Open letter to Adrienne Loska, 2014

Happy New Year, Adrienne!!

        Let's see -- are you still Mike Bara's manager? He hasn't mentioned you for a while, so it's possible he fired you for not getting him on George Noory's misinformation radio show often enough. It's even more likely that you, being a woman of some intelligence, decided you couldn't continue representing a man who is wrong about practically every scientific fact he writes, and uses the C word to denigrate female critics. But I'll assume you're still "on board" -- or if not, that you can pass these brief comments to your hapless successor.

Another work of unintended fiction?
        As your client sets fingertips to keyboard, creating Ancient Aliens on Mars #2, I think it's your duty to remind him of a few facts.

1. The planetary positions aphelion/perihelion are completely independent of conjunction/opposition. The former describe the farthest/nearest approaches to the Sun, and the latter describe the position relative to the Sun as seen from Earth. Mars could, for example, be at aphelion and conjunction, but it could equally well be at aphelion and opposition. They have nothing to do with each other, Adrienne. Your client's elementary errors, seen on pp. 42/43 of AAoM #1, make it plain that he doesn't understand this.

2. It is true that there is a very great difference between the closest and furthest approaches of Mars and Earth. However, this is not a measure of the eccentricity of the orbit of Mars. The eccentricity is a rather modest 0.09 -- even if it were zero, there would still be a great difference between the closest and furthest approaches. Again, your client shows a lack of understanding of very simple orbital geometry.

3. Your client esteems the late Tom Van Flandern, almost to the point of hero-worship. Van Flandern was a highly imaginitive astronomer and there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that. But your client surely owes Van Flandern the courtesy of actually reading what he wrote^{note 1} about the theory of solar fission. He wrote that proto-planets are flung off the Sun in pairs. That's an essential part of the idea. Therefore, for your client to write^{note 2} that the discovery of a single exoplanet (of the star GJ 504) "fits the solar fission theory perfectly" is incorrect. It's like watching the Moon rise and remarking that this phenomenon supports the theory that there are really two moons. Sure, Adrienne, a second Moon could be along later, but until it appears, two-moon theorists are best advised to keep their cake-holes shut.

4. Speaking of the solar fission hypothesis, your client strays into the realm of fiction when he attempts to falsify the alternative hypothesis, accretion from a circumstellar disk. By the way, Adrienne, perhaps you know that accretion is accepted by 100% of the planetary astronomy community, and has actually been observed in the Orion nebula. Anyway, your client wrote on p.61 of AAoM#1, "The accretion model ... requires the planets to have highly eccentric (elliptical) orbits during their proto-planet phase." That's simply not true.

5. Please tell your client to stop saying and writing that "NASA suppressed the positive results of the Viking biology experiment." Again, simply not true. The results he says were suppressed have been available on a NASA-sponsored web site all this time.

6. Please give your client a refresher course in digital photography. Spend extra time on the part where gray levels are discussed. Make sure he understands that not all the 256 gray levels in a monochrome image need have values greater than zero for the image to be a faithful representation of the scene. Hopefully that will stop him from making an utter ass of himself as he did on p.177 of AAoM#1 by complaining that the 1998 MGS image of Owen Mesa "contained only about 50% of the data it should have" because 214 gray levels had a value of zero. It was an ultra-low contrast scene, that's all.

Keeping aliens covered, apparently
        That'll do for now, Adrienne. What did you think of the pilot of Uncovering Aliens? I thought your client did a fairly good job of following the SCRIPT that was faked to simulate a documentary show, and didn't obviously giggle when confronted with a TOTALLY FAKED "town meeting." I do kind-of wish that a show called Uncovering Aliens had uncovered an alien or two. Perhaps next time.

Regards, expat

P.S. Adrienne, I'd copy this to you personally, as a courtesy, but I know you have me on auto-reply with this message:

"Unfortunately, Mike has informed me that you are too stupid to converse with, and in fact that the entire Universe is dumber for having you in it. Please take a moment to thin the heard and improve the quality of the gene pool by removing yourself from it."

er... it's "herd," not "heard" Adrienne dear.

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[1] http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/origins/original-solar-system.asp
[2] http://mikebara.blogspot.com/2013/08/new-image-of-extrasolar-planet-confirms.html

Mike Bara: HD 95086 b "Totally supports the fission model of planetary formation"

        I sent this to Mike today:

I see where you are claiming that the direct imaging of a large planet 56 AU from HD 95086 ^{[note 1]} "Totally supports the fission model of planetary formation."

Your statement is not true. The mere existence of a single massive planet accompanying a star tells us nothing about its formation. It could as well be explained by accretion, fission, or capture. Before astronomers could even begin to make deductions about the formation of such a planet, they would need at least some information about its orbit, and preferably about many other planets in the same system.

