My mum used to say I went crazy on a full moon. She was probably right. The word lunatic comes to mind readily. There is no doubt that the earth’s moon is an imposing sight.
The moons of Mars by comparison are tiny specs. Mars has a diameter of about 4,212 miles, half of Earth’s. Its moons, Phobos and Deimos, are much smaller, with Phobos the larger one, seen below left, measuring only about 14 miles across. It’s the size of Manhattan, below right. Only about a third of one percent of Mars’s diameter. A fly spec.
Earth’s moon is about 25% of the Earth’s diameter at 2,159 miles. It’s massive, causing tides, influencing earthquakes, spawning lunatics and apparently gods.
In the Christian Bible, man was created in God’s image. Not just in inner similarities like moral reasoning and intellect, but in appearance too it can be interpreted. But that is not how it started. Modern humans first appeared some 200,000 years ago, but the first writing system was only invented some 5,500 years ago in ancient Sumeria. This means there’s a 195,000-year prehistoric period where we have almost no idea what sort of gods people conceived of or worshipped. Clearly they existed as part of human culture before writing because gods are mentioned in the very first writing systems. These include the Sumerian Nammu, the Egyptian Atum and the Canaanite Yahweh.
Perhaps the best candidate for the first known reference to a god in history is the Proto-Indo-European god Dyēus Pater (“father daylight-sky-god”), roughly where Ukraine is today. His existence can be traced back some 5000 – 7000 years ago.
Gods caught on. Between this original monotheism and today’s Hebraic monotheism were a mishmash of multiple gods: Norse, Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese. It’s like there can never be enough gods. That makes sense in a way, since one aspect of human knowledge is to find cause, and before causes could be found, blame it on a god. The Greek gods in particular are a complex mishmash of entities. An interesting feature is that they seem to have been created in man’s image. The opposite of the Christian belief. They displayed such traits as jealousy, lust, deceit, all those negative human characteristics. They were war mongering and incestuous.
There is a hierarchy. To simplify, the original Greek gods were the primordial deities Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth). They begat the twelve Titans, 6 boys and 6 girls. The son Cronus married his sister Rhea issuing the twelve Olympians, the ones who lived on Mount Olympus that we are more familiar with. All still in the family with Zeus at the head and only after a lot of fighting between Cronus and his dad and later with Zeus and everyone, another of the Greek gods’ human characteristics.
Back to the Titans, another one of the 6 females was Theia. Not to be outdone by her sister Rhea, Theia married her brother Hyperion and between them they produced Helios (Sun), Selene (Moon) and Eos (Dawn).
So the point is that the Earth’s moon, Selene, was created by its mother Theia. The Romans copied all of this and used a similar story with different Latin names, Selene becoming Luna. But the Greeks got there first.
What the Greeks, or the Romans, or I, did not know was what lay beneath the surface. Ignoring the atmosphere and the oceans, the earth consists of layers. To simplify it, outermost is the crust on which we walk and which consists of all those tectonic plates. Then a thick hard mantle which has a viscous outer lining on which the tectonic plates slide. And at the centre a core consisting or a hard outer and a molten inner part.
We’ve known this for some time, but now we know something new. There are some anomalies. There are some foreign insertions in the mantle that normally should not be there, right at the junction with the outer core. That’s the bit I did not know. They are called Large Low-Shear-Velocity Provinces, or LLSVP’s if you want to make it harder, discovered in the 1980’s using seismic tomography, a process similar to CAT scans. There are two main ones, called the African and the Pacific ones, from work of many but significantly by Tuzo Wilson and W. Jason Morgan, so they are also named respectively after them.
The original theory was that they were caused by thermal pluming out of the core, but since they are up to 1000 kms vertically and 2000 to 3000 kms across, they are the wrong shape for plumes. And they are made of the wrong stuff.
Scientists now believe 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth had a neighbouring planet that also formed in the inner solar system. The current evidence is that the nearby planet collided with Earth and birthed the moon. Not unlike how the ancient Greeks believed Theia and Hyperion “collided” and created Selene, or in its Roman name Luna. So scientists being who they are, named this (so far hypothetical) neighbouring planet Theia, the mother of the moon.
From basic Newtonian physics, scientists know a lot about how this collision influenced Earth beyond just the creation of the moon, including how it affected the shape, composition, and mass of our planet and how it shifted its orbit around the sun.
Geological science provides more information. The LLSVPs are higher density, enriched with iron oxide, different from the Earth’s mantle composition. From our knowledge of the Earth’s composition, from the Moon’s composition, and the composition of the LLSVPs, postulations about Theia emerge. Amazingly the hypothesis suggests that the LLSVPs may represent fragments of Theia’s mantle which smashed through to Earth’s core-mantle boundary.
However, the fact that Theia was completely obliterated in this collision means there are still many unanswered questions about the impactor itself. Who was Theia and what did she look like?
Thanks for this inspiring post.
