Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (44 page)

 •   On a number of occasions after the King’s death, Priscilla Presley referred to Elvis as a living legend—strange words for a woman who believes that Elvis is dead.

 •   Before he died, Elvis took out a multimillion-dollar life insurance policy. To date, no one in his family has tried to claim it. If Elvis is really dead, why haven’t they cashed in the policy?

THE MOURNERS

 •   The people who were in Elvis’s home when he died insist that he really
did
die. Joe Esposito, Elvis’s road manager for 17 years, was one of the first people to see the body. “Believe me, the man that I tried to revive was Elvis.”

 •   Elvis may even have committed suicide. According to his step-brother David Stanley, “Elvis was too intelligent to overdose [accidentally]. He knew the
Physician’s Desk Reference
inside and out.” Why would Elvis take his own life? He was getting old, and the strain of his stagnating career may have become too much to bear. The pressure showed: in the last years of his life, Elvis’s weight ballooned to more than 250 pounds, and his addiction to prescription drugs had gotten out of control.

 •   The impending publication of a book chronicling the King’s vices may have been the final straw. In August 1977, the month of his death, two of his former aides were about to publish a book revealing much of his bizarre personal life to the public for the first time. He was already depressed, and the imminent public exposure of his drug habit may have pushed him over the edge.

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excessive overharvesting

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sink down

MARS MYTH #1: Mars is the closest planet to Earth.

MARS REALITY #1:
Sometimes it is, but on average, Venus is the closest planet to Earth. Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of 67.2 million miles (108.1 million km), while the Earth is parked at 93 million miles (149 million km) and Mars is out there at 141 million miles (226 million km). Pull out your handy calculator, and you’ll see that at its closest approach, Venus is about 25 million miles (40 million km) from Earth, while Mars’s closest approach is something like 48 million miles (77 million km). (Mars can actually get closer, thanks to its highly eccentric orbit, but never as close as Venus.) When Mars is on the far side of its orbit from Earth, it’s so far away that two planets are actually closer to us: Venus and tiny Mercury, which orbits the Sun at a distance of a mere 36 million miles (58 million km).

MARS MYTH #2: Mars is the planet most like Earth.

MARS REALITY #2:
This depends on what you mean by “most like Earth.” It’s most like Earth in its surface features and weather, in its annual temperature range, its axial tilt, and its length of day (which is about 24 1/2 hours long). In terms of actual size, Venus is closer to Earth’s size than Mars. With a radius of 7,500 miles (12,070 km), Venus is just 400 miles (644 km) smaller in diameter than Earth; Mars has a diameter of a mere 4,200 miles (6,759 km). Venus is also closer in terms of gravitational pull—on Venus you’d weigh 91 percent of what you do on Earth, while on Mars you’d weigh just 38 percent as much. Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune also have similar
gravitational pulls to Earth. In terms of water, the planet that is most like Earth is Jupiter’s moon Europa, which scientists think may have an ocean of liquid water hidden beneath a massive covering of ice. So while Mars is like Earth in some ways, in many other ways it’s not.

MARS MYTH #3: Mars is habitable by humans.

MARS REALITY #3:
If you want to know what living on Mars is like, move to Antarctica, because that’s how cold it is on Mars: the average temperature is a nastily cold –85°F (–65°C). Now, once you’ve moved to Antarctica, remove 99 percent of the air from the atmosphere because Mars’s atmospheric pressure at the surface is just 1 percent of what Earth’s is. Not that you could use it anyway, since about 95 percent of Mars’s atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which you can’t breathe. Elton John got it right when he said, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.” He should know; he’s the Rocket Man.

MARS MYTH #4: They’ve discovered water on Mars.

MARS REALITY #4:
Not exactly. In 2002, NASA scientists discovered what they called a “whopping large” hydrogen signal underneath and surrounding the southern pole of Mars—a hydrogen signal that almost certainly means that there is water on Mars, trapped in the martian soil. This discovery is a good thing: Water is an important ingredient in life as we know it, boosting the chances for life on Mars, and it would make it easier for us to visit and even colonize one day. But it’s not clear whether any of that water is liquid; given Mars’s frigid temperatures, it’s more likely that any underground martian water is frozen.

In June 2000, NASA announced that they had found evidence that water might have once flowed on the martian surface—evidence in the form of gullies that looked a great deal like water-formed gullies on Earth. However, a year later, scientists from the University of Arizona noted that these gullies could have also been created by frozen carbon dioxide—carbon dioxide being the main ingredient of the atmosphere, and frozen carbon dioxide also being present in Mars’s ice caps.

