Speaker 1: Okay, what if everything you thought you knew about our
solar system, you know, how planets formed, why they orbit
where they do, even something like Mars. What if it
was fundamentally incomplete. What if our seemingly calm, predictable cosmic
neighborhood actually hides this history of well on unimaginable violence,
scars literally etched into space for us to see if
if only we dared to truly.
Speaker 2: Look, that's a powerful way to put it.
Speaker 1: Welcome deep divers. Today, we're taking a journey through some
really fascinating and, let's be honest, pretty controversial theories that
challenge mainstream astronomy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these ideas definitely push the boundaries.
Speaker 1: We're going to untack some intriguing observations, look at some
radical ideas from various sources, explore surprising facts, and maybe
connect some dots you haven't seen put together before.
Speaker 2: Our mission today is really to understand what these experts
are proposing, why they think it matters, and what it
could possibly mean for well, our place in the universe exactly.
Speaker 1: So get ready, because we're diving deep into the anomalies.
Planets spinning backwards, worlds tilted completely on their sides, mysterious asteroid.
Speaker 2: Belts, and even some chilling evidence potentially of ancient cataclysmic
events right next door on our closest neighbors.
Speaker 1: It's going to be a thrilling, definitely thought provoking exploration
of what some people might even call a broken solar system.
So let's get started.
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: You know, when you look up at the night sky,
everything seems so orderly, doesn't it, Like at this cosmic ballet,
all predictable orbits and steady rotations.
Speaker 2: It has that appearance, certainly calm and measured.
Speaker 1: But beneath that calm surface, our solar system is just
full of these profound quirks, these oddities that seem to
defy easy explanation. It's kind of like admiring a meticulously
organized bookshelf only to realize half the books are upside
down and maybe some shelves are completely missing.
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy. It's a compelling observation, isn't it.
While mainstream science often has sort of individual explanations for
each peculiar.
Speaker 1: Right, like this happened because of X, that happened because
of why exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but when you start to connect them, they feel
less like isolated anomalies and maybe more like consistent patterns,
patterns that hint at something much large or something disruptive
in our past.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's take Venus, our so called sister planet, nearly
identical to Earth and size. But the truly strange thing
about Venus, something most people probably don't realize, is that
it spins in the opposite.
Speaker 2: Direction, completely backwards.
Speaker 1: Yeah. While Earth and basically every other major planet in
our system rotates counterclockwise on its axis, Venus spins clockwise.
How does a planet that supposedly formed alongside its siblings
end up rotating entirely backwards. It's not just a minor thing.
It's a fundamental inversion.
Speaker 2: It really is. And then you've got Urinus. Instead of
spinning upright like a top, which is what we see
with most.
Speaker 1: Planets like Earth, Mars, Jupiter, right.
Speaker 2: Urinus essentially rolls around the Sun like a ball. Its
axial tilt is nearly ninety eight degrees. It's basically lying
on its side, so its poles.
Speaker 1: Are where the equator should be.
Speaker 2: Almost pretty much, and consequently, its moons orbit vertically up
and down relative to the plane of the Solar System.
Following its bizarre rotation. This extreme tilt looks so unnatural,
as if some incredibly powerful force literally knocked it completely over.
Speaker 1: And farther out Neptune's orbit. It's unusually elliptical, right, much
less circular than you'd expect from a world that formed
nice and peacefully.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's also a position farther from the Sun
than conventional models predict. It almost looks as if well,
something shoved it out there into that wider, less stable path,
maybe due to some huge gravitational disturbance.
Speaker 1: Okay, and Pluto, I know, not a major planet anymore,
but still part of the picture.
Speaker 2: An important piece of the puzzle, definitely.
Speaker 1: Its orbit is exceptionally weird now, highly tilted compared to
the main plane, erratic, doesn't really fit comfortably with the
other dwarf planets out in the Kuiper Belt. It behaves
more like a like a cosmic refugee, maybe like a.
Speaker 2: Moon that lost its original parent body perhaps and was
left to wander into its current peculiar trajectory. That's one interpretation, certainly.
Speaker 1: But maybe the most striking enigma of all is Mars.
When you see images of it, it genuinely looks like
two entirely different worlds, somehow stitched together.
Speaker 2: The Martian dichotomy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's stark. It's northern hemisphere is remarkably smooth, vast
plains that really look like ancient, dried up ocean beds,
almost peaceful looking.
Speaker 2: But then the Southern hemisphere is just a stark contrast.
It's a chaotic, heavily cratered, rugged mess. Mountains, canyons, just
rough terrain everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's like a split personality and a planet, a planet
that seems to bear these indelible marks of something truly catastrophic.
Speaker 2: So these are just isolated quirks? Are they? These big differences?
Taken together? They suggest some kind of shared history of cataclysm? Right?
Speaker 1: They absolutely seem too. These aren't just random oddities. I
don't think. They feel like consistent scars that hint at
a much more violent past for our Solar System than
the standard textbooks generally describe.
Speaker 2: And this naturally leads us to question the very foundation
of how we believe our Solar system formed in the
first place. The conventional wisdom, what most of us learned
in school, is NASA's standard narrative, the accretion model.
Speaker 3: Ah.
Speaker 1: Yes, the idea where everything just sort of slowly clumps
together over millions of years.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the theory suggests that after a star forms, the
leftover dust and gas and the surrounding nebula gradually begin
to clump together. They form what are called planetesimals, those
early small building blocks of.
Speaker 1: Planets, like cosmic dust bunnies getting bigger.
Speaker 2: Kind of yeah. These planetesimals then act like snowballs rolling
down a hill, slowly gathering more and more material through
gravitational attraction until they grow into the massive planets we
see today. It's a neat, orderly, and seemingly reasonable process
of cosmic construction.
Speaker 1: Okay, this seems plausible on the.
Speaker 2: Surface, but there are some significant challenges that have been merged,
problems that have led a growing number of respected scientists
to question if it's the whole story.
Speaker 1: Like, what what are the cracks in that model?
Speaker 2: Well, one of the biggest problems, and it's pretty fundamental,
is the speed. The speed at which objects would have
been moving in the early Solar system. We're talking around
twenty kilometers per second. That's nearly forty five thousand miles
per hour.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's incredibly fast.
Speaker 2: It is and at those incredible speeds. If two objects collide,
they don't just gently stick together and create bigger rocks.
They smash each other into dust. They basically vaporize on impact.
Speaker 1: Right, It's not like building with legos, It's more like
crashing cars exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yet the accretion model fundamentally requires these particles to
somehow keep sticking together despite these incredibly destructive velocities. It
feels like a theoretical leap that's well difficult to reconcile
with the actual physics of high speed impacts.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that's a big one.
