2001: The Moon is the Monolith

A commenter recently raised the topic of the moon, and this is such a juicy topic for a site like ours. I provided my theory then, that our moon was originally one of the moons of Jupiter, placed here with Earth…and I wanted to more formally expand upon that here. Keep in mind, I say “theory” in the strictly scientific sense. This is just an idea, and I welcome feedback (one commenter already very helpful in that regard). Keep reading, and see if you think I might be onto something.

As a framework for this post, I want to use the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is not only my favorite film (far and away the best film in the history of film-making), but it is also a message to humanity full of secrets. Kubrick hid secret messages in his movies…this much is known. It should not be surprising considering the company that Kubrick kept, his lifestyle, and the content of his films. By the end of his life, he lived in seclusion and is thought by some to have been murdered for his film Eyes Wide Shut (imagine telling Warner Bros that you were filming a romantic drama and then giving them that). So how is 2001 full of secrets? Below, I hope to explore one such way.

Without ruining the movie too much (spoilers ahead), I want to remind readers what happens in 2001…approximately. In the year 2001 (decades ahead of the 1968 world in which the film was released), the United States and various other earthly powers have built bases on the moon. Space travel is commonplace, especially for high-level government officials. When the United States finds a perfectly rectangular black monolith deliberately buried 4 million years ago on the moon, they quickly hush the whole event up through a cover story of an epidemic on their moon base. A scary sounding “epidemic of unknown origin”. The Russians are displeased and sense some kind of subterfuge.

After a quick few meetings with our main government honcho where he reiterates the importance of the find and explains the need for the cover story (which the government itself created as misdirection), we jump ahead in time to the mission to Jupiter. This is the spaceship that looks like a sperm with HAL-9000 on it. It turns out that when the monolith on the moon was approached by humans, it set off some kind of extremely powerful signal…pointed directly at Jupiter. Attempting to find out the meaning of all this, we find that the US government has sent this mission to explore. This is essentially the framework of 2001.

How does this relate to my theory of the moon? Well, in a nutshell with 2001 we are left with the idea that there is something “deliberately” placed on the moon and pointing to Jupiter (or the moons of Saturn in the book) which implies some kind of intelligence beyond our current understanding. The key details are the deliberate nature of something related to the moon with specific reference to the moons of gas giant planets. Please take another look at the main photo at the top of this post, and consider how perfectly our moon fits as being one of the rocky moons of Jupiter. It has the same size, general appearance, density, and tidal locking indicative of the moons of gas giant planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn…fitting perfectly in size between Io and Europa.

In these still relatively early days of scientific understanding, there is little scientific consensus on how our moon could have formed naturally. The only thing known for sure is that our moon is an oddity of all oddities. Take this quote from a recent article on the moon’s uniqueness, from Forbes:

In most cases, as simulations and observations have taught us, every planet and moon that forms has its own unique elemental composition based on the history of how it formed. Every planet has a unique density and a unique ratio of the different elements, and every Moon has a unique composition as well, distinct from its parent planet. Just like less dense materials float atop denser ones — Earth’s outer core floats atop the inner core, which the mantle floats upon, which the crust floats upon, followed by the ocean and the atmosphere — a gravitational and temperature gradient ensures that the planets and moons have different compositions from one another.

But our Moon seems to be the exception to all the normal rules. Its surface rocks have the same composition as Earth’s; it’s far, far larger and more massive compared to Earth than any other moon compared to its parent planet; it has a small, Earth-like iron core; it orbits out-of-plane of the Earth’s rotation and revolution; and it’s tidally locked to Earth but axially aligned almost perfectly (within 1.5º) with the Sun. The leading theory for how the Moon got to be formed is known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis, which states that a large, Mars-sized protoplanet struck a young Earth early on, kicking up debris which coalesced into the Moon.

The top theory of present-day for how the moon could have formed naturally with Earth is through some kind of tremendous collision. This site provides a good run-down for how none of the existing theories for moon formation make any sense. Let’s be real here…we may be reaching the technological age, but there is still so little about our planet and our universe that we understand. Even those who espouse the so-called “Giant Impact Hypothesis” for moon formation still remind us how rare this kind of collision would be, and how unusual the resulting moon is. The source puts it well at saying: “This theory requires an extreme amount of fine tuning that makes it highly improbable to impossible.” The Giant Impact Hypothesis is also known to have fatal flaws. A collision of this magnitude should have knocked Earth out of solar orbit, and it does not explain the presence of water in moon samples. So basically, we just have no idea how the moon could have formed around Earth naturally. Perhaps this is because it did not form around Earth naturally?