As you know, a key part --almost the only coherent part-- of the evidence Van Flandern ^{[note 2]} presented in support of planetary fission was that planets in our own solar system seem to occur in pairs. I remind you of what Van Flandern (1997) wrote:

"The spin-up of the proto-Sun will make it first oblate, then prolate as it approaches an overspin state where centrifugal forces exceed gravitational forces. This shape is called a “Maclaurin spheroid." When the star-disk boundary reaches the overspin condition, the two prolate bulges on opposite sides of the proto-Sun break away and form twin proto-planets in low orbits just above the proto-star surface in the inner disk."

Accordingly, you are not permitted to write that HD 95086 b supports the theory in the absence of a twin companion.

As you probably also know, the fission model is in difficulty when it comes to explaining planetary differentiation, and in further difficulty now that a proto-planetary disc has been observed in the Orion nebula ^{[note 3]}.

I might add that I'm surprised you have not considered yourself permanently disqualified from writing about this topic, since the unforgivable errors on p.34 of The Choice have been publicly exposed and mocked.

Regards,
(expat)

[1] http://www.space.com/21395-alien-planet-direct-image.html

[2] http://metaresearch.org/solar%20system/origins/original-solar-system.asp

[3] http://www.gemini.edu/index.php?q=node/226

==============================

I copied the text to Mike's manager, Adrienne Loska, which generated this auto-reply:

Unfortunately, Mike has informed me that you are too stupid to converse with, and in fact that the entire Universe is dumber for having you in it. Please take a moment to thin the heard and improve the quality of the gene pool by removing yourself from it.

Evidently, Adrienne is as weak on spelling as she is on cartography.

Mike's e-mail is mikebara33@gmail.com. Adrienne is mike.bara.mgmt@gmail.com.

Mike Bara has a wet dream too

        So, OK—maybe there was a little doubt that Hoagland endorsed George Noory's "oceans and oceans" howler, but Mike Bara leaves us in no doubt about his failure to comprehend the melt inclusion study. It's in gray and white, in his blog for this week:

"[T]he Moon contains as much water as the Earth"

...and a little later...

"The Moon’s internal composition is exactly the same as Earth’s"

        ...both of which statements might be described as balderdash, poppycock, or codswallop, take your pick.

        Bara extends his already laughable misunderstanding to the utterly hilarious point of claiming that this study supports Tom Van Flandern's solar fission hypothesis, according to which the Sun formed first then flung the planets off into orbit, as opposed to the story which is confirmed by thousands of observations—a shrinking and fragmenting proto-planetary disk, most of which slowly accreted into planets.

        IF what Mike wrote were true—that "the Moon contains as much water as the Earth"—it would indeed be a stunner, but not because it would support solar fission. It would be unexplainable because all the water should have boiled away during the WHAM-O that broke the proto-moon out of the Pacific basin.

        Of course, it is emphatically NOT the case that there are subterranean oceans on the Moon. May I explain one more time for the benefit of the slower members of the class (that's you, Hoagland & Bara):

MICROSCOPIC INCLUSIONS IN LUNAR MAGMA CONTAIN WATER THAT WAS SEALED IN, AND PREVENTED FROM EVAPORATING DURING THE BIG WHAMMY. THE WATER CONCENTRATION IS LIKE THAT IN EARTH'S UPPER MANTLE -- 1000 TIMES LESS THAN TYPICAL POTTING SOIL.

SEE THAT WORD MICROSCOPIC?? IT MEANS THAT ALTHOUGH THE CONCENTRATION CAN BE MEASURED (WITH GREAT DIFFICULTY, I MIGHT ADD) WE STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE TOTAL QUANTITY OF WATER IS. The LARGEST of these inclusions is 30 microns across—about half the thickness of a human hair.

        Writing that the Moon’s internal composition is exactly the same as Earth’s is like taking a sample of the Sahara Desert from a cup of mint tea on a café table in Timbuktu.

        Minor point — Bara writes that 615 to 1,410 ppm is "about 100 times higher than previous studies of lunar magma had suggested." It's actually more like ten or twenty times.

Double strike
        I have nothing against Tom Van Flandern. He had an inventive mind, and at least (unlike Hoagland & Bara) his eccentric ideas had some connection to actual observation. He also had a Ph.D. in astronomy, whereas Hoagland & Bara are entirely untrained in the subject. However, as attentive readers of this blog already know, the other piece of astronomy news that turned up last month was a severe setback to Van Flandern's picture of the evolution of Mars by massive bombardment.

        Bara ends his blog scoring as follows: Van Flandern 1, Mainstream NASA types 0. The true score is Van Flandern 0, Modern science 2. Hoagland & Bara aren't even in the game.