MARS MYTH #5: Mars’s surface is covered with canals.

MARS REALITY #5:
Nope. The idea of martian canals got its start with American astronomer Percival Lowell, who in the late 19th century mistranslated comments from an Italian astronomer about
the possibility of huge
canali
, or “channels,” on the surface of Mars. Lowell thought
canali
meant “canals”—artificial structures made by advanced, intelligent creatures—rather than naturally occurring channels, which was the original idea. The existence of the canals was hotly debated for decades, until a visit from a Mariner spacecraft in the 1960s proved without a doubt that no canals (or channels, for that matter), existed at all—and there was no other sign of intelligent life on Mars. So that was that.

However, the canals still pop up from time to time. They’re featured in popular science fiction books by Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein (both wrote many of their books before the question was settled). They were even a minor plot point in the 1996 movie
Mars Attacks!
By 1996 the filmmakers should have known better, but then it was a movie about martians attacking Earth, so you can’t beat on them for not being factually correct.

MARS MYTH #6: NASA spacecraft spotted a face on Mars.

MARS REALITY #6:
The famous “face on Mars” was discovered in 1976 when NASA spacecraft
Viking I
snapped a picture of a mesa in the Cydonia region of Mars. The mesa looked disturbingly like an actual human face—a human face two miles (3 km) long, that is. Since then, “the face” has been a popular pop culture icon and was even featured in the really terrible 2000 flick
Mission to Mars
(in which it really was a face left there by old, dead martians).

In 2001 the
Mars Global Surveyor
took a finely detailed picture of the “face”—and this time it looked like . . . a big pile of rocks, which is exactly what it is. The “face” on the mesa is really nothing more than a combination of shadows and the poor imaging resolution of the camera attached to the
Viking I
spacecraft. There’s also a crater called Galle on Mars that looks like a “happy face.”

MARS MYTH #7: Scientists found microbes from Mars on Earth.

MARS REALITY #7:
The martian microbes may or may not be real. What we’ve got here is a meteor named ALH 84001, found in Antarctica in 1984 and originally from Mars, in which scientists discovered some interesting things: little squiggles that looked similar to fossilized Earth bacteria, carbon (a primary ingredient of life), and some organic molecules. It was enough for NASA to announce in 1996 that there was a possibility of life once existing on Mars. Then
the skeptics weighed in: The “squiggles” were too small to have been bacteria, the “fossils” could have been created by chemical processes without the need for living things, and the organic materials in the rock could have come from Antarctica, where the rock has been, after all, for about 13,000 years—plenty of time for contamination. The current status of the “microbes”? Well, they could be life. Or they might not be.

MARS MYTH #8: The martians sabotaged our spacecrafts so we wouldn’t find out about them.

MARS REALITY #8:
The spacecrafts in question would be 1999’s ill-fated
Mars Climate Orbiter
and
Polar Lander
spacecrafts, both of which bit the big one after arriving at Mars. As interesting as it would be to say that these spacecrafts were knocked out of the sky by Marvin the Martian and his pals taking a little target practice, the fact is that both missions failed because of screwups back on Earth. The former spacecraft burned up in Mars’s atmosphere; the latter went plummeting to the surface.

1985

Coca-Cola reintroduced “classic” Coke

Reagan met Gorbachev in first U.S./Soviet summit

Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 base hits

#1 movie:
Back to the Future

Calvin and Hobbes comic strip premiered

1986

Space shuttle
Challenger
exploded

Martin Luther King Day became U.S. holiday

Soviet nuclear plant Chernobyl had major meltdown

Album of the Year: Paul Simon’s
Graceland

On TV:
Miami Vice, Cheers, Family Ties

Here are some of the smaller, uninhabited islands owned by the United States. (Well, they may have a few inhabitants, but no natives.)

W
AKE ISLAND

LOCATION:
North Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands

SIZE:
Two and a half square miles

POPULATION:
300

BACKGROUND:
Wake Island is an atoll made up of three islets around a shallow lagoon. It was discovered in 1796 by British sea captain William Wake. The United States annexed it in 1899 for a telegraph cable station. An airstrip and naval base were built in late 1940, but in December 1941 the island was captured by the Japanese and held until the end of World War II. Today the facilities are under the administration of the Federal Aviation Agency.

KINGMAN REEF

LOCATION:
North Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and American Samoa

SIZE:
Less than one-half square mile

POPULATION:
Uninhabited