alert: alien spaceship orbiting saturn
The planet Saturn, has many moons. One of these moons is called Iapetus, and is a little odd.
For one thing, most of Saturn’s moons orbit around the plane of Saturn’s own orbit about the sun. The orbit of Iaptus doesn’t. In fact it is tilted by about 15 degrees. This is unusual. It is also very dark, reflecting less than 5% of the rays that hit it from the sun. It has a wierd 13km high ridge going just about all the way around the equator. Iapetus is a wierd shape too, not so much spherical as walnut shaped. It’s a strange moon.
Now, just suppose a large spacecraft had been parked around Saturn a billion years ago by some space faring species, then forgotten about. So it sits in its strange orbit for all those years, its hull gradually being peppered with meteorite collisions. Wouldn’t it look a bit like this:
Note the remains of the radio telescope assembly towards the top of Iapetus and the large circular access to the docking area in the centre of the “moon”. Obviously, you’d build your spaceship out of some dark material so it both absorbs all energy from nearby stars (waste not want not) and provides full camouflage against the darkness of space.
The Cassini spacecraft is currently whirling around Saturn, investigating the planet and its moons. What the odds that it will swing just a shade too close to Iapetus this year and trigger the autonomous defence systems … ?
What do you think?
Dina says:
I think it looks like a giant Lush bath bomb. Especially a “sex bomb”: http://www.lush-fr.ch/shop/images/default_shop/sex.jpg
Note the ridge and the bit on the top. Spooky similarity, no? I can therefore only logically deduce that this moon is actually made of sodium bicarbonate and ylang ylang, and I am now moving to Saturn for an enormous, fragranced hot bath.
But failing that explanation, I think an alien spacecraft is very likely. If it didn’t look like a sex bomb, it would look like the Death Star. (Which it really does. A lot.)
Dina spoke at 22:05 UTC on January 8th, 2006 link
Richard says:
My God, it does look like a bath bomb. This could shed new light upon the origins of the universe. Perhaps the big bang itself was the result of particularly potent bath bomb.
Richard spoke at 22:28 UTC on January 8th, 2006 link
Dina says:
See. Always suspect the baking soda.
Dina spoke at 23:14 UTC on January 8th, 2006 link
Ryan says:
I think you guys are dumb, its a fucking rock
Ryan spoke at 16:04 UTC on December 1st, 2006 link
Richard says:
Oh come now Ryan, at the very least it’s a fucking moon. Accord it the proper astronomical fucking ranking, please.
Richard spoke at 21:30 UTC on December 4th, 2006 link
Wayne says:
Death star….. oh yes…… cassini’s days are numbered…..!
Wayne spoke at 03:40 UTC on January 11th, 2007 link
Georg says:
Just as Obi Wan Kenobi said: “this is no moon!”
Some photographs on my website => http://iapetus.bplaced.net/iapetus/galerie.html
Georg spoke at 01:17 UTC on February 23rd, 2008 link