This book will conclude without a chapter given over to the explosion of the Moon from Earth. In Chaos and Creation and Solaria Binaria lunagenesis is treated more directly, whereas here we have mentioned at many points its relevance to geological processes. Lunagenesis was the paramount holospheric event. No major geological process can be understood without a theory of the origins of the Pacific Basin. The reader can, if so minded, judge the plausibility and the consistency of the theory by tracing it with the help of the Index.
Geology has not been able fully to confront lunar fission because of its notions of time. Nearly all studies favoring the idea have placed the event in the most remote eras, because to place it later would require the reconstruction of later natural history, including that of the biosphere, Furthermore, recent explorations of the ocean bottoms have revealed their astonishing "youth." This finding has been thought to disprove even the earliest fission of the Moon, since lunar fission theory without the Pacific Basin as its point of departure would be unappealing.
But the new evidence piles up in favor of lunar fission from Earth. The physical calculations of mass fit are plausible; the Moon fits its hole. The Indo-Pacific Basin is there; the ocean bottoms are all freshly paved. The land has been cleaved into great and small chunks and directed at the source of the eruption. The cleavages have occurred at a negative exponential rate down to the very present. The only force capable of such large interlocked effects would be the passby of a gigantic exoterrestrial body interacting electrogravitationally with the Earth. Such evidence is resisted because it is felt that the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere would be totally destroyed. This is not a challenge to be met by theory alone. If the facts occur to demonstrate the prior existence of a totally encrusted and thriving world surface and, then, after an epic quantavolution, continuation of the same processes, greatly altered, lunar fission has to be believed.
Yet theoretical logic -call it speculation -has a large role to play, not the least in calculating whether the biosphere would survive. A review of all that has been written on this subject allows an affirmative. The extinction of a species is difficult; the extinction of tens of thousands of species is more difficult; the extinction of nearly all species requires the total explosion of the globe. Exponential reproduction over a few years can hide the most drastic reductions of population by fire, flood, thrusting, explosion, fall-out, radiation, de-oxygenating, and de-photosynthesizing conditions.
The very excesses of blast may harbor the secret of survival. Cyclonic action fashions its own boundaries. The cyclonic form is applicable to water, heat, dust, debris, electrical charge, radiation -to all that in a spread-out form would tend to exterminate life. An atmosphere permitting survival, by the theory of solaria binaria, would have been present in a huge plenum or sac surrounding the planets; in addition, atmospheric gases in close encounters can be exchanged, possibly even created under extreme conditions out of water and other compounds.
Surely survival would not be guaranteed. It might even be considered miraculous. Yet there is enough plausibility in survival so that extinction should not be assumed; what is perhaps the most useful and credible theory to explain the tortured Earth should not be passed over. If the Moon was assembled out of a blasted Earth in a highly developed and recent epoch, then the origins and behavior of continental drift are explained, world geography and physiography are explained, the oceans are explained, and the present state and distribution of the biosphere are explained.
It is astonishing and dismaying to consider the huge differences in time allowances between evolutionary and revolutionary morphology. The Grand Canyon has been a showpiece of geology as well as American tourism. Its accepted history is in the range of one to two billion years for the walls and 10 millions and more for the gorge. M. Cook's explanation calls for only I0,000 years to develop the whole complex. The whole world is implicated in such discrepancies, for the types of geological structures of the Earth are limited to a couple of dozens and they are nowhere unique.
Does it not wreck the earth sciences to propose a cut in time by a factor of 200,000? One might as well ask whether it wrecks economics to suffer both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. A quantavolutionary earth scientist can earn a professional livelihood as well as an evolutionary one, so long as his employer is unprejudiced. Further, radical criticism cannot but help any field, if it is properly conducted. Conventional science funds should be tithed to promote tests of the quantavolutionary model.
But beyond these considerations goes the nature of the field. Geology operates upon a few basic concepts, among them superposition, erosion, heat and pressure. And these are commonsense to begin with. When one rock rests upon another, it is younger, unless some force has intervened; erosion is the effects of wind and water upon landscape; heat and pressure can transform and transmute a substance.
Catastrophists do not deny these ideas; in fact, they invented them. Geology also has a large dictionary of names that are given to things large and small, representing infinite combinations of substances, heat, pressure, erosion, and position. The genius of geology is to bring order to this immense variety and to use this knowledge to practical ends like making cement and finding oil. To all of which the quantavolutionist says "amen."
Neither geology, nor any other science in its historical aspect, has to fear the idea of collapsed time, but can derive theoretical benefits from it. Let us speak for a moment of chemical evolution. Should it be as well termed quantavolution? I have here above (Page 119) spoken of the Miller-Urey experiments on the initiation of primitive life processes, and have generally considered the possible derivation of earthly existence from exoterrestrial and atmospheric sources. In Solaria Binaria we go farther into the matter, elaborating the life-creating and sustaining plenum of primeval Earth.
In 1983 C. Ponnamperuna reported the discovery of all five of the so-called "precursors of life" in the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia in 1959 [1] . The compounds are adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil, which are key molecules in DNA and RNA. He subsequently created all five bases "in one fell swoop" by subjecting a mixture of methane, nitrogen, and water to electrical discharges. This, he said, evidenced that chemical evolution could have been accomplished in a single pool of liquid (or dense atmosphere?) in primitive times. The process might have occurred exoterrestrially as well as on Earth, commented Melvin Calvin who had also studied chemical evolution and won a Nobel prize.
"In one fell swoop:" what, if anything, is this expression but a way of saying collapsing time and quantavolution? Nor can one arrogate to man alone the ability to compress time. Nature may be blind, but she is infinitely large, powerful, and busy.
Therefore, collapsing time may boggle the mind but does not destroy geology. Collapsing time introduces the need for high energy forces than can do in weeks what erosion can do in millions of years. The forces -wind, water, heat, pressure -are already present; it is a question of their organization and intensity. The more intense the forces, the more they depart from our experiences, and resemble the catastrophic recitals of the earliest humans.
Also, the more intense the forces, the more likely that they originate exoterrestrially. There appear to be no means whereby the scientific ideology pervading the earth sciences for the past century and a half can continue legitimately to ignore exoterrestrial causes and exoterrestrial effects in explaining our lately tortured Earth.
Notes (Epilogue)
1. P. M. Boffey, in the New York Times, 30 Aug. 1983.