Running Rings Around Big Science

I don't know if this comes through in my musings here, but I'm one of those people who looks in the opposite direction if someone calling themselves an "authority" tells me to look in a certain direction.  I'm not a complete contrarian, in that I think "authorities" usually include some truth in their pronouncements in order to buy credibility.

For that reason, when I was told that "all credible scientists" agree on Global Warming and anyone who goes against the pronouncement ought to be strung up, I figured there was some kind of significant climate event coming, but that it wasn't warming.  Sure enough, years of research on solar cycles, weather patterns and the like have led me to conclude that we are heading straight into a Mini Ice Age, not unlike the various solar minima that have come and gone just in recorded history.

When the "authorities" told us that a "lone gunman" killed JFK, I immediately figured there was more to see.  A lot of smart people have come to that conclusion, as well, as they did a far more thorough job of investigating than the Warren Commission did.

When the "authorities" told me that 19 Arabs hi-jacked four planes and flew them into buildings, and that those buildings could be reduced to rubble by the event, I was more than a bit skeptical.  Most certainly, the Building 7 collapse should have clued in most conscious people, though I certainly know some otherwise smart people who just can't bring themselves to see that fact.

So when "authorities" tell me that evolution is true and a stable Universe is the norm, I immediately start looking into the matters myself.  Of course, evolution is quite easy to disprove, but not many people try.  Instead, they repeat it as if gospel truth without even scratching the surface for themselves.

And speaking of gospels, I don't have much time for religion, either.

So it was that I began investigating the Asteroid Belt.  I'll assume this audience is smart enough to at least know what and where the Asteroid Belt is, but it may not know some of the fascinating theories out there, nor the compelling proofs for its origin.

The Standard Model says that the Solar System congealed out of a thin disk of dust and gas, much like Saturn's Rings, but much larger and orbiting the Sun.  Over time, the dust and gas clumped together to form planets, the same way snow balls grow larger as they roll downhill.  Naturally, the "authorities" hide the fact that they can't make the model work, even with the largest supercomputers because, for one thing, there hasn't been enough time in the hypothetical 4,5 billion years to form the outermost planets.  Nor do they tell us that there are piles of data that don't fit the model and are just dismissed as "anomalies."  Anomaly is a code word for, "Oops, that doesn't fit our preconceived ideas."

The Standard Model says that the asteroids are bits of debris that never formed a planet because Jupiter's gravity kept mixing them up.  The "authorities" expect that you won't look too closely at this pronouncement, and do something stupid like calculate Jupiter's gravitational pull at the asteroid belt, since gravity drops off rather quickly as a function of the distance from an object, making the planet's effect on the asteroids rather negligible.  Hell, if it were that great, Jupiter would have vacuumed up the Asteroid Belt a long time ago.

Anyway, a fellow by the name of Thomas van Flandern many years ago came up with the Exploded Planet Hypothesis (EPH).  The idea of an exploded planet wasn't new.  It had been proposed before, but van Flandern did an amazing amount of calculating and found that if you roll back the orbits of the asteroids and several of the short-period comets, they all converged on a single point at 3.2 million years ago, and again at 65 million years ago.  Coincidentally, those two dates line up nicely with two mass extinctions on Earth.

That's just the beginning.

There are four basic types of asteroids, according to the Tholen Taxonomy, based on their compositions as determined from their light spectra: C, S, X and M, with a number of sub-types depending on amounts of various minerals.  One can think of these four groups simply as coal, rock, ice, and "not sure" respectively.  In other words, chunks of all the stuff that make up the four inner rocky planets, just in small, discrete packages rather than a big ball.  Pretty much what you'd expect if you blew up a planet - chunks of carbon, chunks of rock, chunks of ice, and some mixed up pieces.

The reason they all had to come from a planet already formed is that the chunks (i.e. asteroids) are differentiated.  If they were all left-overs that never formed a planet, thanks to Jupiter, we wouldn't expect to find nice balls of separated minerals, but rather a mish-mash of stuff that never quite formed up.

Next, the asteroids aren't scattered evenly around their orbital plane.  Instead, they are primarily clumped together on one side, with a somewhat smaller scattering of pieces on the other side.

The asteroids form four distinct "rings," separated by the so-called Kirkwood Gaps, with larger pieces closer in and smaller ones further out.  This leads some researchers to speculate that there might have been two, even three planets that exploded, with the largest - sometimes called Planet V/5 - being closest to Mars.  Just so you know, the second one is called Planet K (Krypton).

All of this only includes what is known as the Main Belt of asteroids.  There are several others, like the Centaurs and the Kuipers that spread out across the entire Solar System.

Anyway, back to the EPH.  If a planet exploded, we would expect to find evidence of a shock wave in the Solar System, right?  Well, we do.

Our Moon's far side looks like it was hit by a shotgun blast.  One hemisphere of Mars is rough and cratered and 2 kilometers higher than the other (splatter effect).  Saturn's moon Iapetus is black as coal on one side and white as snow on the other.  In fact, many Solar System objects show hemispheric dichotomy that can easily be explained by a shock wave spreading rocks and carbon from a central point.

There are also the Early (EHB) and Late Heavy Bombardments (LHB).  These theories propose a cataclysmic events that caused the heavy cratering seen on the Moon's far side, among other things.  The LHB is thought to have occurred around 4.1 million years ago to 3.8 million years ago.  This corresponds fairly well with van Falndern's Planet V explosion around 3.2 million years ago.  This event aligns fairly well with the Pliocene–Pleistocene mass extinction.

So what's the point of this exercise?

Authoritative Science tells us we have it all figured out.  We understand how life arose, we know how the Solar System evolved.  We know how long our Sun has been around and how long it will live.  We even know how long ago the entire Universe started, though how it will end is still up for debate.  In other words, there is little more to understand and learn.  The frontiers are closing and humans have nothing more than some minor details to iron out.

Not only are these pronouncements patently false, they make for a very boring Universe in which there is nothing left to learn.

In fact, all Authoritative Science has done is take Biblical scripts and modernized them, with some fancy frilly stuff to make it all look very modern and high-techy.  The truth is we know nothing, especially for certain, and that the Universe is still wide open for discovery.  The Standard Model and Evolution Theories are full of irreparable holes that are constantly being patched with black holes, multi-dimensional strings and dark energy/matter, not to mention that evolution cannot get past Irreducible Complexity.

The Universe is far more mysterious and interesting when we toss out the mythological rewrites of ancient texts and look with fresh eyes at the space around us.  It is high time to realize that Authoritative Science is doing little more than spinning comforting tales that make us feel like we are still the center of the Universe and can control our environment.

When we tame our egos and our childish need for bedtime stories, suddenly the Universe opens again to curiosity and our innate desire to learn.