Way to go, Tantricism (Now with 100% more content!)

This reminds me for some reason of the Aetherius Society. I once accidentally found myself outside their European headquarters during a pub-crawl in London.

As for geographical data about Phobos, you could look here, here or here, amongst others.

Grazza said:

Sounds OK to me.

The subject-matter reminded me for some reason of the Aetherius Society. I once accidentally found myself outside their European headquarters during a pub-crawl in London.

Heh, I expected to have to read into that site a bit before I'd see the connection, but from the main page I could tell they're whacked.

Ultraviolet said:

Heh, I expected to have to read into that site a bit before I'd see the connection, but from the main page I could tell they're whacked.

It gets better the more you read. From Proof of UFO Contact:

At 8:30 am (pacific time) on April 25th, 1986, almost five hours before the accident at Chernobyl, Dr. George King, a Western Master of Yoga and extra-terrestrial contactee for over 30 years was informed by a space Intelligence known as Mars Sector 6 that an emergency situation was about to occur.

Oh, I'm reading everything already, but thank you.

Grazza said:

It gets better the more you read. From Proof of UFO Contact:

Bwahaha! This planet is full of idiots.

BS

Sorry, but this just sounds like a dumb cult, even though I didn't see the link.

Man, that's stupid. If there was a 10th planet with such an irratic movement that it brings it close to Earth once every several thousand years, it for one wouldnt be able to support life due to it's constantly decreasing and increasing temperatures, but it would also crate a unique pull on pluto. I mean, we have found evidence of a gravitational pull on Pluto from something, weather it is a 10th planet or one of those objects (forget what they're called) that orbit around the outer edge of the solar system, but something with such an orbit would be a bit more obvious.

Also consider if we were half-alien, then we'd be radicaly different from all other primates. But study our genetic makup, and we're almost identical to chimpanzees, and pretty close to the other great apes.

Third, if they really did explode atomics on top of Sodom, someone would have found traces of radiation in some crater out there in the middle-east. Could be another excuse for the war on Iraq though (OMG we found traces of WMDs!).

Yeah, ill-informed pseudoscientists making bullshit leaps of conclusion. I prefer the whole Lemurian theory better.

Lemurian theory?

The Theory goes something like this:

Long ago, there used to be a continent in either the Pacific Ocean (or possibly the Indian Ocean) called Lemuria (or possibly Mu). On i there lived a race of giant humanoids who were cruel slavers (or utopian pcifists). One day, there was a massive flood (or radiation from the sun) that forced them to flee their civilization and take up residence underground. Their culture spread throughout the world (the whole pyramid/astrology/etc. link thing you've heard 10,000 times before) via their human slaves (or students). The Lemurians (who also go by some name I can't remember) on the other hand fled underground and continued their existance there. Some say they live to this day preying upon humans.

Years later, I think in the late 1800s or early 1900s, there was some guy who went off looking for the lost Mu civilization. I think he first searched South America, but ended up going to Southeast Asia. There, his entire expedition was lost. Weeks later, he was founf alone, stark raving mad and carrying some supposed Mu artifacts. Somehow, those all got destroyed in a fire with all documents relating to them.

Later on in the 1940s, a guy by the name of Richard Sharp Shaver got a story of his published in Amazing Stories called 'I Remember Lemuria!'. Interestingly enough, he presented it all as fact and believed it too. He claimed that the Lemurians got mutated by the sun's radiation and fled underground, becoming Dero (Detrimintal Robots). They spend all their time enslaving men and raping women and when they're done with us, they devour us. Their arch enemies are the Tero, who work against them to protect mankind. Also, they put messages inside rocks. Cut any rock in half, and if you know what you're doing, you can decode their secret plans! Shaver also claimed he descovered their language, 'Mantong', from which all our languages are derived. Shaver learned all this because he was taken captive by the Dero and was lucky that he escaped alive. Turns out though that the whole time he was down there he was also checked into a mental hospital. Those devious Dero sure do know how plan ahead!

Anyway, aside from his series of stories boosting sales of Amzing Stories by about 300%, they also sparked cluts all across the world and the whole 'Shaver Mystery'.

