The Moons Of Destiny
Predicting the past
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An announcement was published this week, with literally earth-shattering implications, and almost no one paid any attention.
ESA’s Gaia mission announced that it’s telescope, originally intended to create a 3-D map of local galactic space, had found evidence for more than 350 asteroids with possible or likely moons, bringing the current total to well over 800. To most of us, this may not seem like earth-moving news, after all NASA bombed the moon Dimorphos around the asteroid Didymos with it’s DART mission several years back. So what’s the big deal?
We need to travel back in time a couple of decades to learn why this is huge news. Allow me to introduce Thomas van Flandern, and his website Meta Research. Sadly, Tom is no longer with us, but his work lives on. Tom had a doctorate in Celestial Mechanics, headed up the US Naval Observatory, and helped create the Global Positioning System (GPS), among other stuff. He’s no slouch.
Tom calculated the orbits (ephemerides) for a lot of asteroids and comets, then he did something really radical: he ran them backward in time and found that they converged at a single point between Mars and Jupiter, both 65 million years ago, and 3.2 million years ago. The point where they converged coincided with the position where a planet should have been, according to the Titius-Bode hypothesis of orbital harmonics.
Tom’s work strongly implied an exploded planet, frequently referred to as Planet V, Phaeton, Krypton, or Tiamat. He formulated his Exploded Planet Hypothesis (EPH), based on his findings, and then determined some proofs that would strengthen his hypothesis.
Three of those predicted proofs were that many asteroids would be found to have moons, they would have geologic layering (diferentiation), and they would have boulder-strewn surfaces. The first and third implied explosion of a parent body, and due to orbital dynamics and gravitation, smaller objects on parallel trajectories would fall to the surface or end up in orbit of the larger chunks of the ex-planet. The second one (layering) could only occur if the asteroid were part of a planet at some point in its history. The layers could only be formed through geologic processes, with heat and pressure, like rock layers we find here on Earth, Venus and Mars.
Well, this set off howls and jowls in the ivory towers. The reigning theories of planetary formation and gravitation said that the asteroids — particularly between Mars and Jupiter — were “left over” bits (i.e. dirty snowballs, or loose rock “clouds”) of the dirt and gas that built the Solar System, and that they hadn’t formed a planet because Jupiter’s gravity kept upsetting everything. There was no way asteroids could have moons or rubble-covered hard surfaces, and especially geological layers, under the current narradigm. More than all that, planets don’t explode, dummy.
The numbers don’t lie, said Tom, and the only thing that would explain these and other predictions is an exploding planet. I’ll go one step further, said Tom, I’ll predict a number of bodies in the Solar System have very different hemispheres (hemispheric dichotomy) because of the blast wave, and most asteroids will be irregular lumps of rock and not little spheres. Just wait, said Tom, and let’s see what observations tell us.
Keep in mind that, then and now, asteroids were thought to be loose clumps of pebbles that had never been squeezed into hard rocks as part of a planet. Furthermore, there was no way an asteroid could have a moon, because in a random cloud of dust and gas, things would either collide or fly past each other. The gravity of asteroids wasn’t nearly strong enough to “capture” other rocks as moons. The two rocks would have to be flying almost parallel to each other for that to happen. At best, a “moonlet” would be an extremely rare thing.
Exactly, said Tom. If we find these little moons, then the only real solution is they came from an exploded planet.
Well, dang it if hundreds of asteroids have been found to have moons, many asteroids and comets show differentiation (layers), and all the asteroids we’ve seen close up have surfaces that look like prison rock piles on a solid surface…comets too. On top of that, the Moon, Earth, Mars, Iapaetus, Ceres, Miranda, and a number of other bodies in the Solar System have one side that is radically different from the other, implying material flying past in a shock wave.
It’s even more interesting that the timelines for all the asteroids and comets meeting in one place — 65 million and 3.2 million years ago — coincide with a mass extinction (former, the K-T Boundary) and radical climate change (latter, the Pliocene Warm Period) on Earth.
What’s so earth-shattering about all this? Glad you asked.
Though Van Flandern offers three possible mechanisms to make a planet explode, none of them is very satisfying. Planets colliding doesn’t fit the bill. For one thing, there’s not enough debris for two bodies, and the resulting debris cloud doesn’t match what we see. An internal natural uranium reactor doesn’t really work, since it can’t create enough pressure to blow a planet apart, and at worst would have just melted the planet. The third option, he speculated, could be the planet was not in equilibrium — not equally round but all lumpy and stuff — and spun itself apart from tidal and centripetal forces. This solution has no evidentiary backing at this time, and it violates all the reasoning behind the current planet-formation theories.
Interestingly, Van Flandern briefly considered a massive electro-magnetic event — magnetic field collapse or enormous electrical discharge — as a possible trigger, but dismissed it as being utterly inconceivable in a gravity-only Universe. Oh Tom, you skipped right over it.
Thus, natural causes don’t seem to be probable, or have the power to shatter a planet, which leaves a weapon of unimaginable power, and that implies someone to make and operate it.
Aye, there’s the rub.
It’s not enough that the EPH has some solid predicted evidence behind it, but the implications are staggering. Not only did Planet V blow up, throwing its moons — Mars and probably Ceres — into new orbits and filling the Solar System with ash and buckshot, but someone caused it.
If we accept the evidence that there was a Planet V, that it blew apart, and that the natural causes we can imagine can’t generate the force needed to do this, then we are wading around in some serious woo-woo here.
Suddenly, John Brandenburg’s Mars nuclear war, Norman Burgrun’s Saturn ringmakers, Richard Hoagland’s archologies on the Moon and Mars, Lloyd Pye’s theory that humans are genetically-modified organisms, and Joseph Farrell’s paleo-ancient advanced civilization, and many other “woo-woo” theories start to fall into place. Is it possible? Sure. Is it plausible? Sure. Is it probable? Jury’s still out.
From a bunch of little boulders floating around bigger boulders, we have come across strong evidence of an exploded planet, and by extrapolation they are pointing to an ancient civilization in this Solar System — that may or may not be our ancestors — that blew itself apart. Just ponder the implications that fall out of this line of reasoning for things like government secrecy, surveillance states, DNA databases, the sudden end to manned lunar exploration, and lots and lots of woo-woo. Oops, I spilled a bit of it on my keyboard.
In all the dozens of recent articles about asteroid moons, with lots of pejorative terms like “cute” and “diminutive,” not one mention of Tom van Flandern’s prediction. In fact, the EPH is all but buried and forgotten. Not one single PR parrot outlet even joked about Van Flandern’s prediction. Nothing. Crickets. The occasional coyote. Maybe a night hawk.
Except this one…
Oh, and keeping it light, today’s movie suggestion on topic is Evolution (2001), a fun comedy about panspermia, directed by Ivan Reitman, with some great comic performances by David Duchovny and Orlando Jones. It won’t change the world, but it will make you laugh at it.
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Imagine an object moving at 5% of the speed of light slamming into a planet. You don't need a very large object to completely disrupt the planet. It was torn apart.
PS: I'm having a lot of deja vus the past few days. Is anyone else experiencing this?