Far away places with strange sounding names. Sometimes they exist; sometimes they exist but not quite in the way at times suspected or expected; sometimes they don’t exist at all. It’s the latter two categories I examine here.
Impossible, improbable or imaginary geographies are often located, as things turned out, off planet. Here are a few examples of those impossible, improbable & imaginary extraterrestrial geographies.
Vulcan: We all know that Mercury is the closest planetary object to the Sun. But that’s not celestial physics set in stone. There could be objects even closer in, though difficult to see in the intense glare of our parent star, just as many of us haven’t ever seen Mercury being too close to the Sun to be seen with the unaided eye unless conditions are absolutely spot-on. So, way back when, when astronomical instrumentation and technology wasn’t as good as today, coupled with expectations and the thrill of the chase, well it’s not too surprising that astronomers ‘found’ that there was a planet even closer to the Sun than Mercury. Such a planet would be hot property indeed, and so when looking for mythological names that were ‘hot’ with which to christen it, well Vulcan fit the bill. And so it came to pass that Vulcan was the planet closest to the Sun; Mercury relegated to next in line. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Wishful thinking trumped less than ideal observations and so Vulcan was created in the mind as opposed to being actually verifiable. Mercury was restored to first rock from the Sun status – Vulcan became imaginary real estate. But, as Star Trek fans all know, the name lives on as the (non-solar) home of Mr. Spock and kin.
Neith: Venus, the Goddess of Love, should have a lover – a companion. Venus, the planet, should too have a companion. After all, Venus is the near twin of Earth in terms of size and proximity to the Sun (Venus is second rock out), and Earth has a natural satellite so it stood to reason that Venus should have one too. Alas, it was not to be, but not for lack of trying. Take Neith – companion (but in mythology not lover) to Venus the planet. As with the case of Vulcan, wishful thinking, plus perhaps less than ideal telescopes (relative to modern scopes) led to a flurry of sightings of that expected satellite of Venus, named Neith, so confident were the discoverers that this was no illusion but a physical object. Now there’s a slight problem here. Venus isn’t that close in proximity to the Sun that solar glare should have caused problems. It wasn’t just one professional astronomer who sighted Neith, but many. And while the optical equipment of the day wasn’t 2012 state-of-the-art, it was more than adequate, or should have been more than adequate, to see a reasonable sized satellite in orbit around Venus. So, one could argue that Neith was indeed an actual bit of celestial real estate that went walkabout. Natural satellites don’t have a habit of going walkabout and disappearing. Unnatural satellites on the other hand… Now, might our own Moon be such an unnatural satellite?
Spaceship Moon: Once upon a time there was no real scientifically satisfactorily explanation for the Moon, or rather how the Moon came to be our Moon. One idea that the Moon was an independent body in an irregular and rogue orbit that somehow in a just-so kind of way happen to get gravitationally captured by the Earth was really too implausible. The Moon could have formed jointly with the Earth out of the same cosmic interstellar dust cloud that gave rise to the rest of the solar system. Some bits of that cosmic dust clumped together to form the planets around the parent star, the Sun, and in like fashion other bits of that dust came together around the planets to form natural satellites. Alas, post Apollo, chemical analysis of Moon bits compared to Earth bits ruled that out. For a similar reason, as well as problems in celestial physics, the Moon wasn’t born of a rapidly spinning proto-Earth leaving behind the Pacific basin as its scar, in the same way water droplets would be flung off a globe that was rapidly spinning.
Enter stage left the far-out-star-scout alternative idea that the Moon had nothing to do with the proto-Sun and proto-solar system and proto-Earth. The Moon wasn’t a rogue object captured by the Earth’s gravity, but it was a rouge object that was deliberately steered into an Earth orbit. The Moon was actually a hollow artificially constructed spaceship, covered with lots of dust and rock debris as a natural shield against cosmic radiation and other cosmic bits that would now and again slam into this spaceship – hazards of an interstellar voyage. Anomalies like Transient Lunar Phenomena (strange glowing lights seen on an irregular basis on the lunar surface) are explained as artificial. The Moon’s aliens are the source of the UFO phenomenon. The reason for the aliens steering the artificial Moon into Earth orbit in the first place is that Earth provided all the close at hand next door resources the aliens could ever want.