Speaker 2: What else? Another challenge is the remarkably flat plane of
the ecliptic. Think about it. The Sun's gravity pretty much
equally in all directions. Right, So if plants formed from
just random debris gradually clumping together, why do all the
major planets orbit in an almost perfectly flat disc like
they were marbles rolling around on a particulously crafted flat
dinner plate. For all that random cosmic material to naturally
coalesce into such a precise two dimensional arrangement seems well,
incredibly improbable, almost too perfect to be purely random.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that does seem suspiciously.
Speaker 2: Neat and then there's the frost line concept. This is
supposed to explain where different types of planets form based
on temperature.
Speaker 1: Right the idea that close to the Sun, it's too
hot for gas, so you get rocky planets, and further
out it's cold enough for gas and ice, so you
get gas giants.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The accretion model uses this to explain why gas
giants like Jupiter and Saturn form be on this line
where ice and gas were plentiful, while rocky planets like
Earth and Mars formed inside it closer to the star.
It's a very tidy.
Speaker 1: Explanation, okay, but I sense a butt coming.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, the butt came when astronomers started discovering hot
jupiters around other stars. These are massive gas giants hundreds
of times the massive Earth, orbiting incredibly close to their stars,
often closer than mercury orbits our Sun.
Speaker 1: Whoa, So gas giants right up next to their star.
Speaker 2: Right where according to the standard accretion model and the
frost line concept, they simply shouldn't exist. They shouldn't have
been able to form there. Yet We've documented over four
hundred of them in other star systems. This directly contradicts
a core tenet of the prevailing model. It creates a
really significant problem for the whole snowball theories universality.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if the traditional model has these pretty glaring issues,
are there credible alternative theories starting to gain some traction?
Because this is where doctor Tom van Flandering comes into
the picture right exactly. And he's not who you might
immediately picture when you think of radical astronomical theories. This
guy had serious credentials, absolutely.
Speaker 2: Doctor van Flanders earned his PhD from Yale, spent two
decades at the US Naval Observatory. His job wasn't just
theoretical stuff. He was tasked with calculating planetary orbits with
extreme precision for what like navigation, Yeah, for critical applications
like military navigation, classified satellite operations. He was, to put
it simply, a genuine expert on celestial mechanics. His job
was literally calculating exactly where planets would be at any
given moment, down to fractions of.
Speaker 1: A second, so he knew the math inside and out.
Speaker 2: It was this precise, deep understanding of celestial mechanics that
actually compelled him to question the official story. He saw
the inconsistencies in the data firsthand, the standard decretion model
just couldn't fully account for what he was observing day
and day out.
Speaker 1: So what did he propose instead?
Speaker 2: So Van Flanner proposed something truly radical. It was actually
a revival of an older, largely abandoned idea solar fission
solar fishing.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us. What does that theory
suggest about our son's early life? Was it different back then?
Speaker 2: The hypothesis goes something like this, Roughly four point five
billion years ago, our sun wasn't the calm, stable star
we see today. It was spinning incredibly fast, too fast.
Speaker 1: Actually, like a spinning top about to wobble out of.
Speaker 2: Control kind of.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When a star spins that quickly, it builds up an
excessive amount of angular momentum. You can think of that
as its rotational energy combined with its mass. To maintain stability,
the Sun had to shed this excess energy, and not
gradually but violently. Wow, it shed superheated plasma into space.
Imagine these enormous gloves of plasma, millions of miles wide,
literally skinning away from their parent star, almost like yeah,
like cosmic cotton candy separating from a machine that's going
to fast.
Speaker 1: Wow. So instead of planets slowly building up from dust,
they were born in this violent stellar expulsion, like the
Sun threw them off.
Speaker 2: That's the core idea. As these immense plasma balls spun
away from the Sun and started to cool, over millions
of years, they condensed, eventually forming the planets. Okay and
Van Flanner argued that this single idea elegantly explains many
of the problems the accretion model struggled with, like the
flat plane exactly, it explains why planets orbit in a
relatively flat plane. They all originated from the Sun's equator,
the region where material would naturally be flung off a
rapidly spinning star.
Speaker 1: And the spin the angular momentum.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It clarifies why the planets possess most of the Solar
System's angular momentum while the Sun retains most of the mass.
They simply took that rotational energy with them when they
were spun out of the star and the hot jupiters.
It provides a natural explanation for them too. Some of
these plasma borne planets simply didn't travel as far from
their stellar parent. They ended up in much closer orbits.
It wasn't about where they formed, but how far they
were thrown.
Speaker 1: That is remarkably comprehensive for a lot of these Solar
System oddities. But did he see other patterns?
Speaker 2: He did? Van Planner noticed another fascinating pattern in this
proposed violent birth process. He observed that planets seemed to
have been born.
Speaker 1: In pairs like what.
Speaker 2: Like Earth and Venus, they're nearly identical in size. Jupiter
and Saturn are both massive gas giants, ye their positions
often follow specific orbital ratios, almost as if they were
rejected in sync to at a time. He found that
the math consistently supported these pairings across the Solar System.
Speaker 1: Interesting, but did everything fit?
Speaker 2: Not quite. Not all planets fit this neat paired pattern perfectly.
Mercury's orbit seemed too eccentric, a bit too chaotic. Puto,
as we discussed, behaves more like a captured moon or
a cosmic wanderer than a typical planet or even a
dwarf planet formed in this way. Okay, But the most
significant outlier, the one that truly puzzled him and didn't
seem to fit any pattern, was Mars Mars. Again, yeah,
he was too small for his orbital position. Its path
was peculiar, its density didn't align with any of the
formation patterns Van Flanner and could discern Mars just it
didn't fit the family portrait, so to speak.
Speaker 1: So what did he conclude about Mars? This is where
it gets really wild.
Speaker 2: Right, This is where he arrived at a truly bold conclusion,
one that completely turned conventional astronomy on its head. He
proposed that Mars wasn't a planet that simply failed to
follow the rules of formation. Instead, he theorized it was
once a moon, a noon of what a moon orbitting
a much larger planet, A planet that was utterly destroyed millions,
maybe billions of years ago, a planet he dubbed Maldeck.
Speaker 1: Maldek Okay, and the asteroid belt.
Speaker 2: He believed that while most of Maldek was likely vaporized
or flung out of the Solar System in this cataclysm,
the fragments that remained in orbit around that location formed
the familiar asteroid belt we observe today right between Mars
and Jupiter.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, a destroyed planet forming the asteroid belt. That
sounds like science fiction, but is there any historical basis
for thinking a planet might be missing there.
Speaker 2: Actually, yes, this idea, though it sounds radical now, isn't
entirely new. The notion of a missing planet in that
specific region has roots going back centuries long before Van Flander.
Speaker 1: Really how far back.
Speaker 2: To the seventeen sixties and seventeen seventies. In seventeen sixty six,
a German mathematician named Johann Titius, and later in seventeen
seventy two, the astronomer Johann Bode noticed something remarkable. The
planets in our Solar System weren't just scattered randomly. They
seemed to follow this peculiar, almost mystical, mathematical pattern governing
their distances from the Sun. It came to be known
as Bode's law, or sometimes the Titius Bode law.
