2. The Capture Model
With the death of the
“fission” model, scientists were led to posit a “capture” model for
its origin. In one version of this theory, the Earth and the Moon
evolved into their current double-planet system from the same
primordial space dust in the early formative years of the solar
system. However, for this model to be true the age of rocks from
the two planets would again have to be similar, and here again, the
Apollo moon rocks simply exhibited too great of an age disparity
for this model to be correct.
This led to the
second, and now regnant, theory of “capture” to be adopted.
According to this theory, the Moon was “captured” by the Earth’s
gravity as it wandered too close, and became a permanent satellite
of the Earth.
The problem with this
model is, once again, the physics simply does not work, for in
addition to piling up all the previously mentioned mechanical
“coincidences” a further problem is encountered. This is the idea
of “capture” itself, a phenomenon used, in fact, by the Russian and
European space agencies, and by NASA itself, in launching deep
space probes to the other planets of the solar system. Using
another planet’s gravity well, these probes are steered close
enough to these planets to “slingshot” them to even more distances.
As the probes enter a planet’s gravitational attraction, they
accelerate and thus slingshot by the
planet, able to gain speed for their outward journey.
And so the Moon, if
it was captured would have to
accelerate as it entered the
gravitational pull of the Earth, and this in turn would inevitably
have led to an elongated and elliptical orbit. But this is not what
millennia of observations have shown. Since the Moon is apparently
older than the Earth, it stands to reason that the capture model is
correct in its basic outline. However, no known mechanism can
account for its current orbital mechanics. In short, it would
appear that the Moon had to have been “braked” as it entered Earth orbit, and in such a
fashion as to assume its current position. As no known naturalist
mechanism exists to explain such “braking,” the only other
explanation would appear that it had been intelligently guided to
its current position. It is a celestial mechanics analogue to
parallel parking a car.
Briefly stated, the
Moon was parked. And that implies a
pilot.
This catalogue of
facts led two Soviet scientists to propose in the 1970s for the
Soviet magazine Sputnik that the Moon
was, in fact, a gigantic artificial spaceship. But there were other
anomalies about the Moon, first revealed during the initial days of
the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and
continuing all the way up through the Apollo moon
landings.