One of the Most Haunting Questions: Who Built the Moon?

A new book out by Christopher Knight asks some fascinating questions about our close and old friend the moon. We take the moon for granted but it is in many ways very mysterious.

Could it be that the Moon is artificial? Could it even be hollow? And does the Moon really exist through some happy accident, or is a blueprint apparent – and if so, who was the architect? -

humansarefree.com...

Even after many visits to the moon and a lot of observation we still have a lot of unanswered questions.

Some points of note....

he Moon, which includes the fact that it does not have a solid core like every other planetary object. It is either hollow or has a very low-density interior. Bizarrely, its concentration of mass are located at a series of points just under its surface – which caused havoc with early lunar spacecraft.

The material the Moon is made from came from the outer surface of the Earth and left a shallow hole that filled with water and we now call the Pacific. This rock left the Earth to produce the Moon very quickly after our planet had formed around 4,6 billion years ago. -

The Moon is not only extremely odd in its construction; it also behaves in a way that is nothing less than miraculous. It is exactly four hundred times smaller than the Sun but four hundred times closer to the Earth so that both the Sun and the Moon appear to be precisely the same size in the sky

Furthermore, the Moon mirrors the movement of the Sun in the sky by rising and setting at the same point on the horizon as the Sun does at opposite solstices. For example, this means the Moon rises at midwinter at the same place the Sun does at midsumme

It is beleived by some scientists that the moon has helped to maintain live on earth and that without it we would not be here.

If the Moon was not exactly the size, mass and distance that it has been at each stage of the Earth’s evolution – there would be no intelligent life here. Scientists are agreed that we owe everything to the Moon. It acts as a stabiliser that holds our planet at just the right angle to produce the seasons and keep water liquid across most of the planet. Without our Moon the Earth would be as dead and solid as Venus.

There certainly appears to be a lot of coincidence regarding the moon. To me the moon is the most magical things we see. I love watching a moon for its beauty..


purp..

a reply to: purplemer

The thing I've always wondered about since hearing it, we're the astronaut's observations of a smell. When they re-boarded their lander they said it smelled as though they had walked through a fire. I don't know why that always stuck with me.

Certainly, the moon is one of the great mysteries of early mankind. Of course, if you are implying it is artificial in construction, you are arguing that it is a very old construction, yes? (As certainly it is in many paintings and works of art prior to modern times. )

The moon is rather interesting, actually. The story goes that...
A large, planet-sized object smashed into the Earth shortly after the Earth began to form and cool (gravitational differentiation likely was already taking place). The Earth would have likely been very hot still, though. The planet-sized object's dense core was absorbed into the Earth and ejecta of less dense material was tossed into space, creating a molten blob of material which coalesced under the effects of gravity. It cooled, differentiated (with lighter, plagioclase-rich rock known as anorthosite being in the outer layer and a slightly denser rock making the core), and bulged due to gravitational influences of celestial neighbors.

I can't do the story justice, but I love to think about how some moon rocks are anorthosite derived from Earth rock just differentiated after cooling. Anorthosite is cool by itself, mind you, but the improbability of what must have happened to explain that which is seen is a beautiful thing of statistics.

a reply to: purplemer

Wow almost every point the article makes about the moon is wrong.Where to start i guess first the moon is not necessary for life to develop on earth it does help but without it findings showed that the earths obliquity would vary only about ten degrees. The influence of other planets in the solar system could have kept a moonless Earth stable.

The moon isnt hollow we can easily tell by its gravitational field there is just to much mass for it to be hollow. Before you bring up the bell thing as people always do bells dont ring because there hollow in fact if they were they wouldn't ring. Bells are concave but its still a solid piece. All solid objects with appropriate elasticity reverberate. What we learned about the moon and it vibrating is that its solid no liquid like the earths core.

As far as the distance in the past it was a lot closer making eclipses impossible in fact took up a third of the earths sky. And in the future it will be to far away for a total eclipse as they say were just in the right place at the right time.


Now the moon mirrors the sun of course it does the suns gravity causes this because the earth and the moon are locked together same reason we only ever see one side of the moon.

The moon does not keep water liquid across most of the planet. The Earth's distance from the sun does that.

hi i have read the moon is full of helium which some countries are looking to mine.

en.wikipedia.org...

Aside from the extensive list of physical benefits of having a close satellite like the moon, we've also got to recognise that without the moon, the evolution of human intelligence would likely be stunted.

