Philosophy Discussion Forums

Natural Things - trees, goats, rivers

Man-made (or extraterrestrial-made) things - chairs, jet engines,... the moon?

Now this sounds like nonsense, that the moon isn't a product of nature. But look at a solar eclipse. Ever notice how astoundingly precise the position of the sun, moon, and earth must be for the moon to cover the sun so perfectly so that only the corona is showing? What are the odds of that? I wonder if any of Jupiter's 67 moons ever eclipses the sun so precisely. Most eclipses on other planets are probably going to have the object blocking the sun be too small or too large for just the corona to show.

I can't fathom such precision being so random. If you take a spectrogram of two different objects, and they match exactly, that's not random. Neither is the exactness of the size of the moon blocking the sun random. It can't be. Someone or something intelligent put that moon up there on purpose with intent. Was it an alien being? A supernatural being? A bunch of human beings? I don't know. I don't know who would do it or why, but I just can't see it as being random. The odds of it being random are too small. I think the odds of Egyptians building the moon on Earth, shooting it into space, and leaving no trace of evidence behind is much greater than the odds of the moon's exact placement during eclipses being totally random.

What you are marvelling at is evidence of an intelligently-designed, finely-tuned universe. Why do you suspect Earth's moon and not any other heavenly body to be artificially created? Might it have anything to do with the writings of David Icke?

The moon happens to be roughly 400 times smaller than the Sun and 400 times nearer. Roughly. It passes between the Earth and Sun every 28 days - whenever there's a new moon - but solar eclipses are relatively rare because, in its inclined orbit, it only rarely passes exactly between them. Because its orbit is elliptical and it isn't exactly the same angular size as the sun, it doesn't always completely cover it. This is called an annular eclipse.

I wouldn't see the fact that two objects are roughly, but not exactly, the same angular size as evidence of deliberate design. Just mild coincidence. It is true that the moon is unusually large, as a proportion of the size of its parent planet, compared to other natural satellites. But that's probably a consequence of the way that it was formed.

If it could fire a death ray that destroyed planets and was inhabited by a bad guy dressed in black with respiratory problems. That might be more convincing.

Steve3007 wrote:The moon happens to be roughly 400 times smaller than the Sun and 400 times nearer. Roughly. It passes between the Earth and Sun every 28 days - whenever there's a new moon - but solar eclipses are relatively rare because, in its inclined orbit, it only rarely passes exactly between them. Because its orbit is elliptical and it isn't exactly the same angular size as the sun, it doesn't always completely cover it. This is called an annular eclipse.

I wouldn't see the fact that two objects are roughly, but not exactly, the same angular size as evidence of deliberate design. Just mild coincidence. It is true that the moon is unusually large, as a proportion of the size of its parent planet, compared to other natural satellites. But that's probably a consequence of the way that it was formed.

If it could fire a death ray that destroyed planets and was inhabited by a bad guy dressed in black with respiratory problems. That might be more convincing.

I wouldn't use the term rough. I understand avoiding the term exact. Still, it's pretty darn precise to me. Precise seems better than rough and exact. Too precise to be mild coincidence. Major coincidence. Think of all the other places the moon could have formed. It could have formed 350 times nearer. It could have been 500 times smaller. Regardless of what numbers you throw in there, I think seeing a photo of a solar eclipse says more than the numbers alone can illustrate. I see intent.

It brings up a good point though, how do scientists draw the line between coincidence and non-coincidence? In an experiment that can be repeated many times, that's easy, but with very limited experimental data (how many planets, have we seen? Fifty?) you can't draw the line between coincidence and non-coincidence so easily.

Re: coincidence and non-coincidence. Yes, that is an interesting point. As you implied, the whole notion of the probability that event A caused event B, or that the correlation is a coincidence, depends on the ability to repeat those two events as many times as we think is necessary to establish a level of probability that is suited to our purposes. The more times we see the correlation the more we think it implies cause.

But for events that have only ever happened once, this reasoning cannot be applied. So, to take another example, since life has, to our knowledge, only ever arisen once, it's perhaps meaningless to assign a probability to this event.

The more remarkable thing would be if no such remarkable things happened. The remarkability of total eclipses on Earth seems to aptly match its rareness.

If I dig through hundreds of seashells, and then come on one that seems to have a special shape, perhaps vaguely looking like the face of someone I know. It is something of a fallacy to say, "Wow this is remarkable, the odds that a seashell looks like a face at all must be 1 in hundreds, and for it to be this specific person as opposed to one of other hundreds if not thousands of people I know... this must not be coincidence."