Of course to spoil that good artificial hollow Moon theory, some bright scientist comes up with yet another natural lunar origin explanation that now fitted all of the facts – a rogue near Mars-sized planet slammed, albeit just a glancing blow, into the proto-Earth, and the resulting mixture of thrown off debris from the proto-Earth and the near totally destroyed smaller rouge planet came together under gravity in near Earth proximity to become, the Moon. So, alas, the artificial hollow Moon proved to be another bit of implausible geography.
Face on Mars: The ‘is there or isn’t there life on Mars’ game was set afoot when the American Viking space probes arrived in the Martian arena in 1976. On the scale of micro-organisms, that question still hasn’t been resolved. There are those who are convinced the Viking craft that landed on the Martian surface hit biological pay dirt. Most others say it was only chemical, not biochemical pay dirt. The fence is being sat on by others to this day. However, the other Viking craft that orbited Mars boldly detected not microbial life, but intelligent life on Mars. One photographed the ‘face on Mars’, and by Jove, that’s exactly what it looked like – one huge monolithic massive stone structure on the Martian surface that resembled down to exacting details, a human face. Well, appearances can be, and often are, deceiving. All of us, at one time or another has seen geometry and recognizable shapes, including faces, in the clouds or in rock formations or on toasted cheese sandwiches. Images of ‘Jesus’ appearing on all manner of things are regular fodder for the tabloids. Anyway, the whole ‘face on Mars’ issue spawned an entire mini publishing boom, though sceptics were 99 & 44/100’s % convinced that it was all just an illusion. And so it came to pass that NASA went back to Mars post-Viking, and, under pressure, had a new orbiting probe take another look under differing lighting conditions. The score – sceptics one; ‘face on Mars’ advocates zero. It really was all just an illusion, a trick of those lighting conditions that when coupled with some wishful thinking produced another example of imaginary geography.
Hollow Moons of Mars: But wait, we’re not quite through with Mars yet. Mars has two relatively tiny satellites discovered in 1877 and both named after offspring of Ares/Mars – the god of war - that orbit around it. The one farther out and smaller of the two is called Deimos (about 4 miles radius and over 12,400 miles altitude) and the other larger and closer moon is Phobos (about 7 miles radius; altitude 3700 miles from the Martian surface). Actually it would be more accurate to say that neither is a perfect sphere; potato-shaped is a more spot-on description.
Now it came to pass that some scientists monitoring the relative orbits of Deimos and Phobos noticed that they were shrinking much, much, faster that they should have been. The moons were spiralling in towards the planet, eventually destined to have a close encounter of the Ka-Boom impact kind. The very tenuous Martian atmosphere isn’t much of a drag to what must be solid rock moons. The only alterative explanation is that these satellites were hollow; much less dense than solid rock, and therefore, wait for it, artificial, probably relics of a long extinct Martian civilization. Well actually, there was another alternative explanation – the observations of the shrinking orbits were at the limits of resolution technology and were erroneous. Space probes that have since passed up-close-and-personal to and photographed these satellites, and show exactly what you’d expect – not gleaming metallic hollow space stations or the image of a Star Wars type of Death Star configuration, but irregular, potato-shaped, cratered hunks of rock.
Heaven: If you accept the literal truth of Biblical passages, you can draw no other conclusion other than that Heaven is a physical place not of this Earth since there are lots of passages relating beings ascending and descending twixt the two. Therefore Heaven must be located somewhere up there or out there and as the Bible points out, home to an assorted range of supernatural deities (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and staff, presumably angels (or extraterrestrial officers and crew depending on point of view). Unfortunately, despite Heaven being physical geography, it ain’t been seen by man, telescope or space probe. Heaven would have to be fairly conspicuous – deities and staff don’t reside on a quarter acre block. Try something more like the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace
Of course perhaps Heaven is located light-years away among the stars, but that would hinder rapid interventions by the Heavenly residents here on Terra Firma. Prayers can’t travel faster than the speed of light, and like radio broadcasts, rapidly fade according to the inverse-square law – twice the distance, one-quarter the strength; thrice the distance, one-ninth the strength, etc. So, Heaven, if it makes any sense at all, should be nearby, in cosmic terms. Maybe Heaven resides and is hidden within the cloud bands of Jupiter, though that’s hardly a tranquil or ideal location as is in fact most of the solar system’s real estate. Of course if Heaven were a spaceship, a large spaceship – think Buckingham Palace
Perhaps we all should be satisfied with the geography we got for real, keeping in mind that the geography we know is but a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny (repeat several hundred more times) of the geography yet to be discovered and explored – the vast cosmos beckons.
