Once again, astronomers have different views. Nevertheless, they all point to one curious thing—a pattern involving the month of June.
We have seen that the Taurid shower produces visible meteors when Earth passes through it from 3 November to 15 November each year, but produces a much larger and more virulent storm of debris, invisible to the naked eye, between 24 June and 6 July—with a peak on 30 June. Because of the relative positions of Earth and the Sun, this is a period in which large projectiles could theoretically creep up on Earth with the Sun behind them and fall upon us before anybody had really noticed.
On 25 June 1178, it was exactly such a projectile, an Apollo asteroid or a comet fragment 2 kilometers in diameter, that hit the Moon, creating the gigantic Giordano Bruno crater (see chapter 18). It was extremely fortunate, and indeed a miracle, that it did not hit Earth—as Earth is in the same area of space as the Moon and makes a much bigger target.
In chapter 18 we also presented two other essential clues:
On 30 June 1908, a much smaller fragment of the disintegrating comet exploded in the air above Tunguska, flattening 2,000 square kilometers of forest and causing huge earth tremors hundreds of kilometers away.
From 22 through 26 June 1975 the Moon was splattered with a sustained barrage of ton-sized boulders.
Astronomers are now generally agreed that all of these impacts were related to passages of Encke’s comet, which travels particularly closely to the June/July Taurids, and were caused either by subdividing fragments falling off it or by other objects orbiting close to it that were cast down into the Earth-Moon system.45 Since we know that Encke orbits near to the core, and thus to “the unseen companion,” it is evident these past encounters could have been far worse.
And what of future encounters?
The vision that haunts us is of that dark, dark nucleus, wrapped in its veil of dust, throwing before it a swarm of asteroids.
As Clube and Napier warned as far back as 1990 (apparently to no avail, as there has been no change in public policy):
An asteroid in a Taurid orbit, carrying 100,000 megatons of impact energy, coming out of the night sky [during the November crossing of the stream] would be visible in binoculars for about six hours before impact. By the time it was a naked-eye object it would be at most half an hour from collision. In its final plunge it would be seen as a brilliant moving object for perhaps 30 seconds. One needs more time than this to prepare for winter.46
If such an asteroid came in broad daylight during Earth’s encounter with the Taurid stream in late June—the time at which a collision is also most likely to occur with comet Encke or its dark companion—then it would not be seen at all unless there were a satellite in the sky equipped with an infrared camera.
HELL-WORLD OF OUR OWN MAKING
Humanity today faces two strange and powerful firsts:
The first time, in the history we remember, that a disaster looms with the potential not just to destroy some of mankind but to destroy all of mankind—all human promise, all human potential, forever.
The first time, again in remembered history, that our species has the science and the technology to avert such a disaster—if it has the will.
We have received unambiguous warning signals—from the fate of Mars, from our growing understanding of the effects of impact-cratering on Earth, from the pattern of known large-body Taurid impacts on the Earth-Moon system during the second millennium A.D., and from the apocalyptic crash of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.
Reason and intuition concur. There is real danger here.
Yet next to nothing is being done about the danger and Clube’s warnings, Sir Fred Hoyle’s warnings, and the warnings of all the other eminent men and women who have seen the threat. They are ignored.
We suspect that the first half of the third millennium will be a defining epoch in the story of mankind that will require not just a change of policy, or a change of strategy, or a change of budgetary priorities—though it will certainly require all those things—but above all else a change of heart.
To a great extent, the ancients said, we define our own reality through the choices we make. Yet what we have made with those choices at the end of the twentieth century is well on its way to becoming a hell-world.
What has happened to the human soul when a man, saying that he is acting in the name of God, is so in love with hatred that he can smash out a baby’s brains against a wall and cut the throat of that child’s mother? Such events had become routine in Algeria at the end of the second millennium.
What has happened to the human soul when adults—men and women—are so in love with evil that they gain sexual pleasure from the kidnap, torture, rape, and murder of children? Such horrors had become routine in Europe and the United States at the end of the second millennium.
What has happened to the human soul when a man is so in love with his own ego that he can dash concentrated sulphuric acid into the face of a teenage girl—eating away her flesh, blinding her and burning her skin forever to a crisp—simply because she has refused to marry him? At the end of the second millennium such acts of focused malice and wickedness had become routine in Bangladesh, inflicting lifelong shame, misery, and suffering on hundreds of girls every year.
We will not continue with lists of individual and mass atrocities that could extend to hundreds of volumes—as everybody knows. We simply wish to suggest that a species that is so drawn toward the darkness is unlikely to be able to meet the challenge of the galaxy. Indeed, we seem to have proved we cannot meet it during the first decades of our discovery of Mars and by our failure to take any interest in the protection of our own precious and irreplaceable planet, which—so far as we know—may be the last remaining home for life in the universe.
