How in hell?

... discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five: the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half.

-Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver's Travels.

How in hell did he guess or know THAT?

And I have ALWAYS loved this chestnut:

Swift's prediction isn't the only mystery about the Martian moons. In 1862 scientists were looking for them carefully because conditions for finding Martian satellites were extremely favorable. The scientists found nothing. Fifteen years later Asaph Hall, an American astronomer working at the US Naval Observatory in Washington D.C., discovered them at time when conditions for observation weren't nearly as good.

Source: The Mysterious Moons of Mars

There's no mystery I'm afraid. Phobos and Deimos were theorized 15 years before Swift's book and actually discovered in 1877, the same year the book was written. And he still got the orbits all wrong...

Whoa.. my mistake, the book was written in 1726 not 1877.

Apparently, Johannes Kepler was the first to propose that Mars had two moons. He did this in 1610 although his logic was pretty flakey. See here

I thought it wasn't logic it was decoding Galileo's code incorrectly or something equally "scientific"

The ref I saw said that he reasoned that if Jupiter had 4 moons and Earth 1, then Mars must have 2. Must have been a bad day at the office

[edit on 24/1/08 by tayga]

I think that was actually Voltaire who used that classic bit of highly mathematical and scientific reasoning.

Voltaire- man of keen intellect.

Sometimes.

Give the man a break. Maybe it was a Friday afternoon!

There are a lot of 'ODD' scientific finds, across the board. And many dead on predictions by people not even in the field. Sometimes it seems like the old monkey and the typewritter producing the works of Shakespear.

I've never heard a good scientific reason for how these things seem to happen.

reply to post by mythatsabigprobe


That wouldnt have been near as embarrassing if you hadnt used one of these. (or similar).

At least the explanation didn't involve earth-like Venuses or H-Bomb detonations on 9/11.

My listening-to-crap gland is a little overworked at the moment.

Well, there is *A* scientific explanation for such shot-in-the-dark dead-on-accurate predictions.

I propose you research Carl Jung's theories concerning Synchronicity. Read the Wikipedia article, at the least, as it is a fascinating subject.

Synchronicity is indicative of strange patterns in reality itself that appear to repeat themselves in eerily similar ways, Although Jung terms it to be a psychological effect.

At least it is something.

Indeed! Or if you want to move from the elegant baroque of Jungian theory to the truly rococco mixed nut of Charles Fort- it was "steam engine time" for the Moons of Mars- it was time for them to be discovered and so across the world people started having the idea.

Morphic resonance is my personal favourite scientific theory to explain action at a distance though. Has some vague proof and a lot of solid anecdotes.

Originally posted by DogHead
Morphic resonance is my personal favourite scientific theory to explain action at a distance though. Has some vague proof and a lot of solid anecdotes.

I think the key difference between Jungian Theorem and Morphic Resonance is that Jung's Synchronicity would appear to indicate an ordered universe, structured with patterns and a sort of general design... whereas Morphic Resonance tends to be indicative of a WILLED universe, subject to morphism dependant upon observers.

Both represent interesting possibilities.

Especially interesting given that an alternative hypothesis for UFOs would be that they are signs in the sky that adapt and change with us to remain meaningful, from airships to disks to triangles. What's next, plus signs?

I found another article online stating that the Moons of Mars had disappeared... It had no evidence and cited no sources so I haven't bothered to link to it. Interesting that such an idea is even out there though.

In a holographic universe, I'll let you research that one on your own, it is entirely possible that a "morphic" concept should be applied. Could it be that we collectively dream all our tomorrows?

Consider ET, subject of serious and not so serious thought. Long a product of disordered minds and Hollywood purses. But on a collective mindset scale, did we conjure up this entity? Like some golem of the past, could our aggregate desire for ET form such a being from the very "ether" of the universe itself?

Perhaps we are but a splinter in God's eye.

Or for that matter we can bust out the Tibetan "tulpa" argument- investing a thought construct with enough belief for it to take life - or flight and live out its golem existence until it adapts or fades away like so much swamp gas.

Is this the flowery anecdote competition I've just entered?

Congratulations, everyone! Here's my entry:

We are the infinite question of existence.

We are the thought questioning itself.

We are what we percieve to be and not to be.

To be or not to be.....

and I'll throw in a Voltaire here and an Emmerson there and a Schenechtedy Plinkins over here, and we can all be impressed because I'm attempting to sound smart to fit in, and it's totally working.

Wasn't this thread about mars' moons?

Those old bastards!

But this is all IS about the Moons of Mars- from Jonathan Swift to Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars in some form or another has exercised a disproportionate fascination for humans.

Swift's prescience is amongst the more remarkable examples but virtually every writer on Mars has scored at least one impressive predictive hit- and I think it's fair to say that most of these prophetic moments have been totally unintentional!

Weird.