--- In PotaDG@yahoogroups.com
, "John O." <jspy@w...> wrote:
>
> >> black hole moon
> In PLANET, didn't Dodge also mention cloud cover at night? So how
> would they know if there's a moon or not? Also, a black hole right
> next to Earth? Are you saying that the moon turning into a black
> hole wouldn't affect Earth anymore than it did when it was just a
> moon? What about the intense gravitational pull? I'm also not so
> sure the moon COULD turn into a black hole, that's usually reserved
> for stars.
>
> John O.
*** Dodge says, "It doesn't add up: thunder and lightning, yet
there's no rain. Cloud cover at night... that strange luminosity...
yet there's no moon!"
Why did Serling & Wilson mention "cloud cover at night"? Well, Landon
says, just after this, "If we could only get a fix--!" He ain't
talkin' about heroin, buddy! He's talking about ascertaining their
location in space by SIGHTING STARS and calculating their position
relative to Earth. For example, since they're supposedly on a planet
orbiting a star in the constellation of Orion, they are that much
closer to ALL the big bright stars in that constellation -- stars
like Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, Mintaka, etc. From where they
think they're at -- or where Taylor thinks he knows they're at -- the
red giant Betelgeuse should be all-the-more bright. It's one of the
most luminous stars in OUR sky, and it's about 450 lightyears away
(according to the Hipparcos satellite's estimate of its trigonometric
parallax -- back when Boulle wrote "LA PLANETE DES SINGES" it was
thought to be about 300 lightyears away). If they are 320 lightyears
away from Earth, in the "neighborhood" of Betelgeuse, then it should
be BY FAR the brightest star in the night sky. The sky, as seen from
the vantage point of the "alien" planet they'd landed on, would be so
different from what we see from Earth, that there'd be no question
whatsoever that they were LIGHTYEARS away from the Sol system.
Serling & Wilson needed there to be cloud cover at night so that the
astronauts would remain oblivious to the fact that they somehow wound
up back on Earth. If they were to look up in the night sky and see
the Big Dipper, well, that would give it all away! From the vantage
point of a planet 320 lightyears away in Orion, the stars of the Big
Dipper would look so different that Taylor would KNOW they were
either back on Earth or pretty damned near it, for the Big Dipper to
look the way it does.
But, if they WERE on an alien world 320 lightyears away, those same
Big Dipper stars would be in different positions, and if Landon knows
their distances from Earth he could then calculate how far from Earth
they have to be in order for those stars to make the NEW pattern he
sees, rather than the one we Earth-bound observers are familiar with.
"If we could just get a fix--"
A fix on their position, by sighting familiar stars. Taylor, who has
seen the EARTH-TIME clock, doesn't think they NEED anything else to
prove "where" and "when" they are. He says as much: "What'll THAT
tell you? I've told you where you are and when you are."
"All right, all right!"
"You're three hundred lightyears from your 'precious' planet! Your
loved ones have been dead and forgotten for twenty centuries. TWENTY
CENTURIES! Even if you COULD get back, they'd think you were
something that fell out of a tree."
Their ship had been "in the hands of the computers", and Taylor must
have been told to expect their arrival at their destination in the
Earth-Time year 3978... so that when he SAW that date on the clock,
he ASSUMES they arrived where they had been programmed to go. He
didn't need to "read the tapes" -- the year on the clock told him all
he needed to know, or so he thought.
As for how they'd know if there's a moon or not, well, the Moon (our
Moon) isn't up in the sky ONLY at night. The book of GENESIS may
imply that the Sun was created on the 4th Day in order to "rule the
day" and the Moon to "rule the night"... but the Moon is up in the
sky at ALL times of the day-and-night. During a solar eclipse, it
occupies the same part of our sky that the Sun does. It doesn't only
come out at night.
And it doesn't matter if THEY know if there's a moon or not --
although Dodge seems to think that the "strange luminosity" they see
in the night sky SHOULD have something to do with a moon, which isn't
there. We know that the MASS of the Moon exists still, since it still
exerts a tidal pull on the Earth's bodies of water, as Cornelius
implies.
Sure, a planet will experience Sun-caused tides, in the absence of a
Moon; but a "high-tide" happens when BOTH the Sun AND the Moon
together exert their combined gravitational pull. It is when the Moon
is at its 1st Quarter and 3rd Quarter positions (at right angles with
the Sun) that the lesser "neap tides" occur. Cornelius implies that
there is more than one kind of tide that happens, when he
mentions "HIGH" tide. If there were ONLY Sun-caused tides, he'd have
referred to a mere "tide". It's the combined pull of both Sun and
Moon on Earth's oceans that causes THOSE tides to be "high" tides
(incidentally, it happens when the Moon is in alignment with the Sun
in a Sun-Moon-Earth syzygy or a Sun-Earth-Moon syzygy; it's only when
the Earth is at the vertex of a right triangle, with the Sun off in
one direction and the Moon 90 degrees away that the "neap tide"
effect occurs, the respective pulls of the solar and lunar gravity
fields effectively cancelling each other out to a certain degree).