Speaker 1: Bode's law. I've heard of that. It's a surprisingly simple formula,
isn't it something about starting with a number and doubling it.
Speaker 2: It is surprisingly simple. You start at point four astronomical
units from the Sun and AU being the average Earth
Sun distance. Then you roughly double the interval for each
subsequent planet Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, then a gap than
Jupiter and Saturn, and it predicted their orbits with really
uncanny accuracy for at the time, and.
Speaker 1: Didn't it predict a planet before it was found.
Speaker 2: Its predictive power was quite compelling. Yes, In seventeen eighty one,
Uranus was discovered by William Herschel, and it was found
almost exactly where BOE's law set a planet should be,
even though the formula predated its discovery by nearly a decade.
That's when the astronomical community really started paying attention.
Speaker 1: So the obvious question then became, what about that gap
between Mars and Jupiter?
Speaker 2: Exactly the formula confidently predicted another large planet right there
between Mars and Jupiter, at a distance of precisely two
point eight astronomical units from the Sun.
Speaker 1: So astronomers started looking for this missing planet, planet X
or whatever they called it.
Speaker 2: They did. A group calling themselves the Celestial Police even
formed to systematically hunt for it, and on New Year's
Day eighteen oh one, an Italian astronomer named Joseppe Piazzi,
working independently in Sicily, found something, a small object orbiting
at two point seven to seven astronomical units, almost exactly
where Bode's law predicted the missing planet should be.
Speaker 1: And that was it problem solved.
Speaker 2: Well, not quite. He named it Series. But Series was tiny,
less than six hundred miles across, far smaller than anyone
expected a major planet to be. And soon after more
small objects were discovered in roughly the same orbit Vesta Juno, so.
Speaker 1: Not one planet, but lots of little ones.
Speaker 2: By eighteen fifty they knew of thirteen such objects in
the same region. Today, of course, we know there are
millions of rocks orbiting in that zone, which we now
call the asteroid.
Speaker 1: Build So what did they make of that? Were these
just leftover building materials that never formed a planet?
Speaker 2: That was one interpretation. Yeah, some scientists argued these were
simply leftover planetesimals, debris that never quite managed to coalesce
into a full fledged planet due to Jupiter's gravitational interference. Perhaps,
But a German astronomer named Wilhelm Olbers, who actually discovered
Pallas and Vesta himself, proposed a different, far more radical
idea back then.
Speaker 1: Okay, what was Olber's idea?
Speaker 2: Olbers suggested, what if a planet did form, there fully formed,
and what is something then utterly destroyed it. He even
named this hypothetical planet Phaeton after the Greek.
Speaker 1: Myth Phaeton, after the guy who crashed the sun chariot.
Speaker 2: Dramatic, very but critics immediately jumped on that. They pointed
out that the entire asteroid belt combined has less mass
than our own moon. How could that possibly be the
remains of a whole planet. It just didn't seem like
enough stuff.
Speaker 1: Seems like a fair point.
Speaker 2: But Olber's had this ingenious answer. He argued that if
a planet were to explode violently in the vacuum of space,
most of its mass wouldn't just hang around neatly in
a belt.
Speaker 1: Where would it go.
Speaker 2: Much of the debris would reach escape velocity, some would
fall into the Sun, some would be flung out into
deep space, and a significant portion would simply vaporize in
the explosion itself. Maybe five percent of the original mass
that we observed today in the asteroid belt, he argued,
is exactly what you'd expect to find leftover from a
massive planet that was violently chattered.
Speaker 1: Huh. That's actually a really clever way to turn that
criticism around, using the lack of mass as evidence for
the explosion.
Speaker 2: It was quite insightful. Yeah, But then another curveball came
for Bode's law. In eighteen thirty six, Neptune.
Speaker 1: Was discovered and did it fit the pattern.
Speaker 2: Nope. It's orbit didn't fit Bode's law at all. It
was way off, and any critics seized on this, dismissing
the entire law as just a coincidence, a statistical fluke
that worked for a while but ultimately meant nothing.
Speaker 1: So that killed the idea of a missing.
Speaker 2: Planet for many. It did seem to undermine Bode's law significantly,
but Tom van Flander, looking at this much later with
his fission theory in mind, saw it differently. How So,
he didn't believe Neptune's orbit was inherently wrong according to
the original pattern. He believed it had been altered. He
looked at Uranus spinning on its side, Pluto's tilted and
erratic orbit, Neptune's weird position, and the asteroid belt itself
and saw them not as random anomalies or sailures of
a simple law. He saw them as interconnected scars scarce
from what remnants of an ancient, incredibly violent catastrophe in
our solar system. He believed there was only one event
powerful enough to cause such widespread disruption across multiple planets,
the violent instantaneous destruction of an entire planet. For Van Flander,
the mathematical patterns of BOE's life law, the debris fields,
the peculiar orbits. It all came together. It explained everything
Bode's law he believed wasn't wrong. A massive planet was
there and now it's gone. And he thought he could
find even more direct proof.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if a planet exploded, what kind of proof
would you look for besides the asteroid build itself.
Speaker 2: Well, this is where Van Flanner's theory gets really intriguing
and where he made some very specific, testable predictions. He
needed evidence that planets had actually exploded, and he found
a startling clue in a really unexpected place. Soviet military tests.
Back in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: Soviet military tests. How does that relate?
Speaker 2: American observers were monitoring Soviet anti satellite weapons tests basically
blowing up satellites in Earth orbit, and they noticed something peculiar.
When a satellite exploded, the debris didn't just scatter randomly outwards.
Speaker 1: What did it do?
Speaker 2: Smaller pieces of the debris actually began to orbit the
bigger pieces, almost like tiny moons forming around miniature planets
right there in the debris cloud.
Speaker 1: Huh, never heard that before.
Speaker 2: It was a documented observation, and that observation sparked a
kind of Eureka moment for Van Flander. He thought, Okay,
if that happens when a relatively small satellite explodes, what
happens when an entire planet explodes?
Speaker 1: The same thing, just bigger.
Speaker 2: Exactly the same physical principles, just on an astronomically larger scale.
He reasoned that mountain sized chunks of the destroyed planet
would fly off, but each would be accompanied by clouds
of smaller debris orbiting around them, like.
Speaker 1: A big rock with its own little swarm of smaller
rocks following it.
Speaker 2: Precisely and from Earth, he realized these conglomerates would look
exactly like comets. The main large chunk would be the
comets nucleus, and the orbiting cloud of smaller debris would
create the characteristic fuzzy appearance entail.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a different take on comets. So did this
lead to a prediction?