And there have been more recent sightings too. One janitor working at a secret underground base deep in the Rocky Mountains claimed he saw a Dero working alongside government employees. It spooked him so much he quit his job. Also, an group of explorers in the southwest ran across some caves full of anchient Lemurian artifacts. Also, there was supposedly some submarine that went to go explore some underwater caves beneath California, but it was never heard from again.

I found most of this on some website which I can for some reason not find again. (Probably some sceming Dero masterminding!) But you can find TONS of websites about Lemuria, Richard Shaver, and other stuff I mentioned in this post.

I give them credit for the creative story. Sodom destroyed by a nuclear blast and the arc of Noah was actually a submarine! Pure fantasy, but in a way very creative.

Any person with a Ph.D would not be talking about 10th planet garbage.

Arno said:

I give them credit for the creative story. Sodom destroyed by a nuclear blast and the arc of Noah was actually a submarine! Pure fantasy, but in a way very creative.

The Hindu have depictions of nuclear blasts defining the outcome of major wars thousands of year old.

Psyonisis said:

Any person with a Ph.D would not be talking about 10th planet garbage.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that statement is clearly wrong... seeing as this guy not only has a Ph.D. himself, but also mentors Ph.D. and M.A. students!

The idea that our solar system has a 10th planet cannot in any way be said to be garbage or nonsense; it is a valid scientific theory with a lot of supporting evidence, and explains many things that are currently unexplained. Many astrologers lay 50/50 or greater odds that a 10th planet really exists, although some say it is actually a minor or failed star (aka a Brown Dwarf) rather than a plent.

After all, lets not forget that only 75 years ago, the vast majority of people would have scoffed at the idea of a 9th planet (Pluto), and only 220 or so years ago it was widely believed that there were only 6 planets.

Scientists (yes, with Ph D's and everything) calculate that if a 10th planet is really there, it would be "two to five times more massive than Earth, and have a highly elliptical orbit that takes it some 5 billion miles beyond that of Pluto"... or 3 trillion miles from Earth. It would take light from the sun half a year to reach this planet's surface - which is only 1/8 the time it would take such light to reach the nearest solar system.

"To put this distance in perspective, consider a miniaturized version of the solar system in which Earth is one inch from the sun. On this scale, Pluto, the ninth planet would be a bit more than a yard from the sun. The new planet, by contrast, would be a half-mile distant."

Such a planet would apparently "travel at nearly right angles to the plane of the orbits of the nine known planets, in a looping ellipse so elongated it only nears the sun every 700 to 1,000 years". Even at it's nearest point to the Earth, it would still be far too distant to be seen by modern telescopes, though (if it exists) the space-based infrared telescopes that are being planned might be able to see it.

Records dating from various times during the 19th century (and even the very early 20th) show the two planets were gravitationally disturbed by some kind of large spacial body for almost an entire century, but the effects have since disappeared... although one possible explanation for the (currently unexplained) orbital characteristics of Neptune, Uranus and various 'long-period comets' is the existence of a 10th planet.


As for this guy's aliens theory... well, several parts actually have merit. As I already mentioned, we (or rather Western civilization) only knew there were more than 6 planets 200 years ago - yet thousands of years ago, the very civilization which is thought to have discovered astrology (the Sumerians) were creating diagrams of our solar system as we know it today... with the addition of a 10th planet.

Of course there is an extremely popular theory that the asteroid belt between Earth and Mars was once a planet, so the Sumerians' mysterious 10th planet might have been this, rather than something at the very edge of the solar system.

The Sumerians were quite an advanced bunch - they invented the wheel, music and mathematics amongst other things, they had one of the first known written languages, and so on. The Sumerians are certainly ideal candidates for the basis of a theory about extraterrestial influence on the development of mankind, so at the very least Dr. Lessin did his homework.

If there is a 10th planet, we should name it Rupert.

As far as the advanced ideas of anchient civilizations, this is only due to our perception of them. We think that we are always in a state of progress. Not so. Many times, things are invented and are forgotten due to war, the collapse of an empire, or just because there wasn't a use for it. The most notable example of this is of course the Dark Ages of Europe. The Roman Empire was by far the most advanced civilization on the face of the Earth at the time (not to meantion the largest) and when the cities were pillaged and razed by barbarian tribes, a lot of the knowledge was lost. Fortunately, the conflicts in the east, Arabia, and Africa weren't so destructive and much of the knowledge was retained by the Arabs so it could be later "discovered" by Europeans during the crusades and the wars with the Moors, eventualy brinning about the Renissance.