THE ARROW AND THE CHOICE
To deal with the impact threat effectively would require a grand international project, with limitless resources and limitless good will, bringing together the best minds in the world and asking them to consider nothing else but the safety of the planet and the salvation of their fellow humans. Deflecting asteroids and fragments of dormant comet that could be up to 30 kilometers in diameter would be a high-precision task, since it is obvious that any error might make the trajectory of the incoming object more rather than less dangerous. Probably it is at the very edge, or just beyond the edge, of what our science today is capable of achieving. It sounds impossible. And yet, if you stop to think about it, something of the kind is already being done to achieve far less worthwhile objectives. The worlds armed forces, for example, are a kind of “grand international project,” with limitless resources, bringing together the best minds of all nations and asking them to consider nothing else but ways to spread mayhem and misery, to bombard and to poison, and to inflict death and destruction on their fellow humans.
So really what is involved here are the kinds of choices that societies make about what they want to do with their resources, not a problem over the resources themselves. Yet we can hardly imagine any society in the world as it is today, let alone one of the major powers, actually deciding to switch significant funds from defense and aggression against humans to the defense of the planet.
This is why we are sure that what will ultimately be required, if there is time and if the threat of cosmic impacts is to be overcome, is that human beings should reinvent themselves in the twenty-first century—reinvent themselves entirely. We even wonder whether a grand project to save the earth might not in itself act as the necessary catalyst for such a change. Indeed, in its own way, with almost no official trappings, we have seen that the project has already begun—depending on the energy and initiative of a loose network of astronomers and other scientists volunteering their time in many different countries for the good of humanity.
As an old saying, attributed to Hermes, has it:
Death is like an arrow that is already in flight, and your life lasts only until it reaches you.47
What the astronomers have shown us is an
arrow in the sky, aimed at Earth, that has been flying toward us for five million years.
Yet this arrow need never arrive. Life and light and laughter and the quest for sacred knowledge need not be rubbed out. The darkness need not be fed with more suffering and nihilism. Magic and mystery can be renewed. And the wasteland can be healed.
We are defined by our choices.
And this choice is ours.
Appendix
The “line of dichotomy” is a dramatic cutoff point that separates the heavily cratered southern highlands from the more sparsely cratered northern lowlands. Ninety-three percent of craters larger than 30 kilometers in diameter are found south of this line, including the massive Argyre, Hellas, and Isidis basins—ancient scars from collisions with asteroids and clues to the death of a world.
The D&M Pyramid is seemingly aligned to other anomalous features of the Cydonia Mensa—the City Center, the “tear” on the Face, and the apex of the Tholus.
The vesica piscis, formed by the overlapping of 2 circles, is an important geometric form in the tradition of sacred geometry, yielding many mathematical constants as well as the golden section, the phi ratio, which is formed by the ratio of lengths A to B, roughly 3:5. The phi ratio was widely used in ancient terrestrial architecture, and identical geometric constants are found repeated in the measurements of the Cydonian anomalies.
Dr. Horace Crater’s analysis of the layout of “mounds” within the City area reveals an alignment that is unlikely to have occurred naturally.
The alignments of mounds EAD, GABDE, and GAB-DEP show a highly unnatural repetition of basic triangles. Is this the work of nature or intelligence?
Erol Torun’s reconstructed model of the D&M Pyramid yields unique mathematical constants, including those found in terrestrial traditions of sacred geometry, as well as the tetrahedral angle of 19.5 degrees.
Circumscribed tetrahedron: if a tetrahedron, the simplest of the platonic solids, is placed within a rotating sphere with one apex at the north or south pole, the other three apexes will lie at exactly 19.5 degrees from the equator. This tetrahedral angle of 19.5 degrees occurs with unnatural frequency in the measurements of the Cydonian anomalies. Is this evidence of a lost mathematical message?
The landing spot of the tetrahedral-shaped Mars Pathfinder, coincidentally, lies at roughly 19.5 degrees (the tetrahedral angle) north of the Martian equator.
Professor Stanley McDaniel’s analysis of the Cydonian mound configuration reveals that all the mounds can be fitted onto a grid based on the square root of 2, a framework also used in ancient terrestrial sacred architecture.
According to researchers Richard Hoagland and Erol Torun, major alignments between the Cydonian anomalies reveal an underlying coherence based on the tetrahedral angle of 19.5 degrees and the polar diameter of Mars.
The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacan contain references to the tetrahedral constant of 19.5 degrees in both the measurement of the angles of the fourth pyramid tiers and in their geographical location on Earth—which coincidentally mirrors the self-referencing of the D&M Pyramid on Mars.
According to researcher Erol Torun, the placement of the Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza are conditioned by the Fibonacci curve, based on the ancient sacred proportion of phi, the golden section.
Using calculations based on the work of Egyptologist John Legon, the placement of the smallest of the three pyramids of Giza, the Pyramid of Menkaure, in relation to its neighbors, can be seen to be based on the tetrahedral angle of 19.5 degrees—the same angle mysteriously referred to in the Pyramids of Cydonia.
Endnotes
Part One: The Murdered Planet
1. PARALLEL WORLD
1. Astronomy Now, London, 1996, p. 39.
2. Anders Hansson, Mars and the Development of Life (Chichester and New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 53.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 52.