From anticipating the Moons position and appearance for use as a strategic hunting/warfare tool through to wondering whether the lunar lander would sink into it's dust, the Moon provides an endless supply of questions but is just within realistic reach to allow us to understand it and the environment in which it formed.

a reply to: dragonridr

As far as the distance in the past it was a lot closer making eclipses impossible

You made a boo-boo too.

and the book will sell millions to the intellectually challenged people of the world..thats around 99% of the population isnt it?

the moon's been popular around here lately, but this has been around for a while now..
try putting "food for the moon" into a search engine & research that gurdjief fellow and some of his "friends"

..who's got their tinfoil hat on?

What are the odds... I just started reading this book, I've been a fan of Knights' since the Hiram Key (even though I don't agree with a lot of his conclusions, but that's irrelevant I suppose...) and I would recommend his books to everyone whether your interest is Masonic tradition or the origins of the moon (different books obviously...) but I'm about a third of the way through this book and it is very well written and provides plenty of evidence for its arguments. Worth a read, especially before doubting it's contents. ..

a reply to: purplemer

Um...

I take issue with quite a lot of the things stated in the article as bald fact, which are nothing more than theory, and not particularly well thought out theory at that.

First of all, and most staggering in its ineptitude, is the suggestion that the Moon is the strangest thing in the known universe. That is utter bunkum. What of the strange behaviour of objects at the quantum scale, what of black holes and their incredible, improbable, and unknown depths?

The truth is that there are many things in the universe which are stranger than our Moon, but there are not that many things in the universe which are both very strange, and very close to us, as our familiar satellite.

Furthermore, the article states that the Moons centres of mass are distributed around several points nearer its surface, than its center. That is certainly interesting, but not totally unusual. There has long been discussion surrounding the fact that both Uranus and Neptune appear to have magnetic centres which are offset away from their physical centres by an enormous amount, when compared to other planetary bodies, and Uranus particularly is strange, because although its "north" pole is pointed directly toward the sun, and therefore its polar regions receive more energy input from the sun than its equator (pretty strange, I think you will find!), its equator is STILL hotter than its poles, a fact which has no explanation to this day!

Furthermore, on the subject of the Moon being potentially hollow, it may well have large voids within it, who knows? But again, that is not unheard of in a satellite body either. Asteroids can contain gases, which vent when they are heated by sunlight when these orbiting cosmic bullets travel close enough to the sun. Those gases have to be stored in something do they not? And then consider Phobos, moon of Mars, around which there has been much speculation as to the internal structure of, namely that it appears that it may have voids within it too.

The way I see the moon, is as a broken off piece of planet, formed during a particularly frenzied period of our solar systems history. When its component parts first came together, it probably was not a spherical object like the one we see today, not in the first minutes, hours, days, years, decades, or thousands of years. It was formed from a total madness, and none of its components contained enough energy to sustain a hot core, so the entire congealed mess cooled rapidly, meaning that unlike on other rocky bodies like our Earth, or Mars (which had a hot core for quite a time, but now lies allegedly dormant), its components never got recycled.

You see, here on our planet, the surface went through a period of being reprocessed rapidly. The hot core would spew out molten rock, which would head for the surface, spew out of the fledgling crust, and cover it, and or force the newborn skin of the world to squeeze the existing crust down, to become molten again. That process happens rather slowly by all accounts these days, but it must have been totally chaotic in the earliest time after the planet coalesced. The very slow cooling of our planet, allowed for its components to be distributed in a uniform fashion for the most part, which is why we have a defined core, layers of variously molten material, and a defined crust.

But the moon did not enjoy such energy abundance as our planet, and so its components cooled unevenly and rapidly, which made the mixture lumpy. Yes, I AM comparing it, somewhat, to the process of baking a cake. Simply put, the mixture was not hot enough for long enough, to be properly mixed to prevent clumping.

a reply to: Elijah23

..that's kinda what i'm trying to ramble about back there,
what we have here, is an amalgamation of folks who are putting out the message "you can't trust the system"
but the snake only sheds its skin

if you scare a bunch of sheep enough, they'll probably run straight into some 'safe' enclosed area, right?

a reply to: Snarl

That is a strange thing. I have never heard that before.. Also a little confused I never thought there was smell in space I guess I must be a little wrong..

a reply to: purplemer

Purplemer, although you would be right to say that one cannot smell things in space, because space is a functional vacuum containing no air to breathe in, and therefore nothing to carry the smell to the olfactory nerves, if an astronaut comes in from a space walk, when he is once again surrounded by atmosphere, and can breathe without the assistance of the suit they wear, they WILL smell whatever dust and accumulated trace chemicals that may have adhered to the surface of the suit.