Empires are constantly rising and falling. It's quite possible that the oldest empires that we know about like the Egyptians and Sumerians were really only the halfway mark. Who knows how many records have been lost and how many cities have been razed and built over?

The point is, anchient people weren't really that stupid. They invented all kinds of stuff, but it has been forgotten. Whenever we rediscover this stuff someone goes "thats impossible that they could have invented that! It must have been aliens!". But no, it's just human ingenuity.

And oh yes, what about parallel development? Well, there is a certain reason that cultures on opposite sides of the world discover the same stuff: its just how it works. The bow and arrow was developed by almost all cultures, and the blowgun was developed by all those who din't make bows. Why? Because if you're wanting to launch something far and fast, you have a few options, but only a few designs are going to really work very well. After enough trial and error, those are going to be your most succesful designs. And then there is the anchinet questions about pyramids. Why do we find them both in Egypt and Central America? Well, aside from Thor Hyerdal's theory, there is a simple answer: if you want to make something really tall, the easiest and most stable way to do it is using a pyramid shape. And that is what they did.

As for astronomy, well, if you study the way stuff moves about in the sky for a few years, you'll get a very good idea of how everything is moving. Have several people doing this for several generations and you'll get an even better model. The telescope is a fairly simple invention and it's likely that it could have been invented before we "know" it was. Astronomy is one of those things that gets "invented" in every time period, like atheism and democracy. We seem to think of thse as recent developments, but they've been with us as long as the human race has been around.

Yeah, I'm done.

There's Quaoar, but they don't want to call it a planet :(

COUGH COUGH COUGH GODDAMNIT

Oh, and while you're at it, check out the countless other pages this guy has written on the subject:

http://badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/index.html

Never trust 'astrologers' and pseudoscience. Never make arguments over astronomy unless you are going to look at real evidence presented by real astronomers.

That site refutes the idea that a tenth planet exists in the inner solar system and is headed for a collision course with Earth, not that one exists in a stable orbit in the outer solar system.

As well as that, a large portion of the content of the site is also mostly just some guy's opinion, not fact. He also conveniently "ignores" several issues, such as what exactly is/was having an affect on the orbit and gravity of Pluto, Neptune and the comets.

His idea that you could see a Brown Dwarf (with the naked eye no less!) that far away is ridiculous (rather ironic considering the name of his website!) according to his fellows; they have surface temperatures of only 1500C, which is apparently barely hot enough to give off any light at all.

He claims that other astrologers say Planet X would be several times smaller than Jupiter, which is a complete lie; in reality most say it would be several (three to be precise) times larger than Jupiter.

BTW there was all kinds of "proof" 80 years ago about the non-existence of a ninth planet too... and of course once upon a time there was all sorts of "proof" that the Sun orbited the Earth.

Weather there is a 10th planet or no, it's highly unlikely, nay, impossible that anything actualy exists on it. Not to mention that it will not have any devastating effect on the Earth.

Psyonisis said:

Mathematics and fact are opinion?

In a sense mathematics can be merely be opinion, because the person using them can either get them wrong or in some cases (deliberately) misapply them.

As for fact, Plait presents very little of it that isn't also used in arguments for the existence of a tenth planet!

Have you seen his page with the calculations of the possible orbits of Planet X?

As I said, calculations can easily be wrong. Judging by the number of edits he has on his site, I'd say he gets things wrong pretty often too!

You're also forgetting (ignoring?) one extremely important fact: his calculations were done for a planet in the inner solar system with an unstable orbit, not a planet in the outer solar system with a stable orbit. So they don't back up your argument for the complete non-existence of a 10th planet at all.

Astronomers have no problems with the orbits of Neptune and Pluto, because there is NOTHING tugging on them. Their orbits are exactly what is expected, period.

I made a slight mistake here because I actually meant Uranus and Neptune, but regardless of that I'm afraid you're completely and utterly wrong about this one!

