Is Iapetus Artifical?

Saturn's moon Iapetus, the location of the Star Gate in Arthur C. Clarke's original 2001: A Space Odyssey before it became a screenplay, is Richard Hoagland's newest object of interest. Hoagland is pointing out that the ridge is not only equatorial, 12,000 feet high, and 120 circumferential degrees in length, but is exactly the width of the 'Yin-Yang' shadow- and, it begins and ends at two massive and identical 'craters'. He claims to see geodesic engineering of the moon. Has he identified the 'Hollow World In The Sky' of Iroquois legend? Or is Iapetus just a freak? Did Arthur Clarke read inside information from a pre-existant civilization? Stay tuned- and let us know what you think happened to make Iapetus, and what the heck that 'mountain range' is. You can see Iapetus with a 2" telescope on a good night (but not the Ridge).

[edit on 9-2-2005 by Chakotay]

Hah! the deathStar!


seriously, why would some one build a moon, when there are more habitable planets in our galaxy?

I'm sorry but Richard Hoagland lives in a fantasy world.
Here's his website.
www.enterprisemission.com...

Just a few examples:

He still sees a face on mars despite the newest high-res images showing it to be a funny shaped rock.

He sees fissures on mars and says that they are giant glass tubes.

He shows proof of glass structures on the moon with really crappy photocopied images.

The list goes on and on.

Also Clarke's monoliths were not Stargates, but beacons to the ones who put them there. Basically they were to track our progress.
One more thing on that, Stanley Kubrick and Clarke collaborated on the book and on the screenplay for 2001, based on a rough outline written by Clarke.

Hoagland is definitely out there. But he has broken some pretty fantastic stuff in the past. Such as the Brookings Report, and he recognized the oceans on Europa. Reading his stuff is like gold panning: lots of dirt, one or two flakes.

I think he is thinking about an artificial moon as a derelict starship, Kushi. There is an old Iroquois legend that our Ancestors came here in a hollow world in the sky. Why Saturn? Fuel. Water. Far enough away from habitable non-tech worlds to keep it out of the hands of the 'kiddies'. Hoagie thinks Indian, he was friends with my late friend Sun Bear. He has been debunked thoroughly, but he was a CBS news consultant during Apollo, and has been a NASA insider, of that there is no doubt.

As for the Face, LeftBehind, who's to say we're getting unaltered data, or that the original Face has not been excavated in the intervening years?

I know that if I had black budget authority, a few of my Mars probes would have 'gone missing' due to 'arithmatic errors'. And they would have been systematically excavating the 'Face' without your knowledge since the Seventies. But that's just me

Fantastic pictures of Iapetus in that article, though. I like his slogan: To Boldly Go Where Someone Has Gone Before. I have a hunch that space, like the 18th Century American 'wilderness', is neither virgin nor untravelled.

[edit on 9-2-2005 by Chakotay]

Originally posted by Chakotay
Hoagland is definitely out there... and he recognized the oceans on Europa.

You got name wrong... it's Hoaxland!

This establishes that Hoagland says he was the first to propose an ocean under Europa's ice, and that there might be life there.

So, was he really the first? No, he wasn't. Hoagland's claims in this case are at best misleading.

First, while Star and Sky was a fine magazine, it was not a scientific journal. It was a popular magazine for amateur astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts. I have written for several magazines such as that myself, and writing for them is an entirely different matter than writing a scientific journal article. So right away, Hoagland claiming this is a "scientific paper" is a pretty big stretch of the truth.

Second, the idea of oceans on or in the moons of Jupiter had been around for many years before Hoagland published his article. John Lewis, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona published an article in 1971 about this in volume 15 of Icarus, a (scientific!) journal of planetary sciences. The article was entitled "Satellites of the Outer Planets: Their Physical and Chemical Nature". At the time, his arguments were based on somewhat incomplete data, but later he published a paper (with Guy Consolmagno) which appeared in 1976 in the book "JUPITER: Studies of the interior, atmosphere, magnetosphere, and satellites" (edited by T. Gehrels) which gives better details of the moons' interiors. This clearly establishes that Lewis thought of this ocean idea before Hoagland did.

www.badastronomy.com...
So he's plainly lying.
But on the other hand... liars are even allowed to be presidents...

And kinda contradictory article about Iapetus.
First he claims that Iapetus (icy moon with low mass) couldn't differ from sphere because of gravity and later that gravity of it is very small.

Originally posted by LeftBehind
He still sees a face on mars despite the newest high-res images showing it to be a funny shaped rock.

Newest photos of mars face have probably been altered by Nasa. And the fact that the face is located in Cydonia zone is certainly not a coincidence. Also, why nasa has never took high-res pictures of Cydonia ? Maybe too hard to hide ?

[edit on 10/2/2005 by Musclor]

I really enjoy reading Hoagland's site. It's got a lot of interesting articles, stuff that makes the overnight shift I'm working go by faster.

I also find the articles invaluable when planning sessions for an RPG group I run (Adventure!, pulp-era stuff if you're interested)

That said, I think that he reads too much into the effects of Photoshop's filters on images. Not having the original high-res images he starts with, I can't get the exact end results, but for any form of compressed image on a computer, if you sharpen it, or use an edge enhancer, you will see regular geometric patterns. Because that's how image compression works. Just as an MP3 music file can compress a song so that it only takes up 3-5MB (as opposed to the 30 or so MB that an uncompressed song would take) by "fudging" the audio quality in areas that people are going to be unlikely to notice, so to do most computer images "fudge" the visual quality of the image in ways that the human eye is likely to ignore.

Originally posted by E_T
This establishes that Hoagland says he was the first to propose an ocean under Europa's ice, and that there might be life there.
So, was he really the first? No, he wasn't. Hoagland's claims in this case are at best misleading.

Badastronomy.com makes a classic scholastic error: it debunks on the basis that the mistaken cannot ever deduce truth. If this were true, then Watson and Crick could never have deduced the nature of DNA after first proposing so many stupid theories. Hoagie is sometimes right, often wrong- just like you and me. And very, very well connected. So he hears things worth listening to. If only for laughs.

In fact, Hoagland was at JPL when the images first came in. He voiced his ocean theory immediately to those present.

Like Percival Lowell, he often 'sees' things that, well, aren't there. And like Percival Lowell, he often points out things that are. I guess I have a soft spot for curmudgeons.

Never believe anything. Prove everything- from anyone.

That said, I think Hoagie is curious as to how AC Clarke picked Iapetus for high strangeness. I myself am curious how George Lucas got the Death Star image. What Hoag is talking about is that there may be a 'back channel'- a source of anomalous astronomical knowledge from the past (or ET's? Or the Black Budget) via secret societies. Thus 'what did Arthur know and when did he know it'. I also want to know where the Celestials (Chinese) got the Yin/Yang.

Iapetus, I think, is Enigma.

It certainly made me nauseous when I saw the high-resolution images, whatever that means- in light of the Brookings Report

[edit on 11-2-2005 by Chakotay]