Ode To The Moon

Oh Moon, not just for lovers,

You shine for us all lifers

That beauty you fill us blunt

Not just for the hunt

But for humane seasons

In the end we grasped with reason

The Moon holds our hand

Across space to no end

Our celestial mate

Our own hand of fate

No Moon, No Trees? 4 Billions Year Ago, Moon Was Red Hot Liquid Rock

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Earth’s Moon is most peculiar. It is large relative to the planet it orbits around. Nearly as large as the three largest satellites in the Solar System: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto. Those orbit giant planets.

The Moon has made advanced life on Earth possible. Maybe if Mars had a large moon, it would enjoy obvious life now: a moon would have made super summers impossible.

No Moon, No Sentience?

If one considers Mercury, Venus and Mars, there is something very wrong with their diurnal rotation: it is either way too slow, or way too wobbly, in the fullness of time. Even if Venus did not have a killer CO2 atmosphere, it’s very slow (counterclockwise) rotation would have scorched, half freeze life there, on a perpetual basis.

Mars rotates on itself in roughly one Earth day, but the axis of rotation does not just precess (as it does on Earth). It also changes inclination on the plane of rotation of the planets (the “Ecliptic”). And does so wildly. This means that, periodically, Mars has super summers (and super winters). During super summers, a lot of water vapor appears in the atmosphere, and that’s a powerful greenhouse gas (actually more powerful than CO2).

The Moon-Earth system has one global angular momentum: as the Earth’s rotation slows down, due to the friction of the tides, Earth’s angular momentum goes down, so the angular momentum stored by the Moon has to go up. That’s mostly stored in the product of the distance of the Moon, times its mass, times its speed. The only of these three factors which can go up is the distance of the Moon: so the Moon, which used to be very close to Earth, is now roughly at one light second.

Water Streak In This Martian Crater Are Hundreds Of Meters Long, Five Meters Wide

NASA confirmed today what we already knew: there is briny water flowing on Mars. It’s liquid at minus twenty degrees Celsius (being full of anti-freeze). It’s exact origin is still unknown: deliquescence, melting permafrost, watery reservoirs?

It has long been known there is plenty of water on Mars. It’s just frozen in the ground, and at the poles. During super summer, the poles probably disappear, and there is much more water and warmth on the planet. It’s not excluded that life blossoms then.

Super seasons would have been be a killer for Earth’s advanced life, periodically over-heating or freezing the ocean.

Where from this orbiting celestial miracle?

The Moon is made of Earth. Science does not explain that yet. The main theory’s base state claims that the Moon is collision debris: Earth would have collided with a third body, Mars size, and the orbiting debris would have gathered into the Moon.

I even have my own theory, both outlandish and Politically Incorrect: a succession of nuclear-assisted explosions would have lifted material at the Roche limit, where it would have gathered, forming the Moon.

Angular momentum would have done the rest. Pro my theory: we have a massive, life-giving nuclear fission reactor below our feet. It rotates an iron ocean which in turn generates a life saving magnetic shield. It also generate plate tectonic and mantle subduction, which burrows all nefarious fossil fuels, and excess CO2. (That worked well until the oil devils took over!)

Could we have life on Earth without our large Moon?

This is not clear. Not at all. Having a stable rotation axis is primordial. One of our Solar System gas giant’s rotation axis is nearly within the plane of the ecliptic. Something happened to tilt it. Gas giants can be tilted. Yet, the Earth would be hard to tilt, because of the Moon.

Patrice Ayme’

MOON From NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS, Glancing Blows?

Imagination ought to be stronger than cognition: such is human genius: invent what you don’t know (yet).

Luna, or Moon, played a crucial role in the rise of life on Earth. It is rather unlikely that advanced life could have evolved without it. Luna provided tremendous chemical mixing on Earth’s surface and otherwise unlikely stability of rotation of the planet (so nice seasons, instead of super winters and super summers, etc). Simultaneously.

Luna allows all sorts of rotations of the Earth to be close to the perfection needed for advanced life.