Speaker 2: It led him to a groundbreaking, very specific prediction. If
comets truly originated from an exploded planet or planets, then
some of them shouldn't just be dirty snowball some of
them should possess actual moons, little solid rocks orbiting the
main comet nucleus, not just a diffuse dust and gas cloud.
Speaker 1: Wow, predicting moons around comets. How was that received?
Speaker 2: As you might imagine, the scientific establishment was highly skeptical,
if not openly derisive. The prevailing belief was firmly that
comets were nothing more than primordial, dirty snowballs left over
from the formation of the Solar System, originating way out
in the Oort cloud.
Speaker 1: So they laughed at them pretty much.
Speaker 2: Some scientists even made public bets, very confidently declaring no
comma would ever be found with a companion. Not Ever,
the idea of comets as planetary fragments was just too
far out there for most.
Speaker 1: Okay, so did anything happen to challenge that.
Speaker 2: Then in nineteen ninety five, comet hailbop arrived and it
was spectacular. It became one of the brightest objects in
the night sky, visible even during daylight hours. At its peak,
everyone was watching astronomers and the public alike absolutely captivated.
Speaker 3: I remember Hailbophue it was, and in November nineteen ninety six,
an amateur astronomer named Chuck Schremick captured a photograph of
Hailwop and observed something unexpected, unexpected that is to pretty
much everyone except.
Speaker 2: Tom ben Flander.
Speaker 1: What did he see?
Speaker 2: There was a distinct bright object positioned near the comet's nucleus,
looking very much as though Hailbop had a companion, a
secondary object.
Speaker 1: Traveling with it the moon, like van Flander and predicted it.
Speaker 2: Certainly looked like it. Unfortunately, Shrammick rather sensationally claimed it
was a saturn like UFO, which immediately led to a
flory of dismissals and ridicule from professional astronomers, and the
whole thing got tangled up in ufology.
Speaker 1: Ah, so the potential scientific discovery got buried.
Speaker 2: It largely did. What got overshadowed in that media frenzy
was just how truly weird comet Hailbop itself was, even
putting aside the potential companion object weirdhow well for starters,
it seemed to have not just one, but multiple distinct nuclei,
multiple bright points within the coma, and it possessed two distincts,
which isn't unheard of, but one of them was made
primarily of sodium sodium?
Speaker 1: Why is that significant?
Speaker 2: If Hailbop were indeed a fragment of a water ridge
planet that exploded, a planet that maybe had oceans, the
presence of sodium would make perfect sense. It would likely
have been left behind in salt deposits from those ancient
oceans on the original celestial body. A dirty snowball from
the Oort cloud wouldn't necessarily have concentrated sodium like that.
Speaker 1: Okay? Interesting? Was there other evidence supporting Van Flandrin's comet idea?
Speaker 2: Yes, other pieces started to fall into place. The Galileo spacecraft,
on its way to Jupiter flew by the asteroid Ida
and discovered it had its own tiny moon, dactyl an
asteroid with a.
Speaker 1: Moon right e'd a dactyl i. Remember that.
Speaker 2: Then the near Shoemaker mission, which orbited the asteroid Arrows
detected unusual gravitational forces, suggesting that maybe something more massive
or complex was hidden inside, not just a uniform rock. And,
perhaps most famously, when comet Shoemaker Levy nine was heading
towards its spectacleicular impact of Jupiter in nineteen ninety four,
astronomers realized it wasn't a single object at all. Jupiter's
gravity had torn it apart earlier, revealing it was actually
twenty one distinct pieces traveling together in formation, like a
broken necklace of cosmic shrapnel.
Speaker 1: String of pearls.
Speaker 2: They called it exactly. All of this, taken together, strongly
suggested that Van Flandern was onto something profound. These weren't
just random space rocks or simple dirty snowballs. They looked
much more like tangible evidence of something bigger, compelling proof
pointing to objects scarred by a shattered solar system. And
increasingly the focus of this shattered system narrative kept coming
back to one place, Mars.
Speaker 1: So while Van Flannen was developing this theory about an
exploded planet mal deck and seeing commets and asteroids as
a resulting shrapnel, there was this other researcher, Richard Hoagland,
who was independently exploring theories about well a dead civilization
on Mars.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right. Hoagland was focused on anomalies on the
margin's surface, particularly in the Sidonia region, the famous on
Mars and other structures that he interpreted as artificial.
Speaker 1: And somehow their paths cross. These two very different lines
of research they did, and.
Speaker 2: When they started talking, they began to see how their
seemingly disparate theories might actually support each other. Van Flanderan's
exploded planet could provide the why for Mars devastation, and
Hogland's surface anomalies could be the what that was destroyed.
It started to create a much more complete and frankly
astounding picture of our Solar system's potentially violent past. Both
men had looked at Mars and recognized something profoundly odd
about it. It simply didn't behave like a typical planet.
Speaker 1: We keep coming back to Mars being weird.
Speaker 2: It really is. Its orbit, as we said, is notably
more oval, more eccentric than circular. Its mass is surprisingly
small for its distance from the Sun, only about eleven
percent of Earth's mass. It's just a planet that presents
far more questions than easy answers.
Speaker 1: And the most striking visual clue is that split personality thing,
the Martian dichotomy exactly.
Speaker 2: It truly looks like two completely different worlds got smashed together.
The northern hemisphere remarkably smooth, vast flat plains covered in
what looked like ancient dried up ocean beds, almost serene
on the south, a total disaster zone, chaotic, heavily cratered,
rugged mountains, rough terrain everywhere it looks like it's been
through Hell.
Speaker 1: Is a difference just on the surface.
Speaker 2: No, and this is crucial geologically. The southern crust of
Mars is an astonishing twenty miles thicker on average than
the northern.
Speaker 1: Crest twenty miles thicker. How does that happen naturally, that's
the question.
Speaker 2: It's not consistent with normal erosion or typical geological processes
like plate tectonics, which Mars doesn't seem to have had
in the same way as Earth. It's almost as if
an entire layer of debris, maybe from an external source,
was somehow pasted onto just one half of the planet.
Speaker 1: Like it got hit by something massive, mostly on one side.
Speaker 2: That's one way to think about it, and to deepen
the mystery. The southern hemisphere isn't just thicker, it's far
far older. Geologically speaking. The southern highlands appear to be
maybe two billion years older than the northern lowlands.
Speaker 1: Two billion years difference on the same planet. That's bizarre.
Speaker 2: It is profoundly strange. And then you have the volcanoes,
these colossal shield volcanoes like Olympus Monds, the largest volcano
in the entire Solar System, three times taller than Mount Everest.
It sits on this massive uplift in the Martian crust
called the Tharsis Bulge. Okay, but here's the really interesting part.
Directly opposite Olympus Mons and the Tharsis Bulge, on the
exact other side of Mars, one hundred and eighty degrees away,
there's another prominent rise, another bulge called the Arabia to row.
