Re: OT South African Mystery Spheres

From: Henry Spencer (henry_at_spsystems.net)
Date: 03/10/05 

Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:34:51 GMT

In article <112vlnk13sq137b@corp.supernews.com>,
Revision <kentbetts@notechispspam.com> wrote:
>> >but that Mars sized planet hitting us and forming the Moon?
>
>Latest, yeah, but not recent. Computer sims and all the other relevant
>facts in re: momentum and so on have been present in the literature since
>at least 1969 and probably before...

Not the giant-impact theory. The three pre-1969 theories were "daughter"
(rapidly-spinning Earth fissions), "sister" (Moon forms in Earth orbit as
part of Earth's formation), and "wife" (Moon forms independently and is
later captured). There were reasons to doubt all of them, and all were
thoroughly destroyed by the Apollo samples: lunar rocks are too similar
to Earth rocks for the Moon to have formed separately, and too different
for it to have had the same history.

While people were thinking about giant-impact notions earlier(*), it did
not really surface as a mainstream theory until the Kona lunar-origin
conference in 1984, where it emerged as a fairly sudden scientific
consensus that cut through all the old difficulties.

(* In one case, much earlier: a very similar concept appears in a
forgotten 1946 paper by Reginald Daly. ) 

-- 
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend."    |   Henry Spencer
                                -- George Herbert       | henry@spsystems.net

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