Other planets have unstable rotation (with up to a 40 degrees wobbling axis: Mars), or insufficient spins (Mercury, Venus), or lay completely flat on the ecliptic plane like beached whales (Uranus). The angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system is one, yet it’s spread on a huge area (about 1/6 of the Sun’s cross-section). Luna used to graze the Earth, at the Roche Limit, causing kilometer tides flushing continental margins continually (thus mixing organic materials with earth, sea and sky, as in an infernal organic materials churning reactor).

Earth-Moon From NASA’s Galileo, Heading To Jupiter

How did Luna form?

John Kennedy’s Apollo Project sent a geologist to the Moon, and brought back precious rocks that were generously divided among laboratories (and various animals) worldwide.

Exploring the Moon was a better use of money than feeding the starving in Africa. Actually there were not much starvation in Africa yet. Indeed there were no wars among the savages, yet, hence no starving in Africa, yet. Moon exploration also demonstrated that the USA does not have to be a nasty den of pirates 100% of the time.

First verdict of Moon science? Isotopic studies (2001) confirmed that Luna is made of Earth’s mantle rocks.

The surprise was considerable. Before that (isotopic) discovery, it was widely expected that Luna was a captured minor planet. Instead, the Earth and Moon came from the same body. How could that be? The obvious scenario that comes to mind is that a Mars sized object hit the Earth. Melted debris would have gathered around Earth, and coalesce, forming the Moon. George Darwin, fifth child of the most famous Darwin, himself a distinguished astronomer, suggested this in 1898.

However, closer, more modern inspection reveals that if Luna was made of Terra, it was not made from an impact… because what happened to the impactor’s material? Luna’s titanium isotope ratio (⁵⁰Ti/⁴⁷Ti) is so close to the Earth’s (within 4 parts per million), that none of the impactor’s  mass could have been part of the Moon.

Moreover there is another drastic problem with the impact hypothesis. The dynamics don’t work. A grazing impact would have resulted with debris in a highly eccentric, grazing ellipse. Such a very elongated ellipse is not observed, and impossible to imagine (the debris would have crashed back to Earth, either from air resistance, or the Roche Limit). We are left with a deeper oblique impact, where the impactor is fully absorbed. But then it’s unclear that we can get massive ejecta with a required speed of ten kilometers per second or so, plus high enough an altitude to escape the Roche Limit.

All the more as astronomical considerations lead one to believe the collision happened at low-speed (at most 4 kms/s).

Still another problem of the impact theory is that it implies that the entire planet would have melted. However, there is plenty of evidence that the planet did not entirely melt. Rocks (zircons) have been found to be 4.375 billion years old, plus or minus 6 million years! These are granite like, water rich rocks. That means the supposedly melted Earth would have become solid within 100 million years of impact (by contrast those who believe Earth Core has just residual heat, no active fission heat, claim the core cools at the rate of 100 degrees Celsius every billion years. They generally also believe in the Impact, and thus contradict themselves, thanks to the zircons!)

Thus the impact theory does not seem to work.

The basic problem is that the Moon was created from Earth. Imagine the Earth as a soup: you need to put part of the soup in orbit. You need to rocket it up.

Any brighter idea? I propose there was no magma soup (because so was the fact).

I propose the NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS THEORY (NET). Wow. It’s half tongue in cheek, it has a more serious variant. I replace the overall melting of the impact theory, by powerful local explosions that could hurtle water rich rocks in orbit (mini impacts also do this, that’s the serious variant). As I pointed out in “Life Giving Earth Nuclear Reactor”, we (probably) have below our feet the largest fission reactor in the known universe.

The Inner Core of Earth is about 70% of the size of the Moon, 2440 kilometers across. It is also around 5,800 Degrees Kelvin, the temperature of the surface of the Sun. Should the rest of the planet become transparent, it would appear to us about 35 wider than the Sun, and just as bright. That would transfer to us about 1,000 times more energy than the Sun does. We would quickly fry.

In my vision of Earth’s genesis, a lot of radioactive fission products were gathered, when Earth formed. Being denser, those fissionable nucleotides tended to sink in molten Earth, and so doing, concentrated. As they did so, their neutrons hit each other. Nuclear fission pockets formed, and violently erupted in tremendous nuclear explosions, deep inside the Earth’s mantle.