Speaker 1: Two bulges exactly opposite each other. That doesn't seem random.
Speaker 2: It's anything all random. This is precisely what happens when
a moon is tidly locked to its parent planet. The
immense gravitational pull of the larger body creates permanent rock
bulges on its tidally locked moon, one facing the planet
and one facing directly.
Speaker 1: Away, like our moon has bulges.
Speaker 2: Yes, although less pronounced in rock. We see this phenomenon
very clearly on many moons in our Solar system, Jupiter's
moons Europa and Io, Saturn's Moon's Titan and Enceladus, Neptune's
moon Triton, even Uranus's moon Miranda shows signs. So if
Mars was indeed Maldek's moon, as Van Flanden proposed.
Speaker 1: It would have been tidally locked, always showing the same face.
Speaker 2: To Maldeck, exactly just like our moon always shows the
same face to Earth. Maldeck's immense gravity would have locked
Mars into that orientation.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if Mars was tidally locked and had oceans,
which we now know it did, Hogland theorized what else
Maldeck's gravity would have done?
Speaker 2: Right? Right? For potentially millions of years, that constant, immense
gravitational pull from Maldeck would have drawn Mars's ancient oceans
into a specific pattern. Hogland suggested it would create two
massive ocean systems, perhaps flowing in a clockwise pattern, constrained
by those tidal bulges.
Speaker 1: Two oceans held in place by gravity.
Speaker 2: And these two massive ocean systems, according to the theory,
would have met and ground against each other right near
the Martian equator, constantly churning and eroding the surface between.
Speaker 1: Them, grinding away for millions of years. What would that create?
Speaker 2: It would gradually carve deeper and deeper into the Martian surface,
creating an enormous scar, and today we call that scar.
Speaker 1: Valley's marineris the giant canyon system on.
Speaker 2: Mars, the giant canyon system. It's an astounding twenty five
hundred miles long and up to four miles deep. It
absolutely dwarfs Earth's Grand Canyon, makes it look like a mere.
Speaker 1: Scratch, and NASA struggles to explain how Valley's marineras formed conventionally.
Speaker 2: Yes, explanations involving water erosion or tectonic rifting don't fully
account for its immense scale and peculiar features. But if
Mars truly had these twin oceans held in place and
scoured by Malde's immense gravity, meeting and grinding at that
exact spot for millions upon millions of years, suddenly the
canyon's mind boggling scales starts to make a kind of
horrifying sense.
Speaker 1: And the fact that we now know Mars did have
vast oceans.
Speaker 2: It lends significant support to that part of the picture. Yes,
while mainstream science initially dismissed the idea of significant ancient
water on Mars, it is now abundantly confirmed Mars was
once a blue planet. This adds weight to theories involving
a more dynamic, potentially catastrophic past driven by external gravitational forces.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is painting a pretty wild picture and exploded
planet Maldeck Mars as its former moon, scarred by tidal forces.
But this brings us to maybe the most controversial and
honestly the most thrilling aspect of this whole deep dive.
Speaker 2: The question of what happened on Mars exactly.
Speaker 1: If Van Flandern had the exploded planet and Hoglan had
potential signs of an ancient Martian civilization, then another individual,
doctor John Brandenburg, a plasma physicist who actually specialized in
nuclear weapons effects, found something in the NASA data that
suggested what might have happened to that civilization.
Speaker 2: He believes those Martians, if they existed, were victims of
a nuclear war.
Speaker 1: A nuclear war on Mars. How did he even come
to that conclusion.
Speaker 2: It's important to note Ueberg was an initially looking for
evidence of nuclear war on Mars. He apparently found the
idea quite outlandish himself at first. However, in the course
of his professional work studying nuclear weapons and their fallout patterns,
he meticulously examined a publicly available Mars data from various
NASA missions gamma ray spectrometry data specifically, and what did
you find? What he discovered was profoundly disturbing, at least
to him. The Martian surface, particularly in certain regions, had
unusual concentrations of a specific isotope called xenon one twenty.
Speaker 1: Nine zene on one twenty nine. Okay, why is that
isotope important?
Speaker 2: Because here on Earth, significant concentrations of xenon one twenty
nine primarily come from exactly one source, nuclear fission. It's
a known by product of nuclear reactor operation and more significantly,
nuclear explosions. It's not something produced in large amounts by say,
volcanic activity or typical cosmic radiation processes.
Speaker 1: So a nuclear fingerprint essentially.
Speaker 2: That's how Brandenburg interpreted it. And the concentrations on Mars
were highest and two very specifically locations Sidonia famously home
to the Face on Mars and other alleged anomalist structures,
and in another region called Galaxi's Chaos.
Speaker 1: How high were the levels?
Speaker 2: According to his analysis, the xenon levels in these hotspots
were two and a half times higher than anywhere else
in the Solar System, including Earth's natural background. Levels to
produce that specific isotopic signature, and that much of it.
Brandenburg concluded it would require massive nuclear detonations. We're talking
weapons measured not in kilotons like the Hiroshima bomb, but
in megatons, huge air bursts.
Speaker 1: He suggested, Wow, and he published this.
Speaker 2: What was the reaction He published his findings around twenty
fourteen twenty fifteen. As you can probably imagine, the mainstream
scientific community's response was largely dismissive. Many called him misguided,
suggested he was misinterpreting the data or simply seeing patterns
where unexisted. The idea was just too extraordinary for most
scientists to entertain seriously.
Speaker 1: I can imagine. But here's where it gets even weirder. Right,
Brandenburg wasn't actually the first person to theorize that Mars
died in a nuclear war involving an exploded planet.
Speaker 2: No, Astonishingly, he wasn't years earlier. The core elements of
that theory appeared in the most unlikely of places, a comic.
Speaker 1: Book now comic book seriously.
Speaker 2: Seriously, in nineteen fifty eight. That's a full eighteen years
before NASA's Viking Ie probe, ever, took the first photos
of the Sidonia region and The Face on Mars. The
legendary comic book artist and writer Jack Kirby created a
story for Harvey Comics called The Face on Mars.
Speaker 1: Jack Kirby, the guy who co created Captain America, Fantastic
four or Hulk.
Speaker 2: That Jack Kirby, That Jack Kirby, and the plot of
his nineteen fifty eight story is just uncanny.
Speaker 1: Okay, tell me what happens. In Kirby's story.
Speaker 2: Astronauts land on Mars and discovered this gigantic stone face
sticking out of the sand. One of them climbs into it,
falls through an eye socket, and experiences this vivid vision
like a psychic imprint, left behind, a vision of what
he sees Mars as it once was, a vibrant, living
world inhabited by a race of peaceful giants who built
great cities. These giants created intelligent machines to serve them,
but the machines evolve true artificial intelligence, became self aware
and demanded equality.
Speaker 1: Huh oh, classic sci fi trope, right.