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/outer_planets_991014.html

"Uranus has completed over two and a half orbits since its discovery in 1741, and Neptune, discovered in 1846, has completed almost one full circuit. Both planets should have accurately determined orbits by now. And yet, variations in their predicted positions, called residuals, persist."

http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1988AJ.....96.1476H

"The motions of Uranus and Neptune cannot be adequately represented within the present gravitational model of the solar system. Pluto cannot have any detectable effect on these two planets. There is therefore a good possiblity that there is at least one undetected planet in our solar system, and it is now possible to set some constraints on where that planet might be."

I could easily find more.

"At a distance of even Pluto's orbit, Planet X would be a billion times brighter, glowing visibly at magnitude 2, making it a relatively bright star ... it would be the third brightest object in the sky"

As I've mentioned several times now, the astronomical theory I was talking about is that Planet X is in the outer solar system, whereas Plait is talking about the inner solar system.

As far as I can tell, the site you keep talking about never denies the possibility of the existence of a tenth planet, just one in the inner solar system on a collision course with earth. Basically (and I'm open to being proved wrong) Plait doesn't even seem to suppport your own argument that a tenth planet is impossible!

As for a Brown Dwarf... as I said in my first post, in a scale model where Pluto is a half a yard from the Sun would place Planet X half a mile away. This is 1/8 the distance of the nearest solar system, and we most definitely would not be able to see a Brown Dwarf with the naked eye from that distance, nor an earth-based telescope. A space-based infrared 'scope (which currently don't exist) is a different matter though.

A lot of people say both, and he addresses both issues. Also, if it were 3 times the mass of Jupiter, astronomers would have picked it up a LONG time ago!

You're forgetting the fact that size is counter-balanced by distance. Rather an important fact when it comes to astronomy!

There was? That's funny, because astronomers looked for Pluto because they knew something was tugging at Neptune's orbit. It wasn't a blind hunt for an object that some guy said could exist.

No, they started looking for Pluto after they noticed that something was tugging at Neptune's orbit. Before that, many of them were as unopen to the possibility of a ninth planet as Plait is to a tenth.

It's actually extremely interesting you should mention the fact that something is tugging at Neptune's orbit, because Astronomers have since discovered it isn't Pluto that's tugging at Neptune's orbit! I'm sure even Plait acknowledges that fact somewhere on his site, so the question is, what is tugging at it's orbit?

BTW it certainly isn't just "some guy" who say a tenth planet could exist, it's lots of guys who have qualifications and experience in the field equal to or better than Plait's. In fact, as far as I can tell the opinion in Astronomical circles of whether a tenth planet does exist is about 50/50, although of course there is a huge difference of opinion over where and what the planet is.

Also, I hope you have the terms 'astrologer' and 'astronomer' confused, because astrologers are idiots and base their beliefs on no hard evidence.

Actually it's Plait who had the terms confused in one page on his site, I included it as a joke and meant to put in a [sic] but forgot ;)

I'd rather listen to a man with a Ph.D. in astronomy and years of experience with the field, than a nobody with primitive scientific knowledge.

Scientists aren't always right; when it comes to facts and figures they're usually spot on, but when it comes to common sense they're often a mile off! :P Numerous theories in every scientific field concievable have turned out to be complete nonsense.

Also, have you considered perhaps listening to more than one person who has a Ph.D. in Astronomy? ;)

Here's a good place to start

BTW yes I'm aware there are papers there with arguments against as well as for.

the_Danarchist said:

Weather there is a 10th planet or no, it's highly unlikely, nay, impossible that anything actualy exists on it. Not to mention that it will not have any devastating effect on the Earth.

Actually it's thought that something or other (hint hint) occassionally interacts with the Oort Cloud (a large group of comets which is believed to lie some distance beyond Pluto), and occassionally sends comets shooting off into the inner solar system.

There's a popular theory that it was comets from this very Cloud that were responsible for several extinction-level events on Earth, including that of the Dinosaurs.

NiGHTMARE said:

Scientists aren't always right; when it comes to facts and figures they're usually spot on,

Fact's and figures may be spot on (assuming valid experimental procedure - which in itself is not always a given), but the interpretation of those facts and figures is often very subjective. Depends how much the scientists want to prove their hypothesis. :-)

NiGHTMARE said:

There's a popular theory that it was comets from this very Cloud that were responsible for several extinction-level events on Earth, including that of the Dinosaurs.