Rocky, inner planets such as Earth should NOT have such a tremendously large  partner as our moon. They simply should not. It is not natural. I would challenge anyone out there who is familiar with the search for exoplanets to give me an example among the pseudo-Earths where the analog is shown to have a large, rocky, tidally-locked moon such as ours. It goes against the basics of nature. If Earth is already an oddity of near-impossible proportions for harboring intelligent life, then we are a double impossibility for the fact that our rocky, inner planet is paired with such a gigantic and exceptional moon. Our moon does not fit at all…it is a true anomaly. You can find plenty of information out there about this. Scientists are not even able to create a workable hypothesis for how our moon could have formed that explains the wide array of anomalies seen. This is critical.

What does this all mean? The movie 2001 provides us with some clues. In the movie, burying a monolith in a random spot on the moon is like leaving a path of jellybeans on a path that you know very few people will reach. So many things would have to happen for the inhabitants of that planet to actually discover the buried monolith on the moon and understand its implications. They would have to master science, progress along a path that brings them into space exploration, colonize the moon, excavate, find the monolith, and extrapolate the meaning. It would be understood by those who placed the monolith that its discovery would only occur after that society had reached a very specific stage in its development. In a nutshell, it would only be found when that society was actually ready to truly understand its implications.

We need to begin looking at the moon itself in the same way. The moon IS the monolith. Mono-lith meaning “single rock”. The revelation is that the moon itself is the object that has been deliberately placed. By appearance, size, and density our moon is a perfect fit as the rocky moon of a gas giant planet. It is a textbook moon of gas giant, and is a near impossibility as a natural satellite of an inner rocky planet. What is the obvious revelation staring at us there? Why would scientists try to force two puzzle pieces together that obviously do not fit, when there is a clear place that our moon DOES fit as having its origins? It has all the hallmarks of the rocky moons of a gas giant planet and is the anomaly of all anomalies as the natural satellite of Earth. The obvious conclusion there is that we should start to try and understand how the Earth could have captured (or been provided) the moon of a gas giant planet!

We also see all kinds of absurd coincidences beyond this. Think of solar eclipses…the moon being placed at such a perfect distance as to become the exact same size as the sun from our perspective. Another impossible coincidence on top of a pile of 3 others! Our moon is the monolith sitting there, deliberately placed, standing as a constant message to us of its origins as the moon of a gas giant planet. It is a message that few understand, because our science and technology have only recently reached the stage where such a conclusion is nearly undeniable. It takes only the intellectual courage to understand the implications of what is right in front of our faces.

Perhaps the secret is that some intelligence, seeking to guide intelligent life on Earth, scooped up one of the rocky moons of a gas giant and placed it at the perfect distance. They knew that some day, the inhabitants of Earth might be smart enough to realize the significance, so they built in signals (perfect solar eclipse) to tell us what they did. How could an object the size of the moon have been plucked from the heavens? Good question…I personally feel that when we consider the billions of years of the universe, we have to realize that technologies may have developed which would seem God-like to us. We must be humble enough to realize that our moon might have been placed just as well as it might have been captured. When we are dealing with nothing but long-shot probabilities, the “intentionally placed” theory becomes worthy of serious consideration.

Fundamentally, the evidence tells us that our moon is a perfect fit as the moon of a gas giant planet. This means that it must have either been captured naturally, or must have been placed here by an intelligence far beyond our understanding. Take your pick; the bottom line is that our moon is actually the moon of a gas giant planet. Once you begin to see this, it is hard to NOT see it. Like the coastlines of Africa and South America lining up, our moon seeming to be a perfect fit as the moon of a gas giant planet is hard to ignore…especially when scientists struggle so fundamentally to explain how our moon could have formed naturally around Earth in the first place.

PS: There is an interesting connection to Velikovsky here, since Kubrick actually experimented with using Saturn instead of Jupiter in 2001, but couldn’t get the rings of Saturn looking realistic enough in time. Arthur C. Clarke, writing his book simultaneously with the movie script, actually used Saturn and its moon Iapetus as the source of the mission. The idea of Earth’s moon being connected with the moons of a gas giant planet bring us back to Velikovsky’s Saturn theory (that Saturn used to be MUCH closer to Earth), and all related Saturnian theories. If we imagine that the moon was naturally captured, then we must imagine that Earth has had extremely close calls with Saturn or Jupiter in its past. This is not a currently accepted scientific belief, but the moon itself is physical evidence that supports this.