Speaker 2: The giants refused, and a devastating war erupted between the
giants and their machines, lasting for generations. Finally, the giants
constructed a doomsday weapon and aimed it not at Mars
but at the machine's primary home world, which Kirby depicted
as a planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.
Speaker 1: Between Mars and Jupiter where the asteroid.
Speaker 2: Belt is exactly in Kirby's story. The weapon works, the
planet explodes, but the catastrophic blasts wave from the exploding
planet also strips away Mars's atmosphere and kills almost everyone
on Mars, giants and machines alike. The few surviving giants
in Kirby's narrative carved. The giant faces a warning to
the Cosmos and then retreat underground to face their ultimate extinction.
Speaker 1: That that is disturbingly close to the brendenburg Land Flander
Hogeland synthesis nuclear war, an exploded planet between Mars and
Jupiter forming an asteroid belt, survivors leaving monuments in nineteen
fifty eight.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly specific, isn't it. Now Here's a fascinating detail
that adds another layer. Jack Kirby was known to be
friends with prominent rocket scientists in the late fifties. People
associated with Werner von Braun's team, scientists like Willie lay
who had worked on the German V two rocket program.
Speaker 1: So people with high level access, people involved in the
early space program exactly.
Speaker 2: These weren't just casual acquaintances. These were individuals with security clearances,
likely having conversations and accessing information that we the public
can only speculate about. Did Kirby or hear something? Did
someone tell them a story off the record? We don't know.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's one strange connection. Is there more?
Speaker 2: And then there's another layer of just weirdness? Project Stargate
This is a real classified US government program that ran
for decades investigating psychic phenomena like remote viewing for intelligence
gathering purposes.
Speaker 1: Right, the government psychic Spies program.
Speaker 2: During this program, one of their most renowned and apparently
accurate remote viewers was a man named Joe mcmonagall. He
was a highly decorated military officer, a Vietnam War hero,
described as a total straight arrow, definitely not someone who
read comic books or was into fringed theories.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what did mcmoneagall do.
Speaker 2: On one occasion under control conditions? Mcmonagle was given a
set of geographic coordinates sealed in an envelope with absolutely
no context standard remote viewing protocol. He didn't know what
or where he was.
Speaker 1: Supposed to be looking at and what did he report seeing.
Speaker 2: He reported seeing humanoid beings, but described them as very
tall giants. He saw huge structures, evidence of vast cities,
a complex civilization, but he said their civilization was dying
and they seemed acutely aware of their impending doom.
Speaker 1: And the coordinates? Where was he looking?
Speaker 2: When Joe emerged from his remote viewing session, the project
officer handed him the envelope containing the target information. The coordinates,
it turned out, were from Mars, specifically the Sidonia region
approximately one million years.
Speaker 1: BC one million BC. Giant beings, dying civilization.
Speaker 2: Mcmonigaill had reportedly never heard any of these specific theories
about Mars, yet his remote viewing session seemed to describe
elements remarkably similar to what Van Flanderen, Hogland, and even
Jack Kirby's story touched upon independently decades later.
Speaker 1: So the question hangs there was Kirby's nineteen fifty eight
story just pure coincidental fiction, or did he somehow tap
into something, maybe something he heard from his scientist friends,
or maybe something else His comic described nuclear war on Mars,
an exploded planet, creating the asteroid belt, survivors, building monuments,
all the same core elements. It's a chilling conversions of ideas.
Speaker 2: It really is. But there's one final dark twist to
doctor Brandenburg's theory. He doesn't actually believe the nuclear explosions
came from the Martians themselves fighting each other. No, then
who He suggests it was an attack, an attack from
somewhere or something else. Entirely, someone or something wanted Mars dead,
wanted that civilists wiped out, and whatever it was, they succeeded.
Speaker 1: An external attack. That's even more terrifying.
Speaker 2: And Brandenberg's most chilling warning, based on his interpretation of
the data and this scenario is this Mars, he claims,
was only the beginning. Whatever did this might still be
out there.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a lot to take in the face on Mars.
The exploded planet theory, ancient nuclear war, maybe an external
aggressor It's an incredibly compelling narrative, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It absolutely is. All the pieces seem to fit together
with remarkable precision, maybe a little too perfectly for some skeptics.
Speaker 1: Right, And that paradoxically is often The very problem critics
point to, isn't it It can look like confirmation bias,
forcing the pieces to fit a preconceived narrative.
Speaker 2: That's a fair criticism to raise. Definitely, when a theory
explains everything perfectly, you have to wonder if you're connecting
dots that shouldn't be connected.
Speaker 1: So what are the main counter arguments From the perspective
of mainstream science. How do they push back against these?
Let's face it, pretty radical ideas?
Speaker 2: Okay, let's break it down, starting with Van Flandern's solar
fission theory. The idea that the Sun ejected the planets
well does elegantly explain things like why planets orbit and
a flat plane, and why they possess most of the
Solar System's angular momentum.
Speaker 1: The big problem is we've never seen it happen, right, That's.
Speaker 2: The main critique. Yes, if stars regularly eject planets through fission,
especially in their youth, we should observe it happening somewhere.
Astronomers have now cataloged thousands of star systems, many of
them young, but not one has ever been definitively caught
in the act of solar fission.
Speaker 1: What was Van Flandern's response to that.
Speaker 2: His response was reasonable, suggesting that maybe it only happens
when stars were very very young, in a phase we
haven't observed much, or maybe it's a rare event, or
maybe we're simply looking at the wrong time in a
star's evolutionary cycle. While that's a fair point, it ultimately
remains a theory without direct observational proof. It's an explanation
that fits some facts but lacks that smoking gun observation.
Speaker 1: Okay, what about the the exploded planet hypothesis for the
asteroid belt, the fate nor Maldeck idea. What are the
main scientific challenges there?
Speaker 2: Well, the biggest one, and critics always emphasize this is
the mass issue. The entire asteroid belt combined, all those
millions of rocks adds up to less mass than our
own moon. How could that possibly be the remnants of
a whole large planet?
Speaker 1: But didn't Olber's and van flander and have an answer
for that the five percent argument?
Speaker 2: They did. As we discussed then, Flandering in particular did
meticulous calculations. His math showed that if a planet were
to explode violently in the vacuum of space, based on
the physics of explosions and escape velocities, you'd only expect
about five percent of its original mass to remain orbiting
in that region. The rest we flung out, fall into
the sun or vaporized, and that five percent is remarkably
about the percentage of a hypothetical planet's mass that we
actually observe in the asteroid belt today. So in that
specific regard, the math aligned surprisingly well.
Speaker 1: So the mass argument isn't necessarily a killer for the theory.
Speaker 2: It's debatable, but Van Flanderen provided a plausible quantitative defense.
The perhaps more significant challenge is simply that we've never
witnessed a planet explode, and beyond that, we lack a clear,
agreed upon natural mechanism for how a planet could explode
with that kind of force.