The burnt smell could be explained thusly. Our planet has an atmosphere containing oxygen and nitrogen, which is constantly in motion. Even on the stillest day, air moves around on planet Earth. The fiery birth of our world would have created a significantly singed smell, but our atmosphere has diffused that smell over years, so we only really smell the ashes of our planets birth, when we stand near a volcano. However, as far as we know, the moon has nothing one could legitimately call an atmosphere, and so all the smells which would ordinarily be diffused into the atmosphere here on earth, and stripped out of the atmosphere by vegetation, are still sitting on the lunar surface, in dusty form.

Therefore, since the only times when heated rock has existed on its face, are when it was first born, and when it is hit by asteroids cannon balling through space, it is probable that the burnt smell is literally the ashes of the birth of our moon, and the sundry impacts with other torpedoing space debris over the eons of its existence, which have not been diffused by atmosphere, or absorbed by plants, as they would have been on Earth.

originally posted by: dragonridr
...As far as the distance in the past it was a lot closer making eclipses impossible in fact took up a third of the earths sky. And in the future it will be to far away for a total eclipse as they say were just in the right place at the right time. ..

Well, to be accurate a closer moon/larger moon would create more total eclipses.

...HOWEVER, that's not the point I wan to make here. The point I want to make is that the moon is not always the exact same relative size as the Sun in the sky -- not even in our present time.

Depending on differences in the Moons and the Earth's orbit, there are times that the Moon is smaller than the Sun -- meaning there are times that the moon does NOT totally cover the sun during eclipses. Therefore, the information in the OP that "the moon is the exact same relative size as the Sun" is not accurate.

-----

As for the idea that intelligent life on earth would not exist without the moon having the EXACT physical and orbital characteristics that it does, that is not necessarily true, either.

It may be true that we humans (in our human form) and the other complex life on Earth that we know today may not have evolved in the exact same manner as it would have with a different moon, but that doesn't mean that other complex life and other intelligent life would not have evolved. A different Moon may have meant a different evolutionary path for the earth, but that path may have still led to an intelligent species -- just possibly a different species.

Maybe "we" wouldn't be around, but then again, perhaps some other intelligent creature who evolved on an earth with a smaller Moon might say "if our Moon was bigger, then we would not be here".

Heck, there are a lot of "If ____________ happened/didn't happen, then humans wouldn't be here" moments in the history of the Earth. For example, if the dinosaurs were not wiped out, or it the "snowball Earth" period didn't happen, or the Permian extinction event, etc, etc.

If any of those events happened differently, then some intelligent life other than humans may have evolved -- and that life may be asking similar questions.

originally posted by: purplemer
a reply to: Snarl

That is a strange thing. I have never heard that before.. Also a little confused I never thought there was smell in space I guess I must be a little wrong..

They were talking about the smell on the spacesuits after they came in from the outside. In the atmosphere of the LM, the astronauts would be able to smell things.

And it really does not surprise me that the dust on the moon could have a smell. I mean, why not? Why wouldn't the lunar soil have an odor? Most things (even minerals and rocks) can have an odor.

Another possible explanation for the odor may be how the space suits react to the environment. Is it possible that the smell came from how the environment reacted with the space suit material?

Makes you wonder where the "man in the moon" thing really came from. I always thought the moon was an oddity. I remember reading about how many astronomers throughout history have seen flashes of light there. I also find the hexagon at the north pole of Saturn odd. Such beauty and mystery in space.

a reply to: purplemer

@ times its pondered if there is a liquid or frozen core within it that keeps its EA*RTH facing side from turning.
EX: fill a water balloon or ball up with fluid and watch how it slowly spins as the fluid gathers to the more slanted side freeze the fluid on a slant like position and the sphere may not spin and if it does it will irregularly. This combined with tidal activity at times makes 1 think its filled with some substance. But I am an outta box thinker

a reply to: Fylgje

Astronomers who saw light and fire on the moon, were witnessing asteroidal impacts with its surface. One of the earliest accounts which is thought to describe such a a thing was provided by a Christian monk if I remember correctly.