Friday, March 11, 2005





Richard Hoagland's Iapetus saga continues . . .
Posted by at

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

One definitely can't fault RH for lack of imagination. He tells a beautiful, brilliant story, true or no. I particularly like the idea of Titan as a terraforming experiment. (Actually, if they migrated from Mars, they would have been martiforming it.) Saturn begins to look more and more totally WEIRD! And how's this for an addendum: the Martians who migrated to the Saturnian system also pushed one of Saturn's moons into an orbit so close that tidal forces tore it apart, forming the rings. Motive? Building materials for Iapetus. (The asteroid belt would not yet have existed, since, according to the RH scenario, Planet V had not yet exploded.) I love this stuff! Pure speculation unbound (or not very bound) by strictly empirical considerations.
--WMB

12:05 AM
Unknown said...

I've been motivated into opening photoshop. These blow-up 'enhancements' need some looking into, so I downloaded the original image from JPL. And I'm doing this only because I don't like the levels they pushed the enlargements to.

12:40 PM
Mac said...

Let us know what -- if anything -- you find. I'm intrigued by some of the claims, but the enhancements look highly suspect.

3:54 PM
Unknown said...

After much searching, I really found the source image they used, not the one I first thought. Why they don't provide reference links to accompany their analysis (for purposes of PEER REVIEW), I'll never know.

I'm actually impressed. Their top image got washed out, whatever they did to it, but the enlargement and rotation is an honest representation. I can't say as much for the one below it, but I'm surprised they missed this, which can be found in the bottom edge of the large, dark crater in the upper right on the PIA06167 image linked above.

11:54 PM
JohnFen said...

Oooh, good find, Sauceruney!

You know, this installment annoyed me more for the mathematical relationships regarding the ordit, size, etc. than for anything else this time. He is quick to attribute such relationships to design, but my experience with mathematically similar dynamically stable periodic systems is that it is not at all unusual for the components to have such relationships as those are more likely to be stable configurations.

2:25 AM
Mac said...

Looks like a surprised gibbon.

3:37 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)