----------------------------------------------------
You also asked, "Are you saying that the moon turning into a black
hole wouldn't affect Earth any more than it did when it was just a
moon? What about the intense gravitational pull?"
First off, the "intense gravitational pull". The Moon -- if its MASS
were to be scrunched into a small enough volume so as to become a
singularity -- would still have ONLY the mass it had when it was a
mere moon. And that SAME mass would exert the SAME gravitational pull
on the Earth that it exerts now. It would orbit Earth at the same
rate as it ever did, going around it once every 29.53 days or so (on
average). It would NOT become a huge vacuum cleaner in the sky
sucking up everything around it -- THAT is a common misconception
about Black Holes. The "gravity well" currently around the Moon would
be unaltered, except in the vicinity of the singularity.
If the Sun were to be converted into a Black Hole, the planets would
still orbit it the way they always have -- but they would receive no
sunlight from it, of course, and THAT effect WOULD affect them.
Similarly, if the Moon were to be converted into a Black Hole,
its "orbital dance" with the Earth around the Sun wouldn't change in
the slightest (assuming ALL its mass were converted into the denser
forms of Electronium... to Neutronium... and, ultimately, to a
Singularity). But that mass would be so small as to have an Event
Horizon about it that is microscopic -- assuming that it were to spin
at the same rate the Moon spins on its axis (a rate we know to be
equal to its orbital period, 29.53 days, so that it keeps its "near
side" always facing us).
But the Moon would NOT remain spinning at a mere 391.94291 nanohertz
(i.e. 0.00000039194281 times a second, or once every 2,551,392
seconds, or once every 29.53 days, or once every lunation, in other
words). The mass of the Moon would -- due to the Conservation of
Angular Momentum -- INCREASE its spin-rate, just as a ballerina can
make herself spin faster and faster, like a pinwheel, when she draws
her limbs closer to her "spin axis". The Moon's mass -- cooped up in
a ring-shaped Singularity -- would spin, oh, millions -- possibly
billions -- of times a second. It would bend spacetime around itself,
most predominantly at the equatorial bulge of its Event Horizon,
which (of course) moves faster relative to a point near the Event
Horizon's north and south poles -- this effect is called "frame-
dragging".
And, when the "Lunar" Black Hole reaches its "New Moon" position
(i.e. between the Sun and Earth, as during a solar eclipse), it would
NOT eclipse the Sun -- it wouldn't be able to, being so small. But it
WOULD do something else: it would serve as a Gravitational Lens. The
rays of sunlight, streaming towards that Black Hole, would be
slingshot in a spray of ions -- the same way that a comet's tail jets
out away from the comet's nucleus, in a direction AWAY from the Sun.
There's a scene in "THE CORE" (a fun, goofy movie) where a scientist
describes the effects of sunlight on an Earth without an ozone layer:
he flicks a lighter on and sprays an aerosol can at the flame,
causing a jet of fire to blast further in the direction of the spray.
A similar thing would happen with the Moon becoming a Black Hole.
Particles in the solar wind would be gravitationally accelerated --
sling-shotted -- in a spray directed away from the Sun... and when
the Earth gets in the way of this stream of particles it would get
dosed with radiation. It would light up the Aurora Borealis like a
discotheque, when those particles interacted with the Earth's own
magnetic field. And those particles accelerated high enough to pierce
the buffer of that field would plow into Earth's atmosphere as a
steady stream of shooting stars.
The "thunder and lightning... yet there's no rain" line of Dodge's.
He's describing what would happen if a jet of solar wind were to be
gravitationally lensed by an intervening zone of warped space, like a
magnifying glass frying ants at the focal point. In my scenario,
Taylor's shuttle splashes down in Dead Lake on 1 July 3955, and the
next day -- 2 July 3955, which will be a "New Moon", when the "Moon"
is in alignment BETWEEN the Sun and the Earth -- the astronauts see
the daytime sky light up with "thunder" and "lightning", but no rain.
They see the effects of high-energy ions cascading through Earth's
atmosphere. The velocities of those ions are high enough to cause
sonic booms, which is all that thunder is, really.
