Monday, August 12, 2013

Oh THAT'S what Richard C, Hoagland is constantly hinting at!

I just read the latest of Richard C, Hoagland's 'papers' on the enterprisemission.com and learned something new. No, I didn't learn anything REAL, just something I had not quite understood before about Richard C, Hoagland's claims:

For over twenty years, The Enterprise Mission has pursued an extraordinary scientific and political hypothesis ....

That the Earth orbits the Sun, not as "the only lush oasis amid a host of lifeless other worlds ..." but as, potentially, the lone planetary survivor of a long-forgotten ancient solar system epoch, shaped by "an extraordinarily advanced, Type II ET Civilization[his link] -- which, after literally remaking this entire planetary system ... collapsed in a catastrophic, ancient War--
Leaving only scattered, arcane clues behind to its existence -- including, some evidence suggests, the human race itself ....

Wow! That is so so so NOT a scientific hypothesis!!! To be a scientific hypothesis, there must be a phenomenon that needs explanation. In the early phase of the scientific method, one must determine which explanation is most reasonable. Occam's razor, anyone? Let us suppose that what we are trying to explain is the Face on Mars, which seems most likely a natural geologic feature of our solar system's fourth planet... ;)

Photo: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems (2001)


Despite Mr. Hoagland's claims to the contrary, the 'Face' on Mars and other formations do NOT present clear and compelling evidence of intelligent construction which would bring one to question 'who' built it. Mr. Hoagland can point to the mathematical relationships between features on the fourth planet, but what he has presented is really meaningless and cannot be construed as evidence of anything. (Wow, I didn't even read that part of Hoagland's paper before I mentioned this... I guess we can see where he's going)

Now Mr. Hoagland thinks he has found more extraterrestrial arcology on Mars.  Richard C, Hoagland has posited that the following feature is, in fact, a construction on Mars.

Photo: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (MRO HiRISE, 2007)

When one examines this photo, it is easy to see an approximately regular form, but if you look at surrounding geologic forms, they also appear to have fairly sharp corners. That might be a clue that this, too, could be a natural landform.

What we really see in Richard C, Hoagland's fanciful ideas is not a scientific hypothesis because he has yet to find a feature which we can feel very confident is not a natural landform. The fact of a hypothesis should be arising from some unexplained phenomena, but there is nothing to explain, except if the question is "what forces have acted upon this object to make it as we see it today", in which case the question is one for astrogeologists. The question is, emphatically, NOT whether our planet is the lone survivor of a long-forgotten ancient, extraordinarily advanced space-faring society, the remnants of an interplanetary war. :D

At least that's how I see it!

3 comments:

  1. Hoaglands been hinting at this for a while, as you mentioned, but I thought that he'd ripped his scenario off from late 50's/early 60's science fiction writer H. Beam Piper which had the Martians travelling to Earth because they had exhausted the planets resources.

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  2. Haven't read that. Mr Hoagland's theses DO sound like bad science fiction, though. No offense to RCH!

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    1. The key book for the Piper scenario is a short story collection entitled "Paratime", which you might be able to get through Amazon or a good second hand bookshop.

      The short story "Omnilingual" is not set in the same 'universe' as the Paratime stories, but it does feature a 1950s 'exhausted Mars' setting that I thought might be the basis for Hoaglands fantasies. It, along with a number of Pipers other books can be found on Project Gutenberg (Direct link below).

      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445

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