The greatest evidence of these types of crater chains having been caused by intent is the resemblance to mankind’s own weapons damage photos. The craters left from atom bombs would look the same, given the same environment, and if exploded close together as these crater chains are. Only on a far larger scale. The automatic computer control fire systems of modern weapons can duplicate this kind of accuracy. Only on a much smaller scale of course, and definitely not on an interplanetary scale.

Note that predominately across the images of them they are evenly spaced. In the dozens of crater chains no matter what size and length, they are predominately spaced about shoulder to shoulder, and all in a neat line. Whether they are a few miles wide, or tens of miles wide, whether they are a few tens of miles long, or hundreds of miles long we see this pattern of craters. Similar patterns are produced by machinegun strikes, aircraft strafing runs, strategic precision bombing. Another example is explosives set and detonated simultaneously to dig drainage ditches.

The known dynamics from observation of comet Shoemaker / Levy 9 gives little credence to crater chains of these types ever being caused by a broken comet or asteroid. The probability against these crater chains actually happening from broken up space debris is admitted to being close to zero. That there are dozens of crater chains showing such uniformity across size brings that probability far closer to zero.

Based on what is known to cause the closest similar crater chains, mankind’s weapons, and that it takes intelligence to do so, also that broken comets are pretty much ruled out by demonstration of their dynamics, my highest probability is that we are not alone. Someone obviously has far bigger and better weapons than mankind. The rest is all guess work and conjecture.

I respectfully ask BA to do as he will with this thread. I have tried to make my case as best I could and am out of breath. I think it’s time to move on for me. Thanks again.

This exercise did give me more conviction of probability because of the realization that the same pattern was duplicated across a major size differential. That’s a biggie.
Thanks again, we learn from all kinds of people

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It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

Craterchains, thank you for addressing all the points and questions people directed at you. It was very forthcoming and professional of you to do so. Watching this flow of information between you and the others here has shown me that you are indeed a reasonable and polite person who truely believes what he says and offers proof and evidence to those that doubt. You are certainly not to be confused with those others who merely repeat the same things over and over with no regard for other people's posts. You certainly cannot be said to have ignored questions repeatedly. You have answered every apparent contradiction with dignity and, in the end, you have shown that your hypothesis is the most likely one for this phenomena. Your data and evidence have convinced me beyond a doubt that you are corect.

__________________
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

CC, for future reference, you should start a thread with a post like the one you just made. Just lay all your cards on the table.

Instead, you started out talking about "signs" and "cryptographic messages" and made really flippant remarks like, "please investigate this and tell us what you find." I wasted several posts explaining why I do not think a line of craters represents a message from an alien race. The effort I put into those posts was wasted because it refuted something you never believed in the first place. You've thought the chains are evidence of war all along. You should have just stated that. I can't help but be a little irked that I wasted so much effort.

At any rate, now that your cards are on the table so to speak, I've tried to explain how crater chains can be formed naturally. I understand that you don't except my explanation. That's fine. You're entitled to your opinion. But at least now we are talking about the same thing.

In my humble opinion, the best point you have made has been the observation that on many of these chains, the walls to not overlap. Just to show you how this forum and this community can work, I'm going to start another thread to discuss just that point. I'm not going to beat around the bush. I'm not going to be flippant. I'm just going to ask the question. I bet I'll get a really good, intelligent answer too - and in less than 7 pages of thread.

I take that back. When I started looking for pictures of chains to support the statement "most chains feature craters whose walls only just touch the walls of adjacent craters" I found that most chains do not fit that profile.

For example, overlapping walls:


space between walls:
[img]
http://www.mhhe.com/physsci/astronom...ages/15f26.jpg
[/img]

another showing space between walls:


So, there's no reason for me to ask the question, "why do the individual craters touch each other?" because the answer is, "they don't always touch."

Tofu, it looks like I owe you an apology for the misleading path about cryptography or that there may be a message in the “dots” so to speak. In all honesty I went down that path on crater chains a couple years ago for about a week. Nope, no luck there. Dead end. But, you may have found something I had missed. I am sorry to have been as you say flippant and it was meant as an attempt at humor about less probable reasons for them being in such a repetitious pattern. Again, sorry about that.

Yet the “pattern” does carry a message. One that mankind should easily recognize and is well aware of.

War.

__________________
It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

Craterchains, two words:

PROVE IT!

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Yeah, but the message is that people will come to conclusions unsupported by any evidence. But that's not the message you want to see, is it?

I'm with Gullible on this, be our guest...go ahead and PROVE IT!!