So, then, the Moon's gravitational pull on the Earth would be no more
(or less) than it is now, if it were to be converted into a Black
Hole. But the ability of the Moon to eclipse the Sun WOULD be
changed. The Moon's 687.55-mile width just barely covers the disc of
the Sun, as seen from somebody on Earth's surface; but if the mass of
the Moon were to be forced into a state of ultra-high density,
occupying a volume so small that it is a mere "point" in spacetime (a
point distorted into a ring-shape due to the axial spin), then it
would have no disc with which to eclipse the Sun. Furthermore, it
would act as a gravitational lens to the sunlight that DOES hit it;
rather than BLOCKING sunlight, it would FOCUS that sunlight on
whatever is in the path of that jet of ions.
And, during a solar eclipse, the EARTH just so happens to find itself
in that very path. So, it gets dosed with that jet of radiation. And
THAT would probably have an effect on the global climate... on the
rate of mutation in all lifeforms... on the cancer rates... etc etc.
The Apes would tend to live INSIDE their cave-like dwellings, to
avoid the excessive radiation, with the canopy of treetops to help
block the sunlight. And the Mutants would tend to live BENEATH the
surface -- after all, they're dealing with an excess of radiation as
it is, living in the radioactive ruins of a nuked city. They don't
need EVEN MORE radiation to screw 'em up further!
The "intense gravitational pull" of the Lunar Black Hole -- of ANY
Black Hole, really -- becomes a concern ONLY when you are in close
proximity of it. If you were to build a hollow shell around a lunar-
mass Black Hole with the same diameter of the real Moon (687.55
miles, giving a circumference of 2160 miles), and if you could
somehow keep that Black Hole at the geodetic center of the sphere,
you could walk on that hollow sphere's surface and feel the SAME
gravity pulling at you that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin felt, one-
sixth that of Earth. The direction "down" that they experienced was
towards the center of the Moon (actually, a point offset slightly
from the sphere's center, towards the Earth -- because the Earth's
pull on the Moon has bunched up the lunar mass around a point closer
to the Earth, due to the fact that the Earth keeps the Near Side of
the Moon always facing it); similarly, somebody walking on a hollow
sphere with a Moon-mass singularity at the equivalent central point
would feel "down" in that direction.
The Black Hole's gravitational pull only becomes "intense" when you
get into close proximity with the singularity. As you approach the
Event Horizon, the escape velocity approaches the speed of light --
in other words, the force of 1/6th of a gee (1.63 meters per second
per second of gravitational acceleration) increases towards a
velocity of 299,792,458 meters per second and BEYOND. For, inside the
Event Horizon, the escape velocity is HIGHER than lightspeed. Nothing
can escape a Black Hole's Event Horizon... unless, ahem, it can
somehow travel FASTER THAN LIGHT.
Which is what Virdon's ship manages to do after Jones hits the
Emergency Homing Device button and Virdon boosts the power to his
ship's warp engine. But that's another story...
-------------------------------------------------------------
Finally, you state: "I'm not so sure the moon COULD turn into a black
hole, that's usually reserved for stars."
And you're right. The black holes once believed -- and now known --
to be in existence, are created when a star of more than 1.4 solar
masses reaches the end of its hydrogen-fusing stage, and commences
its gravitational collapse. The brilliant East Indian physicist
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar proved this many many decades ago. Nature
creates Black Holes through this process of stellar collapse -- when
the remaining mass of a star that has used up its hydrogen can do
nothing more to offset the inward pull of its own gravity and
accelerates inward with so much force that the mass at the center of
the collapsing body exerts a gravitational pull so high that matter
cannot exist as "ordinary" matter (i.e. atomic), nor as "degenerate"
matter (i.e. as either Electronium or the even denser Neutronium),
but must overcome all the known forces of the universe to shrink to a
point in spacetime -- a Singularity. A spinning "ringularity", if it
had any rotation at all to begin with.
But... what if there were a way to FORCE a sub-stellar mass into a
gravitational collapse? Theoretically, how might this be accomplished?
The way I "interpret" the Alpha Omega "Doomsday" Bomb from "BENEATH"
and "BATTLE" is this: whereas an 'ordinary' atomic bomb uses a
geodesic array of explosives -- shaped charges designed to send
shockwaves inward towards a central point where the fissionable
material is -- like the hexagons and pentagons on a soccer ball, to
simultaneously detonate and trigger the chain reaction that sets off
a nuclear blast, the Doomsday Bomb goes it one better.
