Earth

THE DOCUMENTARY "No Place on Earth" doesn't seem as if it should work quite as well as it does. A History Channel production, the tale of Ukrainian Jews who survived in underground caves for 511 days while hiding from the Nazis during World War II is structured around lengthy, foreign-language re-enactments of the events featuring costumed performers. Why not just commit to the undeniably thrilling theatricality of the story and make a fictionalized dramatic feature? Instead, Emmy-winning documentarian Janet Tobias ("Life 360")

And you think it's hot here? You don't know hot. You can't handle hot. Try hot as in 11 suns flaming down on our poor Earth. Try highs of up to 950 degrees on the sun side and lows of down to minus-350 on the dark side. That's what it's like on Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. It's worse than here. Not a tourist destination. Who would want to go there? NASA would. And the rest of us should, too. NASA just launched a 1.2-ton interplanetary probe named Messenger.

Could men really be from Mars? Far-fetched as it sounds, the answer from scientists at a major astronomy meeting yesterday was . . . possibly. An international team presented new calculations showing that billions of rocks that might have carried living organisms were rocketed from Mars to Earth (and vice versa) during the early solar system. And since Mars is smaller than Earth and farther from the sun, it cooled faster - making it available first as the crucible for life.

Jupiter will ring in the new year by looming directly overhead at midnight, as close to Earth as it will get all year. This coincidence of Earth's orbit and Jupiter's has not happened since 1752 and will not happen again until New Year's Eve 2084, said Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium. Moreover, Jupiter will be cozying up to a bright and nearly full moon. When the sun sets tonight, Jupiter will rise in the northeast and will slowly climb in the sky until it reaches its highest point at midnight.

"Here on Earth" dares you to dislike it in its very first scene, when a rich, snotty prep-school boy takes delivery of a Mercedes convertible. The $80,000 car is a graduation gift, and the cocky student (Chris Klein) takes it on a joyride to a nearby town, where he picks a fight with resentful locals. The kid is really too bad to true, and soon we begin to suspect there is some deep, dark, humanizing secret that would explain his antisocial behavior. It recalls the teen cinema of the '50s, and that's the apparent intention of "Here on Earth," with its dated, S.E. Hinton schematic of rich vs. poor, its dreamy re-creation of a Rockwellian small town and its infatuation with old-fashioned melodrama.

The Wings fell to the Toronto Rock, 19-11, last night in a National Lacrosse League game at the Air Canada Centre. Dan Teat had two goals and three assists, and Kyle Sweeney also scored twice for the Wings (1-4). Toronto (4-1) broke the game open in the second period, outscoring the Wings, 5-1, to take an 11-5 lead at the half. Colin Doyle scored three goals to go with four assists for the Rock. The Wings game against the Orlando Titans scheduled for tonight at the Wachovia Center has been postponed because of the snowstorm.

Cosmos-watcher Carl Sagan isn't feeling cheerful these days. Short of an international effort to save the Earth, he said Saturday night in an address in Richmond, Va., there'll be no escaping a global, man-made environmental disaster. "Molecules don't have passports," the scientist declared. "All the creatures on Earth are in this together. We need a primary allegiance to the species and to planet Earth. Nothing short of that is going to solve our problems. " Sagan ticked off problems such as the greenhouse effect and chlorofluorocarbons - which could lead, respectively, to massive floods and destruction of the food chain.

The whole world is suddenly a-twitter about the dangers of space objects that could collide with Earth. Screaming headlines told us about a mile-wide asteroid that would pass within a whisker of Earth on Thursday, Oct. 26, 2028, and maybe even collide with the planet. Then a day later, it was Whoa, Nellie, never mind. The astronomers had recalculated, and now it appeared the object would flash by Earth at a safe distance of 600,000 miles. Crowds are pouring into theaters to see "Deep Impact," a movie about astronauts dispatched into deep space to nuke a comet bearing down on Earth.

When sun rises on the Arctic spring and the mama polar bear pushes her cubs out of the den for the first time, they rub their sleepy eyes and look out to see . . .  A camera crew, no doubt. No polar bear's life goes undocumented these days, judging by "Earth" and last year's "Arctic Tale. " That's understandable, given the essential message in contemporary wildlife documentary. Nature is beautiful and also fragile, climate change (move along, deforestation) is now the leading threat to nature's delicate equilibrium, and the canary in the coal mine is now the polar bear on his thinning Arctic ice. As we learn again in "Earth," the bears hunt for seals and other critters on the ice pack, and when the ice melts and breaks up, they swim more and hunt less.

The nation's most ambitious effort to learn about the interior of the Earth has been launched by the National Science Foundation. The agency is sponsoring a major upgrading of the seismological tools used by most of the nation's scientists to study the planet. These tools will aid seismologists in learning how the planet was formed, how earthquakes occur and how the gigantic plates that make up the Earth's surface slowly move. "This effort has the potential to revolutionize our knowledge about the interior of the planet," said Stewart Smith, a geophysics professor at the University of Washington, who is spearheading the effort.