Two associations pop up to my mind when reading it:
The first was a dialogue between Bernhard Philberth, a German priest and physicist (he invented the highly efficient Philberth transformer (https://www.chemie.de/lexikon/Philberth-Transformator.html) and together with his brother Karl proposed a cosmological theory fully compatible with energy conservation from the first moment), and an Australian aborigine. Philberth wanted to test a hypothesis about their thinking and philosophy. He thought: For westerners, the natural laws are kind of fundamental. These are “mental/spiritual (in German, both are the same word) structures of the material word with non-personal character”. So he asked the aborigine: “Do you have material structure describing the spiritual world with personal character?”. And the aborigine answered: “You are the first white man who understands that we do not believe in many gods”.
So it is no wonder that “many gods” may well be images of the human soul, a kind of psychoanalysis.
The second source you might be interested in is Immanuel Velikovsky. He wrote the book “Worlds in collision” in 1950, where he claims that these kinds of impacts have happened until fairly recently: https://ia801203.us.archive.org/1/items/B-001-014-474/B-001-014-474.pdf .
Many unpublished works of him are in https://www.varchive.org/
The moon is covered in https://www.varchive.org/itb/index.htm, very much in line with what you wrote.
Thank you Joachim. I’ll read the links you suggest and write something more. I’m pleased you enjoyed the post.
There is a lot of material in those links you suggest Joachim, but I have scanned some of it. I remember in my early school days in the 50s and 60s with the pull-down Mercator project map that all school rooms had in those days, and prompted by the teach seeing clearly that the continents and the bits of flotsam in the oceans all fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, or shards of a shattered orb. I wondered why Greenland was bigger than Australia. It is no wonder that for a half century it had been believed that somehow the continents must have floated around, but only with the understanding and proof of the subduction zones and their opposites where continents spread apart, that the actual process was explained and accepted. As bizarre as that all seemed, continents sliding under another one! So for me scanning through “Worlds in Collision” was interesting to get into the minds of experts and scientists and thinkers right before the cusp of that breakthrough discovery. To see where they had guessed right, how close they were, and where they got it wrong still. Same with Velikovsky’s hypothesis of a mass being ejected from Jupiter to become Venus. I feel gratified that much of his terminology, like the cosmology myths, coincide with my little blog.
And the treatise on the ice ages would intrigue John.
Inventing supernatural forces, we call gods, to create and run our world was a logical response to the complete ignorance of the times, but we know more now.
Today we know we are only a microscopic part of a 13.8 billion yo universe with two trillion galaxies, each made up of billions of stars, including our sun that formed 4.6 billion years ago along with its planets. The first life emerged on planet Earth some four billion years ago and after four billion years of evolution today’s life, including us, resulted.
It was all quite natural, no gods or other supernatural forces were involved, but the stories various priests had created over the years to explain it all are so appealing they are still widely believed. This doesn’t make them true and as any look at European history will tell, there are now far more dead gods than live ones.
That’s it in a nutshell Doug, you’ve nailed it.
Next; what It is outside of the Universe, where does that It stop and, more to the point, what is beyond that, and that, and that, and where does all that stop, and what is beyond all that! Been wanting to know since I was a little boy looking at the stars.
It’s turtles all the way down, Jacob.
Interesting that you make that comment John. I am trying to remember where I came across that same comment just this year for the first time, in one of my popular science books I think, but cannot recall which one (and they are not here for me to check at the moment). It was the one on free will, it came to me as I was writing this reply. Sapolsky’s “Determined”.
I have a pet idea. I think of the vacuum of space, the aether, the stuff we think of as no stuff, as not empty but actually made of quanta. Subatomic bits of space. Sounds funny I know. But there is some serious quantum scientific consideration given to the idea that there is a smallest possible length. That there is a quantum of length, in the same way that there is a smallest energy particle: like the photon. These quanta are so small that at a macroscopic level they seem to be continuous in our experience. It is a bit like the quantum of a moving film, composed of discrete (smallest possible) images which when played contiguously seem to be a moving picture. Even though the utter vacuum of deep space seems empty; it is actually made of something, these minute quanta of space bits. Whatever they may be. Remember this is just a thought experiment of mine. Now I see the emergence of the big bang into not a vacuum of space, but bursting into non-existence, creating the universe. Therefore outside the boundary of what is the expanding universe, which is mostly a vacuum, devoid of anything (except my preposed “space quanta”) is non-existence, impossible for our minds to imagine, because once we imagine it, it kind of exists. So in answer to your question Jacob, I think outside the Universe is non-existence. Into which the big bang, our big bang if there are more than one, banged.
Your last two posts (and their comments) have been bloody great, Allan!
I’m glad you like them John. It is fun building a narrative each time. For me it starts with a simple topic idea, usually something in the news, or some thought I’ve been having, but then fleshed out in an attempt to make it appeal across wide interest levels.