Jesus Christ. The sun went down at 4:51 today in New York. Oh my God. It might as well have never come up. That’s so bad—and get this: it’s not going to set after 5 p.m. until January 22nd. You’re in for a long, bad time. This is awful.

If our tenure on Earth is anything to judge by, humans are not very good planetary tenants. Now, with a (nearly) clean slate on Mars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is already trying to prevent us from destroying a second planet.

Earth broke another all-time heat record again. "We are living in the steroid era of the climate system," one researcher says. Together, there's nothing we can't do! Except for reversing global warming.

Most of the focus regarding Earth's rising sea level has been on the Arctic Ocean, where ice in the North Pole has been melting rapidly for decades. But now there's even worse news: in the South Pole, Antarctica is beginning to melt and the results will be catastrophic.

A magnitude-5.1 earthquake blew Los Angeles' high last night, striking at 9:09pm local time for about 30 seconds, with at least five aftershocks ranging 2.7-3.6. Authorities across all affected counties have confirmed gas leaks, water main breaks, and a rock slide near the earthquake epicenter around Brea in Orange County, California, just 20 miles south of L.A.

Depending on how you feel about extra terrestrials, either your greatest fear or hope may soon be confirmed. Astronomers at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK (which, by the way, is the most English name for anything ever) have studied 6,000 observations of the Tau Ceti star and found that there may be as many as five planets orbiting it, which can only mean one thing: aliens!

NASA has just released some nighttime images of Earth taken by an ultra-sensitive satellite 512 miles above its surface and They. Are. Gorgeous.

Guys! Twinsies! NASA scientists have discovered the most earth-like planet yet, Kepler 22-b, and we are ready to move any minute now:

On the last day of October 2011, the global population of an upstart branch of the primate order will reach 7 billion.

Here's a gorgeous time-lapse video constructed (by James Drake) out of 600 publicly-available photos taken from the International Space Station as it orbited around the Earth. Our only gripe: No music! We would have gone with this, or maybe this. But we're open to hearing your suggestions for a space jam if you post them in the comments.

Astronomers have discovered a possibly Earth-like—and therefore possibly liveable—planet in a star system 20 light years away, which is pretty close, in galactic terms. But can we all move to that planet when we've finished destroying this one?

Two asteroids are due to pass between the Earth and the orbit of the moon sometime today, but don't worry, we're (probably) not all going to die: "Neither of these objects has a chance of hitting Earth," says NASA.

Los Angeles has named a new high school of environment science after former vice president Al Gore and author/activist Rachel Carson. And what better way to honor the two great environmentalists than by building the school on a contaminated site?

As part of a new Discovery Channel series physicist Stephen Hawking says that he's convinced aliens are out there, but that we should avoid them because they will probably come to earth and kick our asses like in the movies.

A source working at Comic Con tells us that organizers are purposefully putting Avatar events far from Twilight events because they fear a melee between the Fanboys and TweenGirls. Hopefully there will be enough
wolf T-shirts for everyone.

[An image of a thin band of Earth's atmosphere taken from the Space Shuttle Atlantis yesterday; image via AP]

Lord Christopher Monckton (pictured left—that's really him!) says his wacky denials of global warming were unfairly skewed in a recent BBC documentary on the environment. Lord Monckton—a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and not an invention of Evelyn Waugh's—claims, "They made it sound as if these were just my personal views, as if I was some potty peer. It was caddish of them." Oh dude, you have got to be in the news every weekend forever!

Of course, Clinton surrogates are once again changing the goal-posts, suggesting that superdelegates make their decisions based on the wishes of both Earth and sister planet Mars. [Drudge]

Remember Colin Beavan, the 40-something Brooklyn writer who forswore toilet paper and showers in pursuit of a book deal about being green? To us it seemed that his wife, a kindly Business Week editor by the name of Michelle Conlin, was only hanging on by a thread. We're surprised to find that, months later, it seems she's still hanging on by that very same thread. Who knew organic shade-grown raffia was so sturdy?