Saturday, March 19, 2005





Richard Hoagland's Iapetus theory keeps getting better. Whether you agree with his case or not, this qualifies as one of the most engaging speculative exercises I've had the pleasure to encounter online in a long while.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

One question (two actually): Doesn't RH's scenario imply that Iapetus is basically hollow or at least a "shell" containing a complex of open habitats in the interior? If this is the case, wouldn't meteor impacts, especially by very fast movers the size of asteroids, punch ragged, gaping holes in the structure rather than leaving nice, neat, round, shallow craters on the surface? Just a thought.
--WMB

JohnFen said...

It depends. If I understand RH's thesis properly, then the object is hollow, but covered with an outer layer of tough stuff that is very thick -- thick enough to make the top part of the equatorial ridge equal to ground level.

In that type of object, meteor strikes wouldn't punch nice, clean holes. they'd be more likley to make gigantic dents, perhaps with tearing at stress points.

Anonymous said...

The RH illustration that looks like a cross between the Death Star and a giant interstellar soccer ball may be misleading (also RH's own description). If ET engineers were actually going to design a habitat that large, they probably would layer it over with several tens of kms thick compacted material to protect it from meteor/asteroid penetration. But if that's the case, why not just hollow out an existing asteroid or moon? And even with meteors/asteroids making huge dents and not punching through, it still seems to me that they would at least expose the underlying structure.
--WMB

JohnFen said...

Yeah, the illustration of the buckyball with lights bothered me, because it doesn't even really match what RH seems to be implying (at least in my interpretation).

On the other hand, such art is excellent for enhancing hype, which is something RH does pretty well.

Mac said...

If I read Hoagland's theory correctly, the moon isn't so much hollow as porous, composed of a dense fractal "rebar." This could be quite tough, so it's not totally implausible that impacts could leave relatively superficial suface wounds.

And there really do seem to be linear collapses consistent with a Platonic superstructure. I disagree with the details presented with Hoagland -- and I'm exasperated by his "extreme close-ups" -- but I think Iapetus qualifies as a geometric anomaly.

Mac said...

And I take partial credit for the "reconstructed" blue and yellow buckyball at the top of Part Five. I'd run across a computer-generated wallpaper showing pyramidal spaceships at Space.com and sent the URL to Hoagland, who "sampled" the texture.

Anonymous said...

There are what look like two RECTANGULAR craters smack in the middle of the pic plus a very strange angular (pentagon-like) looking structure just above and to the left of the large crater.
--WMB