Who Built the Moon? by Christopher Knight, Alan Butler
My rating: 3/5 cats
it’s the moon, y’all!!!!
…or is it??
my dismissal of the moon-as-entity started some years ago, when they were running all those “the moon landing was a hoax and we were just trying to beat the russians, so we lied” specials on the teevee. and sean of the house would watch them, and i would breeze through the room and laugh at how earnest these people were; with their “the flaaaag! look at how it is mooooving!” and these programs really pissed off SOTH. for someone who genuinely believes in aliens and nessie and gypsy curses*, he also believes in the idea of america, and was personally offended that people would doubt our great achievement. so i started to equate these things in my head, hokum-wise, and the moon landing became as implausible as the jersey devil, simply on the grounds that he believed in both of them. and it is so delightful to be able to lean over any time, apropos of nothing, and whisper, “sound stage,”
because he invariably makes this outraged face and get really emotionally invested in whether some dudes in the sixties went to the moon and he will start berating me and he will be 100% sincere, as if it matters one bit in our day-to-day lives.
and then, once i realized just how many people believed that the moon landing was a hoax, it seemed a natural progression to widen my playful stance to something even more outrageous, and start my own conspiracy theory party and claim that the moon does not exist at all. and this pisses off conspiracy theorists, which is fun, because obviously i don’t believe the moon does not exist for real, but people get so committed to arguing, it is fun to watch their little faces get all red as they try to “prove” the moon to me. as if i care.
i’m an empiricist. i have never been to brazil. it is really as full of beautiful, sexually permissive people as pop culture would have me believe? i will never know, because i will never go there. hell, i don’t even know if brazil exists. SOUND STAGE!!!
but so anyway, my point is that this book was a great gift from our beloved bird brian, because now i know the Truth about the Moon.
want me to spoil it for you??
because, seriously, you have to get through over 150 pages of the 225-page book to get to the point.
there is a lot of this:
We can only assume that a polar circumference was used and taking the 40,008 km figure it translates to 48,221,838 Megalithic Yards using Thom’s central value for the unit. It was then subdivided as follows:
Polar circumference = 48,221,838 MY
1 Degree (1/366th) = 131,754 MY
1 Minute (1/60th) = 2,196 MY
1 Second (1/6th) = 366 MY
So, this brilliant system of geometry starts with 366 degrees and finishes with seconds of arc that are 366 Megalithic Yards long. Self-evidently, an amazing set of ‘wheels within wheels’!
i mean, i guess that is exciting enough to warrant an exclamation point? i don’t know. the last time i did math, i was counting on my fingers. (although i got this really cute teeny tiny calculator for christmas, and i am taking its picture in front of the window to commemorate the one time it snowed in new york this season)
but math just isn’t something i get excited about. and magical math, like numerology, forget it. math is not fun. reading is fun. apeiron is fun. eating cookies is fun. making numbers do what you want them to do makes me feel lonely and sad. the authors insist that it is not numerology, but i can’t tell the difference here. i don’t know shit from poundcake about math or astrophysics.
not a surprise to any of you, i’m sure.
so but the beginning of this book is a lot of blah blah to me. i was not skimming, but a lot of their facts i just had to trust that they researched, because i’m not super-strong on equatorial circumferences and how pendulums work during eclipses and shit. it is all about astronomy and genetics and geology and anthropology and all sorts of hard and social sciences building up to make some Big Point.
which is basically that “the moon should not exist. it is too perfectly useful to our planet, and its formation goes against all reason.”
I KNOW, RIGHT?? IT DOES NOT EXIST, I WIN!
but, no. they are saying something else.
they are saying it DOES exist (booo) but it was clearly constructed by some entity, and not a naturally-occurring body.
so then there are three explanations given, based on their hypotheses:
1) The Moon was engineered by an unknown agency circa 4.6 billion years ago to act as an incubator to promote intelligent life on Earth.
2) The unknown agency knew that humanoids would be the result of the evolutionary chain.
3) That unknown agency wanted the resulting humanoids to know what had been done and they left a message indicated by the dynamics of the Moon and its relationship with the Earth.
so their three possible solutions are:
1) god made it.
but then they disprove god, so that one is wrong.
(okay, they don’t really, but they say why no god could/would have made it)
2) aliens made it.
but then they explain why this could not be so, but do not disprove the existence of aliens.
3) weeee did it! but not we-we (hahahaha “wee-wee”), but some “we” from the future.
which is their conclusion. time traveling humans made the moon, because without the moon, we would not exist. chicken. egg.
here is a page of their explanation, to convince you:
Firstly, it has to be acknowledged that there are no other possible candidates that we know of anywhere in the Universe. God exists by faith and not as a result of evidence, and aliens may or may not exist. It is entirely possible that we are totally alone, either in our part of space or in the whole of the Universe. In any case, who would have more to gain from a life-producing planet than the very intelligent creature that has most benefited from its existence, namely humanity?
The question of how the UCA could have known that the intelligent species on Earth would evolve with ten fingers and therefore adopt base-ten arithmetic, at a time when the Moon was exactly where it is today, is answered instantly if humanity is the agency we are seeking. The mystery simply dissolves if we are the unknown creative agency.
Another difficult issue to explain has been how the UCA could possibly have used Megalithic and metric units as part of the message. Once again, this scenario resolves the problem. Indeed, it adds to the message because it makes it very clear that the UCA ‘has to be’ humans from our future, travelling back in time to manufacture the Moon.
The motive for the message becomes obvious and absolutely necessary. If humans do not become alerted to the need to manufacture the Moon as an incubator for life – we would not be here.
However, there is the problem we can’t avoid. Humanity might be described as having been reasonably technologically advanced for around 100 years. The Moon came into being some 4,600,000,000,000 years ago. We have to admit that this does represent a bit of a gap.
The answer can only be time travel.
and there you have it.
that is where our moon comes from.
i think the message part of it is a little suspect, myself. their whole thing is that the message is mathematical perfection of the moon vis-a-vis the earth.
Once complete, our Moon worked its magic and life began, evolving eventually into an intelligent, ten-fingered species that uses Megalithic and metric units. The message had to be built into the very nature of the structure or else we would miss the cue to understand what we need to do.
see, that’s exactly the kind of message i have missed. it seems like it would have made more sense to have just sent an email or something. don’t expect me to sit around idly calculating the moon’s distance from the earth and the circumference and tilt and revolutions in my free time, because that is not going to happen, future humans… don’t you know project runway season 11 just started?
AND DO NOT TELL ME WHO WINS, SPOILER-FUTURE-HUMANS!
but it’s good that someone understood this message, and thank you for building the moon because i think the tides are awesome.
however, the authors, one of whom may or may not be
made one fatal error. although there is that whole chapter saying “noooo, it couldn’t be aliens, nope!,” at one point he says,
Humans are incredibly robust creatures considering we are little more than animated bags of water hanging on a mineral frame.
THAT SOUNDS LIKE ALIEN TALK TO ME, BUDDY!
don’t say “we,” because i am on to you now.
so mayyybe it was time-traveling humans, and mayyyybe it was aliens disguising themselves as human authors. perhaps brazilians. i don’t know. all i know is I READ THIS BOOK!
* if you think i am joking, you are wrong – he totally believes in gypsy curses**, and that is another fun thing to mutter because apparently just saying the phrase “gypsy curse” is enough to cause one to fall upon your head.
**which i think is supposed to be called “roma disagreements” these days, but oops.