Speaker 1: Not volcanos or earthquakes.
Speaker 2: No natural geological processes like volcanic or tectonic activity just
don't release that kind of energy. Even hypothetical natural nuclear
reactors deep within a planet, like the ones found in
Oaklaw Gabon on Earth couldn't build up the pressure to
blow an entire planet apart. So if it did explode,
the mechanism remains a mystery unless.
Speaker 1: Unless as the theory suggests, the explosion wasn't natural.
Speaker 2: In origin precisely, which brings us neatly to Brandenburg's nuclear
war theory.
Speaker 1: Right the xenon one two nine that's real data, isn't it.
NASA satellites measured it.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The documented existence of xenon one twenty nine on
Mars and its elevated concentrations in certain areas compared to
others into the Solar System average is real and based
on published NACA data. That's not in dispute.
Speaker 1: So what's the counter argument? If it's a nuclear fingerprint,
isn't that pretty strong evidence?
Speaker 2: Critics argue that while xenon one twenty nine is a
product offission, it can also potentially form through other, much
slower processes over billions of years. Specifically, they point to
cosmic race relation, high energy cosmic rays hitting elements in
the Martian soil and atmosphere and breaking them down, sometimes
producing isotopes like xenon one twenty nine, especially.
Speaker 1: Since Mars has a weak magnetic field and thin atmosphere, right,
it gets bombarded exactly.
Speaker 2: Mars has very little protection from cosmic radiation compared to Earth,
so critics contend maybe that long term bombardment over billions
of years is all we're observing, not the signature of
ancient nuclear bombs.
Speaker 1: What does Brandon Burg say to that?
Speaker 2: Brandenburg naturally counters this. He argues that the geographical distribution
is wrong for cosmic rays. If it were just cosmic
rays showering the planet, you'd expect a more uniform distribution,
perhaps varying by latitude or altitude, But not these intense
hot spots concentrated in very specific areas like Sidonia and
Galaxy's chaos. He maintains the pattern looks much more like
fallout zones from specific large explosions. However, his critics remain
largely unconvinced by that rebuttal alone, the standard explanation is
still preferred by most planetary scientists.
Speaker 1: Okay, and then there's the face on Mars itself, the
visual centerpiece for Hogland. What's the official stance there now.
Speaker 2: NASA's official stance has always been that it's a classic
case of peridolia, the well known psychological phenomenon of our
brain seeing familiar patterns, especially faces, in random or ambiguous stimuli,
like seeing animals in clouds or the man in the moon.
Speaker 1: So just a trick of light and shadow on a
natural landform, that's the position.
Speaker 2: They maintained that the original Viking one photos had low
resolution and specific lighting conditions they created the illusion. When
later missions like Mars Global Surveyor photographed the same feature,
known as the Sidonia Mensa, with much higher resolution cameras
and different lighting angles, the face looked much less facelike
and more like a natural mesa, a flat topped hill
eroded by wind.
Speaker 1: Although some researchers still argue about the symmetry and details
even in the later photos, don't they Oh.
Speaker 2: The debate definitely continues in some circles, but the mainstream
scientific consensus is firmly on the side of natural formation
and peridolia. However, it is worth noting just for balance,
that Richard Oglin, despite the heavy controversy surrounding the face
and some of his other interpretations, did make some other
specific predictions about Mars based on his Mars as a
former moon of an exploded planet model that were later
confirmed by NASA missions, like what he predicted, for example,
that if Mars was once a tidally locked moon with
ocean's influenced by Maldeck, we should find significant salt deposits
in valleys Marineris, where those hypothetical ancient oceans met and evaporated.
NASA's Mars Odyssey later found evidence consistent with large deposits
of chlorides and sulfates there. He predicted the northern plains
would show clear geological and chemical signs of having been
covered by ancient water. They absolutely do. He predicted that Mars,
like other tidly stressed boons, should exhibit specific types of
tectonic features related to that stress. Mars indeed exhibits features
like graybins and scarps that are consistent with past tidal forces.
Speaker 1: So some of his predictions panned out. Even if the
central face idea is widely rejected.
Speaker 2: It seems that way. So was it all just coincidence? Perhaps?
Or perhaps Hogland was insightful about some aspects of Martian
geology derived from his model, even if he was mistaken
or overly imaginative about others, like the Sidonia structures. That
seems a more nuanced conclusion than outright dismissing everything he
ever proposed based solely on the face. These are, after all,
incredibly complex interpretations of remote data from another planet's deep past.
Speaker 1: Okay, So summing up the skepticism, no direct observation of
solar fission. The asteroid belt mass needs the explosion physics explanation.
The nuclear signature on Mars could be explained by cosmic rays,
and the face is likely peridolia, though some related geological
predictions were interesting.
Speaker 2: That's a fair summary of the main counter arguments.
Speaker 1: Yes, but here's what we know for sure. Regardless of
the specific mechanism proposed, Mars is profoundly strange. It is
like two very different planets, almost jarringly stitched together. That's
not really debatable.
Speaker 2: The dichotomy is real. Yes, the age difference to crustal
thickness difference, those are measured facts.
Speaker 1: And Venus spins backwards. That's a fact. Uranus is tip
dramatically on its side, rolling around the Sun. Fact. Neptune's
orbit defies conventional formation predictions. Fact, and the asteroid belt
exists exactly where bodes Law predicted a massive planet should be.
That's also a fact.
Speaker 2: The undeniable scars, the anomalies, they are definitely there. Something
profoundly violent, or at least highly unusual and disruptive happened
in our solar system's past. The evidence is quite literally
written in the stars, etched into the very structure and
dynamics of our cosmic neighborhood.
Speaker 1: So the real question maybe isn't whether our solar system
was damaged or significantly altered from some initial state. The
evidence seems to suggest it was, but rather how or why,
and maybe the most chilling question, the one were often
hesitant to ask. Could whatever happened happen again?
Speaker 2: That does become the unsettling implication, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: It's a poignant legacy for doctor Tom van Flandern, who
passed away back in January two thousand and nine. His
exploded planet theory was largely dismissed by mainstream science during
his lifetime. Many called him a brilliant crank.
Speaker 2: It's often the fate of those who proposed truly paradigm
shifting ideas.
Speaker 1: He never lived to see water fully confirmed on Mars
by later missions, never saw the detailed mapping of moonlike
tidle features on Mars verified, never knew that his calculations
about the expected remaining mass and distribution of the asteroid
belt after an explosion would hold up surprisingly well to
further analysis. He apparently died, believing he had largely failed
to convince his peers.
Speaker 2: It's a sad footnote, but Van Flanderan saw something. He
saw a pattern hidden in plain sight that most to
others were explaining away piece by piece. Our Solar system,
he argued, is fundamentally broken, not metaphorically, but literally broken.