The remarkability of the a total eclipse is tempered by all the days it doesn't occur and the irregularity of its occurrence and that it only occurs from certain perspectives on Earth. The remarkability of a picture of a total eclipse is tempered by the countless other photos of the sky or outerspace or astronomical events that are not nearly as remarkable. It would be incredible if none out of those thousands of pictures or events was not as remarkable as the picture of an eclipse. The lack of a certain amount of coincidence is even more remarkable, as demonstrated by the birthday paradox.

For instance, if we weren't talking about how coincidental it is that the moon almost covers the sun so completely that we cannot see even the corona, we might be talking about how much of coincidence it is that the moon is just big enough to cover the sun to cover it's corona and if it was a significant bit smaller we wouldn't even see that.

If I dig through hundreds of seashells, and then come on one that seems to have a special shape, perhaps vaguely looking like the face of someone I know. It is something of a fallacy to say, "Wow this is remarkable, the odds that a seashell looks like a face at all must be 1 in hundreds, and for it to be this specific person as opposed to one of other hundreds if not thousands of people I know... this must not be coincidence."

If that were to happen to you, how could you dismiss it as mere coincidence?

Theophane wrote:

If I dig through hundreds of seashells, and then come on one that seems to have a special shape, perhaps vaguely looking like the face of someone I know. It is something of a fallacy to say, "Wow this is remarkable, the odds that a seashell looks like a face at all must be 1 in hundreds, and for it to be this specific person as opposed to one of other hundreds if not thousands of people I know... this must not be coincidence."

If that were to happen to you, how could you dismiss it as mere coincidence?

Because I expect 1 out of hundreds of seashells to be special.

This has pretty-much come back to the old "faces in the fire" phenomenon.

As has been pointed out, the apparent miraculous-ness of the event is caused by the act of selection on the part of the human observer. It's a fundamental part of our strategy to make a sense of the complex world. We select what's interesting to us and ignore the rest. We see what we're looking for. If you're interested in miracles, you'll see them. A world filled with a vast amount of information and activity behaves a little bit like a mirror. It tells you more about yourself than it does about itself.

Another example (which I may have mentioned before): I work in an office and generally arrive some time shortly before 9am. Spookily, when I look at the little clock in the bottom-right corner of my computer screen it nearly always seems to read "9:11". Much more often than would be expected by chance. This is a silly example to make a point. Some people might imbue this with some kind of meaning. Others might conclude that I probably unconsciously look at the clock very frequently and don't consciously notice that I've done so unless a familiar pattern flags it up to my busy conscious mind.

So, even if the similarity of angular size between moon and sun was not artificially created, perhaps we could say that it is artificially selected.

The moon used to be much closer to earth. The orbit gets larger by about 4 cm per year. It can be measured, there are reflectors on the surface and powerful lasers are used to measure the distance. It’s just a lucky coincidence that it appears to have the same size as the sun.

I am reminded of the puddle sitting in a perfectly puddle shaped hole, what are the chances.
Also roll a six sided dice ten times and marvel at the odds of getting the exact result which you did get.
Oh and if you want the want the simple answer to your question, the answer is no the moon wasn't artificially created.

It's interesting to read that the first (and as far as I know last) liquid ever poured on the surface of a gravitating body other than the Earth was a small quantity of communion wine poured by Buzz Aldrin just after he and Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, to go with the small communion wafer that he'd brought along with him.

And it's interesting that, given that Aldrin was therefore slightly under the influence of alcohol, Armstrong was the designated driver on the way home.

It's interesting to read that the first (and as far as I know last) liquid ever poured on the surface of a gravitating body other than the Earth was a small quantity of communion wine poured by Buzz Aldrin just after he and Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, to go with the small communion wafer that he'd brought along with him.

Hate to burst your lunar bubble but in the film I saw, Buzz held his communion in the space capsule, not on the moon. And since there is no gravity on the moon, a liquid would not fall onto the surface, right? Further, I think Neil was given the most demanding piloting assignments because he was the best pilot in the bunch, his lunar landing was a work of art.

Well the gravity of the moon is still existent, it's one sixth of the earth. So the pouring of the wine would still work.

I was drinking a glass of red wine in the garden the other evening and trying to work out (approximately) how long it took for the wine to swill from one side of the glass to the other. I estimated that Buzz Aldrin's wine, sitting in that Eagle lander on the lunar surface, in that one sixth of Earth's gravity, with Neil Armstrong watching and wondering when Buzz would be finished so he could open the door and get out, might take about a second to slosh from one side of the glass to the other.