Now, if some intelligent life from from Planet 10 was directing those...

Hmmm, goes away and regards the "bug meteors" from "Starship Troopers" with new respect, if only temporarily. :-)

Oh my gosh... I've heard of that theory with the Oort Cloud, but I don't buy it. Firstly, the odds of a comet hitting the Earth are son infinitessimally small that it would take basicaly a deluge to increase them significantly. Secondly, the theory is that EVERY time the comets in the Oort Cloud are disturbed, one of them hits the Earth. I find this HIGHLY unlikely. I mean, dang, I can't imagine there being enough comets hurled in our general direction that one of them always hits us.

Now, as for all of this 10th planet crap, the issue of whether or not there is a 10th planet is irrelevant. Nothing could live on it, because it's out in the depths of space with very little sunlight. Also, as for the asteroid belt being a planet, it's more likely that no planet ever formed there, as a result of Jupiter's gravitational pull.

And then there's the whole thing about aliens messing with early civilization. People are a lot more intelligent than they are given credit for, especially ancient people. We are too closely related to other primates in my opinion to have been the result of an experiment, and I've seen no evidence of anything in the past that couldn't have been human-made.

Sodom and Gomorrah is an interesting tale, but there's no reason to jump to the conclusion that aliens nuked it. Firstly, you're assuming that an intelligent force had to be responsible. That's not the case. There are any number of natural disasters that could have happened, and of course people in biblical times are going to attribute it to God. That's just something people don't get, and it bugs me. They take the bible literally, as if everything in there is an accurate account of what happened. No, people see something, and they put their own spin on it, influenced by their religious beliefs. Natural disasters become acts of God. Military victories were God's reward, defeats His punishment. Later on, writers change the text so that everything has an explanation in terms of God. Saul lost Israel to the Phillistines allegedly for sparing a nation from destruction, against the will of God. It's a minor thing, but it's the only thing that the writers could think of as reason for Saul's defeat. Moses wasn't allowed into the Promised Land for a very minor thing, indeed. Everything has to tie in with God. I'm sure this applies to other ancient civilizations as well, leading of course to texts which seem to suggest that an outside intelligence was working very closely with humans.

the_Danarchist said:
Third, if they really did explode atomics on top of Sodom, someone would have found traces of radiation in some crater out there in the middle-east.

Just a few days ago I saw a documentary about a possible location for the cities of Sodom and Gomorra. They are thought to have existed on the shores of a volcano near the Black Sea (?), trading mostly in tar. An eruption caused that slope to liquify, utterly destroying the entire site.

Just the sheer number of alien conspiracy theories proves that religion is indeed a human invention :)

BTW, I also totally agree with Danarchist's theory on progress. Mankind's knowledge level can't be represented by a straight line going up from Stone Age to today, but rather a much-curved line which often falls back to levels way, way lower than they used to be centuries ago.

NiGHTMARE said:
Actually it's thought that something or other (hint hint) occassionally interacts with the Oort Cloud (a large group of comets which is believed to lie some distance beyond Pluto), and occassionally sends comets shooting off into the inner solar system.

Our solar system itself is traveling through space at breakneck speeds, orbiting the center of this galaxy. Once every few dozen million years this brings us into close proximity to other star clusters. The additional gravitational pull of those stars are believed to disturb the Ort Cloud, which results in large meteors breaking out of orbit and falling into the Sun. This may explain the regular occurance of large meteor impacts every 60-100 million years during Earth's history.

NiGHTMARE said:

There's a popular theory that it was comets from this very Cloud that were responsible for several extinction-level events on Earth, including that of the Dinosaurs.

It's not so theoretical now as it used to be. Scientists are agreed that they've found the "smoking gun" that killed off the dinosaurs: an asteroid of at least 10 kilometers in diameter that smashed into the northern tip of the yucatan peninsula(the chicxulub impact crater).

Heh, pretty much everyone has said what I was going to say. But to add to what Mordeth said about Sodom and Gemorrah, experts have also figured an origin to the pillar of salt thing. See, around the Dead Sea there are plenty of these salt pillars made by geological events. People probably saw them and thought they could be human beings that had been transformed by some supernatural force, most likely God.

True. In fact the locals still call them "Lot's Wife"...