The Ganymede Hypothesis - Part 2: Dark and bright sides of the ancient system
Rocky planets orbiting a sub Brown dwarf star would orbit inside the plasma sheath or Heliosphere of the small star. Radiant energy would not be in short supply, but light would be and would be canted towards the blue and red extremes of the visible spectrum. At a later point in time, the earth acquired dust-laden auroral bands which blocked out almost all light from North temporal latitudes. Dwardu Cardona and other authors have described the curious lack of an ice age in the arctic. At least some parts of the Earth went from being very dark places to being very, very dark places.
The Sun and Jupiter in ancient times
When the discovery of exoplanets was first confirmed, it was natural that there would be a sampling bias towards finding large, gas-like giants since their enormous physical size made them easier to detect than smaller sized terrestrial-type planets like Earth. What was not anticipated, however, was that these huge gas giants, some many times the mass of Jupiter, would be found circling in extremely close orbits around their host stars. This fact is completely at odds with the accepted SNDM notion of planetary formation. The gravitational-based nebular model for the formation of a solar system calls for gas-giant planets to inhabit the system’s outer edges, while smaller terrestrial planets are expected to take up the innermost orbits. When Jupiter-sized planets, or ‘hot Jupiters as they were subsequently called, started appearing where Earth-like planets should be, journalists covering mainstream science started talking about going back to the drawing board:
As astronomers discovered the first extra-solar planets, it quickly became obvious that the formation theories that we’d built on our own Solar System were only part of the story. They didn’t predict the vast number of hot Jupiters astronomers found nearly everywhere. Astronomers went back to the drawing board to put more details into the theory, . . .(Emphasis ours)
With gas-giant exoplanets now regularly discovered within 1 – 2 AU of their host stars, we now have growing data pointing to the common existence of gas-giants within the habitable zone of far-off distant sun-like stars - gas-giants not unlike our own Jupiter. It would not then be untoward to suggest that, given the then absence of the other major planets seen today, the Sun’s sole and original gas-giant, namely Jupiter, would most likely have been found in a much closer orbit to the one it currently holds, as seems to be the norm elsewhere. If such an orbit were within 1 – 2 AU of the Sun (where Earth is now), then it is reasonable to also suggest that Jupiter’s three currently ice covered moons, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, would have enjoyed liquid water environments spectacularly conducive to the existence of aquatic-based life had they also borne substantive atmospheres.
Creatures of the Saturnian (dark) system
Most if not all of the creatures of the Saturnian system, particularly dinosaurs and hominids, had larger eyes then we normally see in today’s land animals.
The eyes are the first thing a viewer notices with Danny Vendramini’s Neanderthal reconstructions:
Rob Gargett (the “Subversive Archaeologist ”) notes that if you draw a humanized Neanderthal with the eyes and nose as large as the bones indicate they would have to be, what you end up with is still outlandish:
Image courtesy www.themandus.org
The Neanderthal, in fact, had a larger brain than modern humans do but was not inventive like modern humans. Given a creature with a larger brain than ours and tens of thousands of years to work with, one might expect to find Neanderthal cities; of course there aren’t any. New studies are indicating that:
...Results imply that larger areas of the Neanderthal brain, compared to the modern human brain, were given over to vision and movement and this left less room for the higher level thinking required to form large social groups...
In other words, the Neanderthal brain was dominated by what you might call the neurological equivalent of the circuitry for a military night-vision scope.
Image courtesy of Rob Gargett,
The Subversive Archaeologist Blogspot
Creatures of the Sun/Jupiter (bright) system
Such were the adaptations of creatures of the Saturnian system
Humans and Dolphins have the smallest relative eye sizes of higher creatures; both would be very bad candidates for having either evolved or been created for the Saturnian system.
The Human/Hominid non relation
Humans would have been maladapted to Earth’s ancient conditions in at least three ways, and these three problems would have been severe enough to rule out any sort of hominid to human evolutionary schemes. In other words, a hominid wishing to evolve into a human would need to have:
- Lost his fur coat while an ice age was going on.
- Lost 99% of his sense of smell while trying to make it as a prey animal on land.
- Lost almost all of his night vision at a time when night was the only time of day to be had.
We read (Paabo and Max Planck) that some (not all) modern human groups share Neanderthal genes and that this implies some level of interbreeding between our own ancestors and Neanderthals. Such claims have to be able to pass simple sniff tests for logic to be believable, and these claims don't; Cosmos in Collision goes into these questions in some detail.
What do humans need from an environment?
An original home world for humans would have to have been bright. Darkness mainly induces humans to sleep and human eyes would have been all but worthless in the conditions of the Saturnian system. Such an original world would also have needed to be wet. Elaine Morgan catalogued a fairly long list of features which humans share with the aquatic mammals.
- The most obvious visual difference between us and primates is the fact of our legs being our major limbs; that is basically an adaptation for swimming and wading.
- Voluntary control of our breathing is an example. That is basically an adaptation for swimming; we take it for granted but monkeys and apes don't have it, and that is the only reason that chimpanzees and gorillas cannot be taught to speak English; they can be taught to communicate using deaf signs fairly easily.
- Face to face sex is a behavioral characteristic of aquatic mammals. If any land animals other than humans do this, it’s very rare.
- Likewise sweating and the way in which humans use fat are maladaptive for a land animal but reasonable for an aquatic mammal.
There are numerous other such examples, i.e. the list is a fairly long one. Humans still show a preference for living around water. . Most of our major cities now stand on the shore of some body of water and ‘going to the beach’ is a worldwide trait amongst humans vacationing. Yet another measure of the extent to which humans still prefer living near water today can be had from the fact that something like 80% of the targets that the US military might ever want to engage were said to have been within the 25 mile range of the guns of the Iowa class battleships, that is, within 25 miles of some shoreline.
Elaine Morgan’s thesis has never gained any traction in academia and there are two main reasons. One is that no fossil evidence of any sort of an aquatic ape has ever been found. The other (and more serious) problem is that there has never been a body of water on this planet which would be safe for humans to live in.
An original home world for humans would need to have been bright; it would need to have been wet; and its waters would need to have been safe. A 10 minute tour of the ancient sea monster exhibit hall of the Smithsonian Museum should convince anybody that the prehistoric oceans of this planet would not qualify.
By Ted Holden
Dwardu Cardona, “Flare Star,” Traffid Publishing, Victoria, B.C., Canada, 2007, page 81; quoting R. F. Griggs, “Indications as to Climate Change From the Timberline of Mount Washington,” Science, Vol. 95, No. 2473 (1942), p. 519
Canadian astronomers Bruce Campbell, G. A. H. Walker, and Stephenson Yang announced in 1988 the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting the star Gamma Cephei. This was subsequently fully confirmed in 2003. The 1992 discovery of two planets circling the pulsar PSR 1257+12 is generally recognized as the first fully confirmed discovery of an extra-solar planetary system.
Jon Voisey, Rocky, Low-Mass Planet Discovered by Microlensing, June 17, 2011, Universe Today.com; http://www.universetoday.com/86841/rocky-low-mass-planet-discovered-by-m...
BBC: “Neanderthals' large eyes 'caused their demise'” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21759233
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genome_project, “In May 2010, the project released a draft of their report on the sequenced Neanderthal genome. Contradicting the results discovered while examining mitochondrial DNA, they demonstrated a range of genetic contribution to non-African modern humans ranging from 1% to 4%. From their Homo sapiens samples in Eurasia (French, Han Chinese & Papuan) the authors state that it is likely that interbreeding occurred in the Levant before Homo sapiens migrated into Europe”