5. Ibid., Preface, xiii.
6. The Sunday Times (London), 1 December 1996.
7. See discussion in Hansson, Mars and the Development, 137–153. See also Arthur C. Clarke, The Snows of Olympus, Victor Gollarcz, London, 1994.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 19, 128.
10. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1978).
11. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Solar System.”
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Mack Gipson Jr. and Victor K. Ablordeppy, Icarus 22 (1974), 197–204.
15. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (London: Book Club Associates, 1981), 130.
16. Viking project scientist Gerry Soffen cited in Richard C. Hoagland, The Monuments of Mars (Berkeley, Calif.), 5.
17. V. DiPietro and G. Molenaar, Unusual Martian Surface Features (privately published, 1982), 38; M. Carlotto, The Martian Enigmas: A Closer Look (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1997), 181.
18. Carlotto, Martian Enigmas, 28.
19. Ibid., 28.
20. See Stanley McDaniel, The McDaniel Report (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1993), 82–84.
21. Hoagland, Monuments of Mars, 25.
22. Ibid., 26.
23. Ibid., 27.
24. McDaniel, Report, 65–66.
25. Chris O’Kane, telephone conversation with the authors, August 1996.
26. Ibid.
27. DiPietro and Molenaar, Unusual Martian, 106–12; Carlotto, Martian Enigmas, 88–95; Hoagland, Monuments of Mars, 317–21.
28. Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, Headline, London, 1996, 56.
29. Ibid., 56.
2. IS THERE LIFE ON MARS?
1. R. S. Richardson and C. Bonestall, Mars (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), 3.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Solar System.”
3. Ibid.
4. Times (London), 11 November 1996.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Times (London), 8 June 1997.
8. Guinness Book of Astronomy, 62ff.
9. Newsweek, 23 September 1996, 57.
10. Peter Cattermole, Mars: The Story of the Red Planet (London and New York: Chapman and Hall, 1992), 37.
11. Times (London), 13 October 1996.
12. Tim Radford, London Review of Books, 3 July 1997, 16.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Times (London), 8 August 1996.
16. The Guardian (London), 1 June 1995.
17. Newsweek, 23 September 1996, 57.
18. Radford, London Review of Books, 16.
19. Hansson, Mars and the Development, 45.
20. Paul Davis, The Guardian (London), 1 June 1995.
21. Quoted in Quest for Knowledge (Chester), October 1996, 6.
22. Daily Telegraph (London), 24 May 1997.
23. The Sunday Times (London), 3 November 1996.
24. Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), 26 December 1996.
25. The Sunday Times (London), March 1997.
26. Times (London), 9 June 1997.
27. Ibid.
28. Hansson, Mars and the Development, xiii.
29. Daily Mail (London), 1 November 1996.
30. Daily Mail (London), 8 August 1996.
31. Times (London), 8 August 1996.
32. National Academy of Sciences briefing to Vice President Al Gore, 11 December 1996.
33. Daily Mail (London), 8 August 1996.
34. Times (London), 8 August 1996.
35. Times (London), 9 June 1997.
36. Daniel Goldin, quoted in Spaceflight 38 (October 1996): 328.
37. Hieronimus and Co. Newsletter 1:8–10, 2, Owings Mills, Md.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. New Scientist, 17 August 1996; Times (London), 8 August 1996.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Astronomy Now, October 1996, 39–42.
44. “Mars Dossier,” Focus (1996), 90.
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45. Spaceflight 38 (October 1996): 327; Times (London), 9 August 1996.
46. Writing in Spaceflight 38 (October 1996): 328.
47. The Sunday Times (London), March 1997.
48. Ibid.
49. Bartholemew Nagy, quoted in Hieronimus and Co. Newsletter, 1:8–10, 1.
50. Nagy, quoted in Nature, 20 July 1989.
51. “Mars as the Parent Body of the CI Carbonaceous Chondrites,” Geophysical Research Letters, 1 May 1996. Cited in Hieronimus and Co. Newsletter, 6.
52. Hieronimus and Co. Newsletter, 4.
53. Ibid., 1.
54. Ibid.
55. Daily Mail (London), 30 August 1996.
56. Spaceflight 38 (October 1996): 328.
57. Ibid.
58. Hieronimus and Co. Newsletter, 5.
3. THE MOTHER OF LIFE
1. Miller and Orgel, quoted in Hansson, Mars and Development, 38.
2. Ibid., 77–78.
3. Ibid., 37.
4. Ibid.
5. Percival Moore, quoted in Patrick Moore, New Guide to the Planets, (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1993), 99–100.
6. Lowell in 1894 was the first astronomer to discuss the wave of darkening in detail.
7. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Solar System.”
8. Cattermole, Mars, 192; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Solar System.”
9. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Solar System.”
10. Cattermole, Mars, 161.
11. Ibid., 161.
12. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Solar System.”
13. Ibid.
14. Cattermole, Mars, 23–24.
15. Ibid., 91–94.
16. Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, quoted in Clarke, Snows of Olympus, 55.
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