here. Hopefully the
aliens will know the difference between human
beings and, well, Scientologists.

Accordingly, we ask applicants whose last
names start with M through Z to send their
forms to:

Trementina Base

37 Ultra-Secret But Totally Real

Scientology Mountain Base Avenue

Trementina, NM 88439

Attention: David Miscavige, Project Administrator

If all goes according to plan, at some point
in the future you will find yourself (or someone
very much like yourself) emerging from what
we presume will be a gooey pod, alongside
thousands of other people who bought this book
to give themselves something to read in the
bathroom.

And then, once again we can rule the world!
(By the way, try not to mention this last part to
the you-know-whos.)

The Authors

The newly revised markings over Trementina

x

CHAPTER 1

Earth, as seen
from the moon.

1

EARTH

T

HE FIRST THING you may have noticed on your

way in was the color. Deep pools of greens and blues, unique within our galaxy, beckon amongst ethereal swirls of white

clouds. As you get closer you’re struck by the topographical diversity. Vast oceans give way to lush green forest and jungles, which seamlessly taper off into sandy desert ridges stretching

towards meticulously water-carved canyons. In the distance snow-covered mountains rise up to seemingly touch the sky. Of course, for an oblate

spheroid, she’s certainly not perfect. But despite a pronounced equatorial bulge and receding polar iceline, she still stubbornly maintains a jaunty 23.4° axial tilt that belies her 4.5 bil- lion years.

And she has been through it. We knew her as a fertile oasis of sophis- ticated life in the endless, barren

expanse of the universe (no offense). But she was almost 20 million years old before she had even electrostatically accreted enough to achieve solid status. And even then she was made up mostly of gasses and dust the sun was throwing out anyway.

But somehow, using nothing more than a little moxie and massive gravitational and magnetic fields, she pulled herself together. With an unassuming iron core and delicate silica crust, you would never suspect that much of her success was due to explosive volcanic eruption  and the water she had

stolen from passing asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects in her wilder youth. She did what she had to do.

In her 4.5 billion years she has been alternately cov-

ered in lava, ice and ammonia, and has endured the endless discomfort of her tectonic plates shifting. She has seen her dedication to creating a viable atmosphere rewarded with a

Cambrian explosion of multi-cellular creatures, only to witness five mass extinctions (you came right after the sixth). She has survived being simulta- neously pelted by all manner of  aster-

oids, meteors, radiation and whatever else decided to smash into her as they joyrode around the universe. And she did it all without complaint…unless you consider the violent restructuring of land masses through earthquakes complaining.

It’s funny. When we were alive we spent much of our time staring up at

the cosmos and wondering what was out there. We were obsessed with the moon and whether we could one day visit it. The day we finally walked on it was celebrated world wide as perhaps man’s greatest achievement. But it was while we were there, gathering rocks from the moon’s desolate

landscape, that we looked up and caught a glimpse of just how incredible our own planet was. Its singular astonishing beauty. We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.

So welcome to Earth… population, you.

Earth

Our planet had its own day. Did yours?

Length of day (in days)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Length of year (in years)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Mass (in Earth mass units)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Distance from Sun (in astronomical units)

. . 1

Age (proven)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4.5 billion years

Age (“revealed”)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6,015 years

Circumference

. . . 40,041 kilometers/24,901 miles*

*