(In most so-called thermonuclear bombs’ explosions, contrarily to Communal Wisdom, most of the power actually comes from fission, by using the cheap trick that Uranium 238, the “stable” isotope of Uranium, fissions when exposed to fast neutrons; in the young Earth, there would have been plenty of Uranium 238; this subtlety no doubt escaped geophysicists, since they are unused to nuclear bomb making… In other words, tapping my nuclear know-how, I notice that there is way more fissionable nuclear fuel down below if one thinks, not as Voltaire’s proverbial watch maker, but as a nuclear bomb maker! Is not thinking fun? The reserves of U238 inside the Earth are enormous, and those reserves were more than double that, 4.5 billion years ago).

These enormous nuclear explosions, within the mantle, created plenty of ejecta, thank you Lord. Most fell back with a splash, but plenty had enough correctly directed momentum to achieve high enough orbit.

This is smarter than it looks. The Earth rotated at least once every five hours (8,000 kilometers/hour at the equator). That means ejecta thrown up at the equator would have had one-third of the energy needed for satellization. Hence only equatorial ejecta would have formed the Moon, explaining both why the Moon’s orbit is coplanar, and Luna spins the way it does.

The hot debris gathered, and formed the Moon, just beyond Édouard Roche’s (liquid) Limit. At least, so I propose. Never underestimate all things nuclear. One can combine my nuclear ejection theory with coplanar mini collisions (so not on Mars size body). The whole thing would have looked like one of these spirals generated by some stars… If a star can do it, so could the nuclear boiling Earth…

Some will object that the theory above does not explain the high angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system, that an impact provides with. They will object that I have to introduce this as an independent assumption.

It is true that, the more the independent assumptions in a theory, the weaker it is, or the more empirical.

My own Nuclear Core Theory (NCT) explains a lot of characteristics of the Earth. Could it also explain the high angular momentum? Yes. How? NCT considers that Earth formed not just in the Habitability Zone, but in a Nuclear Zone (NZ). The NZ cloud dust was full of heavy elements. Heavy nuclei can’t be held together by the nuclear force, so they fission, So the densest elements are radioactive.

As the NZ condensed, the heavy elements carried more angular momentum (angular momentum is the product of speed by mass by radius). So any planet in an NZ (which I believe necessary for long-term life evolution), once it has condensed from an NZ cloud, will have more angular momentum. The NCT implies high angular momentum.

Reality is stronger medicine than fiction, because what’s within is a pale imitation of interpreted fragments out there that it has been our good fortune to come across.

Conscience without science is only dwarfing of the soul.

Patrice Aymé

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Note 1: Angular momentum was locally augmented by explosions, be they partly of nuclear origin, or caused by mini-impacts, or a combination of both. Mini-impacts would have been automatically in the orbital plane… Something the usual macro impact theory does NOT have! (Let me repeat slowly: the usual Mars sized body impact theory is very unlikely just on the ground that the impact has little probability to be within the plane of the ecliptic. The theory above makes this automatic: non-ecliptic impacts and explosions get de-selected, as the Earth’s OWN rotation, which is basically co-planar with the ecliptic is used crucially… OK, cynics may retort that it’s not quite so, and thus evidence for an off-ecliptic massive impact, agreed… Computer modelling will decide…)

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Note 2: As I pointed out in passing, the more the independent assumptions in a theory, the weaker it is, or the more empirical? This may sound all too vague. However, it’s very practical. For example racism is logically weaker than non-racism, as it hypothesizes supplementary logics. (Which is, moreover, unobserved!) Some will say that this is just a version of the law of parsimony (lex parsimoniae, Occam razor; the idea is explicit in Aristotle: “We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [other things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses.“.)

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Note 3: Searching for my own essay on the Internet, July 8, 2018, to my somewhat dispirited surprise I stumbled on the following paper, which I never heard of, let alone read, before:

Which argues the Moon formed in one big nuclear explosion, using some of the logic above (nuclear fission being the only source of power capable of lifting the material, etc…) The difference with my theory is that I don’t do it with just one big explosion, but a whole sequence of them. One big one looks completely implausible to me (the math of coalescing so much nuclear material in just one spot at one time don’t work). Many, yes… So my own idea holds its own, all the more as the mini nuke and mini impact theory go together well, in whichever proportions… Alleluia…