The Doomsday Bomb has an array of NUCLEAR bombs at those geodetic
loci surrounding a "core" in the center, rather than mere
conventional explosives. The shockwaves generated by a cluster of
nested nuclear explosions all set off simultaneously causes the core
to fuse into itself... the core's mass is forced inwards into a
smaller and smaller volume. A volume so small that the atoms of the
core fuse into one huge high-mass atom, so to speak. But the
electrons of those inward-blasted atoms fuse with the protons, to
form more neutrons... and the newly-created neutrons fuse with the
already-present neutrons... and the density grows so great that this
relatively small-mass Doomsday Bomb core becomes a mini-black hole.
Now, a mini-black hole will eventually evaporate due to Hawking
Radiation. The less mass a Black Hole has, the faster the evaporation
rate. But before it evaporates in an explosion of high-energy
photons, that mini-black hole would commence to falling towards the
center of gravity, down the gravity well in which it happens to be.
When Taylor triggers the Doomsday Bomb, the cluster of nukes all go
BOOM at the same time, creating the mini-black hole in their center.
That crushed Core then falls "down" -- towards the center of the
Earth. And when the Event Horizon of that mini-black hole comes into
contact with ANY matter, it gobbles it up inside its Event Horizon,
adding to its own mass and increasing the size of its Event Horizon --
effectively enlarging it's matter-eating "mouth" so as to gobble up
bigger and bigger portions of food.
This mini-black hole would fall towards the center of the Earth at
the same rate as any material body would fall -- at 32 feet per
second per second, one gee. It would ACCELERATE as it fell down
towards the center of the planet... and after it got there, it would
rebound "upwards" again. It would "orbit" the center of the planet
like a comet with a highly eccentric and decaying orbit, gobbling up
matter everywhere it wormed its way. The Earth's mass would be lost
to the mini-black hole's mass -- accelerated towards the infinitely
dense singularity. As the mini-black hole continued to convert
Earth's mass into hyperdensity, the layers of matter above it (i.e.
the mantle, the crust, the atmosphere, etc) would fall inwards,
having been "undermined" literally by the burrowing Bomb-Core.
Eventually, the entire mass of the planet would be gobbled up by the
black hole and BECOME the black hole -- no longer a "mini-black hole"
but a "planetary mass black hole". Not through the ordinary workings
of nature, but by the forcible conversion effected by a technological
terror. Just as Tesla could theoretically cause earthquakes through
non-"natural" means, so too is the Doomsday Bomb designed to create a
black hole through the artificial means described above.
In my scenario, the "radioactive turbulence" Virdon's ship runs into
out at Alpha Centauri is the accretion disc of a planet-mass black
hole that had once been a planet... before it had been destroyed by
a "Doomsday Bomb" of its own. And the Earth's Moon is ultimately
converted into an Earth-orbiting Black Hole due to the intervention
of somebody who has access to the technology to build a bomb with the
same potential as the one worshipped by Mendez and his followers.
When Zira describes a "bright white blinding light" -- she's
describing the detonation of the Doomsday Bomb, a cluster of nukes
packed around a central Bomb-Core.
When she says she "saw the rim of the Earth melt" -- she's describing
the effect on the outer layers of the planet as the matter they're
made of falls inwards towards/into/through the Event Horizon of the
Bomb-Core's burrowing Black Hole: as matter falls into the Event
Horizon, an immense burst of x-rays results (hence, the first known
Black Hole, in the constellation Cygnus, is called "Cygnus X-1",
or "the 1st X-ray source"). That high-radiation effect serves to
superheat the outer layers of the planet to a slag -- an inwardly
falling slush of hot magma.
When she finally describes "a tornado in the sky" -- she's describing
the final form of the destroyed Earth: a hyper-rotating Black Hole,
surrounded by an accretion disc whirling as a vortex. It, literally,
IS a tornado. A cyclonic whirlwind of ions and dust. The ship in
which the Ape-onauts are in a decaying orbit around this monster is
equipped with a spacetime-warping Hasslein Drive engine, however,
which creates a warpfield around them to buffer them from the frame-
dragging effects of the high-gravity vicinity of the singularity.
They fall through the Event Horizon -- or FLY through it, at a "warp-
overdrive" velocity -- and pierce the ring-singularity. The "warp
signature" of their buffering warpfield takes on the characteristics
of an "antiphoton", rather than a "photon", and they get sent on a
trip through Time. BACKWARDS through time. Trapped in the gravity
well of the Earth, which is why they >POP< back into existence in the
vicinity of the Earth in their Past, rather than hundreds or
thousands of lightyears away.
I'll leave it at that! If this post is horridly long, for some of you
longsuffering readers of my stuff, perhaps you should print off a
hardcopy and read it at your leisure and not burn out your retinas
staring at the Yahoo Groups screen!
Hasta la vista, bonobos...
Patrick