Speaker 1: He'sa venus spinning the wrong way clockwise instead of counterclockwise
like every other planet, as if something hit it so
hard it completely flipped its rotation.
Speaker 2: He saw Uranus lying on its side, rolling around the
sun sets, spinning like a top, its moons orbiting vertically.
That's just not a natural formation state.
Speaker 1: He saw Neptune's orbit making no sense based on gradual
accretion models, too elliptical, too far out, like it was
violently shoved there.
Speaker 2: In Pluto, not even a planet anymore, behaving like a refugee,
a moon that lost its home planet and got trapped
in this weird, tilted, erratic orbit.
Speaker 1: And then always back to Mars. Half smooth planes suggesting
ancient oceans half utterly destroyed, cratered highlands, its ancient ocean's gone,
its atmosphere stripped away, Strange nuclear isotopes lingering in its
soil and specific hotspots. A planet that looks like it
survived something it absolutely shouldn't have.
Speaker 2: Van Flander and traced it all back in his model
to two distinct cataclysmic events. Two planets in our Solar
System utterly destroyed. First, Theatan, the planet he believed existed
between Mars and Jupiter. Its explosion created the asteroid belt
and sent powerful shockwaves through the inner Solar System, perhaps
causing initial damage.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't the main event.
Speaker 2: No, in his timeline, that was just the warm up act,
perhaps destabilizing things. The truly monumental event, the one that
caused the most widespread damage we still see today, was
the destruction of a second, possibly larger planet, which he
called Maldeck, the one Mars orbit.
Speaker 1: Is, and when Maldeck exploded its.
Speaker 2: Moon, Mars was violently flung into its current eccentric orbit,
suffering catastrophic damage in the process. The enormous blast wave
Van Flander and calculated would have traveled outwards and inwards
it impacted Venus, potentially causing its backward flip. The vast
debris cloud from Maldeck's destruction reached the outer planets significantly
disrupting their orbits, tilting Uranus perturb.
Speaker 1: Being Neptune and Earth did we get hit.
Speaker 2: Earth mercifully likely caught some fragments too. Maybe some of
the large impact creators we see date back to this event.
But according to his model, we were lucky. We were
far enough away from Maldeck's location compared to Mars to
escape the full brunt of the cataclysm. We survived, wounded, perhaps,
but intact.
Speaker 1: Because here's what Van Flanderons seemed to understand with this
chilling clarity. If it happened twice, if two planets in
our system could be destroyed, it.
Speaker 2: Could absolutely happen again. Whatever destroyed those planets, whether it
was some kind of escalating natural cosmic catastrophe, a devastating
interplanetary nuclear war, as brandon Burg suggests, or something else entirely,
something we haven't even conceived of the underlying mechanism, the
potential for such an event might still exist. The danger
hasn't necessarily passed.
Speaker 1: We often like to think Earth is somehow special, uniquely protected,
don't we. We call it the Goldilocks planet, where everything
is just right for life.
Speaker 2: It's a comforting thought.
Speaker 1: But perhaps we're not special at all. Perhaps we're simply
next in line, living on borrow time in a dangerous neighborhood.
Speaker 2: It's a sobering perspective. Consider this, three planets generally considered
to be within the habitable zone of our son Venus,
Earth and Mars. Based on these theories, one is dead
and hypervolcanic, possibly due to catastrophe, One is dying or
long dead from catastrophe, and the third Earth continues to
exist seemingly oblivious, perhaps ignoring the clear cosmic warnings embedded
in the fates of its neighbors.
Speaker 1: We spend so much time and effort searching for aliens,
for extraterrestrial intelligence, because maybe, deep down we don't want
to be alone in the universe.
Speaker 2: It's a fundamental human question.
Speaker 1: But perhaps we've been looking in the wrong place all along.
Maybe the aliens were here, right here, within our own
solar system. Maybe they lived on Mars, built monuments, created civilizations,
and then they were gone, annihilated, And the.
Speaker 2: Face on Mars, if Hogland and others are right, might
not be a natural mesa at all. It might be
exactly what Jack Kirby imagined in nineteen fifty eight. Their
last message a warning carved in stone for any future
civilization intelligent enough to find it and decipher it.
Speaker 1: But we can't read it, or, perhaps more accurately, we
choose not to. We prefer the comforting explanation of peridolia.
Speaker 2: Van Flander and Hogland Brandenburg. They dedicated significant parts of
their lives trying to tell us what they believed was
the Solar system's real history, a history far more violent, dynamic,
and ultimately destructive than the slow, peaceful accretion model we
generally accept. Planets, even entire civilizations, don't necessarily last forever.
Nothing does.
Speaker 1: Earth sits here, nestled between two worlds, Venus and Mars,
that bear the undeniable hallmarks of profound cosmic trauma. We
study their ravaged corpses, analyze the scars, and perhaps we
mistakenly pretend we're somehow different, somehow immune to whatever happened
to them.
Speaker 2: But the data, the anomalies, the patterns, the very structure
of our cosmic neighborhood till a potentially different, more unsettling story.
Venus fell, Mars fell, And the truly disturbing implication, according
to these researchers and their theories, is that maybe some
people within institutions like NASA know this story, or at
least strongly suspected.
Speaker 1: You think they have the data.
Speaker 2: They certainly have more data than anyone else. Every mission
to Mars, these researchers, argue, sends back information that concerns
or is consistent with this catastrophic history. But the argument goes,
they keep quiet about the most troubling interpretations. They show
us the beautiful, often photoshops pictures of red sunsets and
ancient dried up river.
Speaker 1: Beds, the safe version of Mars exactly.
Speaker 2: But they don't emphasize the scars that could be interpreted
as evidence of war, the chemical signatures that might point
to nuclear detonations, the geological dichotomies that suggest planetary catastrophe,
the potential warnings carved into the landscape itself. The critics
would say they treat the public like frightened children, that
they don't think we can handle the harsh reality that
civilizations can die, that planets can be just destroid, that
all things must end, including potentially our own world someday.
Speaker 1: And maybe maybe they're right, Maybe we can't handle it.
Speaker 2: That's the uncomfortable question, isn't it If our solar system
truly bears these undeniable marks of ancient cataclysmic events, And
if the very structures of our neighboring planets whisper these
terrifying tales of destruction, what does that really say about
the fragility of life and indeed civilization anywhere in the cosmos?
How common is catastrophe?
Speaker 1: And maybe more importantly, what are we, as individuals and
as a species truly prepared to know about our own
cosmic past and our potential future. It's a heavy thought,
it is.
Speaker 2: Indeed, it forces you to look at our place in
the universe quite differently.
Speaker 1: So the next time you look up at the night sky,
maybe you'll see it not just as distant, serene points
of light, but perhaps as echoes of an incredibly violent history,
and maybe just maybe as a stark, profound reminder of
our own vulnerability, our own precious place in the grand
and possibly dangerous cosmic story.