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"The facts gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching." Isaac Asimov

Something you discovered proved it to you, right? Your careful research led you to something that inarguably could only point to an origin of war for these chains of craters. You have the proof.

Why the playing around? Spit it out. What convinced you?

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no harm done I guess.

i still disagree with you but I really don't mind disgussing it ad infinitum.

Can you maybe just provide a senario that results in a crater chain? I mean, something like this:

alien A lands on the surface of the moon.
alien B fires a spread of nukes at him.

Like that but in greater detail. Maybe you could include some diagrams. See, my big problem at this point is that I can't imagine any reason why an alien race would create a chain of impacts like that. I need you to explain it in great detail. I think that's what other people are asking for too when they say you need to "prove it." Short of interviewing Admiral Kipp of Starfleet Command about the glorious battle of Mars, you can't really prove it. But what you can do it go into more detail about how the alien weapons form chains. Are they firing at bunkers or tanks? Are they firing from low orbit or interplanetary space? You can guess at some of those things and if we eliminate certain possibilities, I hope you can be open minded enought to accept it.

Thank you all for your comments.
I have decided against further discussion of this topic here.

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It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

"Color" me surprised!

This was posted in January of 2004 and gives a good reflection of what the “scientific researchers” seem to think.
http://www.lpod.org/LPOD-2004-01-27.htm
I find the paragraph to be a very interesting read and study.
QUOTE:
Then there are the “explorers” like me that offer just “one” probability that would answer all the questions of crater chains formations of the type we are investigating. Yes, Alien War, would easily explain these unique chains of “pits” or craters.

With that, and as this is just another astronomy question about our solar system’s formation and evolvement, Tofu I would like to continue the possibility of ETI tactics in another thread. Would you? Hopefully we can attract some objective reasoning on this possibility of what caused these crater chains and HOW.

Edited to add:
Or, Tofu, we can continue with what is here and go on into the reasoning and possible space war tactics that would cause these types of crater chains? Would the BA prefer this to continue all in one thread or continue the tactics ideas in another?

__________________
It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

I thought you weren't going to post any more on this thread, eh?

That quote does not provide any evidence for your "theory".

Advanced aliens could do a much more efficient job than we could. Artificial dust clouds and orbital patrols could be used to literally put a planet under seige. To take out large very large targets, antimatter warheads could be used - a big antimatter warhead could probably leave a crater larger than Texas. (Remember, aliens that could make near-lightspeed starships could probably make weapons of this sort.) Genetically engineered pathogens could kill off the populations of entire planets, even solar systems if quarantine of some sort wasn't used until too late.

But let's remember how often we humans fight among ourselves! Chances are that any advanced, starfairing civilization would have left war far behind - otherwise, it would almost certainly have destroyed itself.

BTW, you're starting to sound a bit egotistical.

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

I don't know. We've done a lot of advancing in the last few centuries without either destroying ourselves or leaving war behind.

How much more advancement do you think we need before we have to do one or the other?

__________________
SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

no. Alien War does not explain crater chains because, as I have stated over and over again, aliens would have to be drooling idiots to fire so many munitions and miss so many times.

Sure. Whatever. There are plenty of people on this board. There's never any shortage of responses to an interesting thread.

wait. Do you want to talk about alien war or crater chains? Wars do not cause crater chains. I've asked you to provide a hypothetical scenario in which a war does cause one. You know something like, "Alien A is driving along on the surface of the moon in his hover tank and Alien B fires a spread of nukes at him." I've asked you to provide a scenario like that but you haven't – so I assumed you had thought about it and concluded, as I have, that no action in war would cause a crater chain.

So do you want to keep talking about chains or do you want to talk about war?

...especially since the line of craters is neither equally spaced nor equally sized, contrary to your "thesis."

So let's see, we have competing hypotheses for the origin of crater chains. We want to apply the razor. Let's have a go...

1. Crater chains were produced by alien wars.

2. A variety of natural processes, including tidally-disrupted meteor impacts, tectonic processes in icy materials, and collapsed lava tubes, produced crater chains.

Well, it sure seems like hypothesis 1 is simpler. It's only seven words long! Hypothesis 2 is at least three times as long, and it's not even complete since it invokes "a variety of processes", some unnamed.

But wait a second...

What sorts of assumptions are required for each of these hypotheses? How do those assumptions compare with what we already know about the universe?

Hypothesis one requires quite a few assumptions. Let's start with these:
- Life exists (or existed) elsewhere in the universe.
- That life evolved so as to produce a technological culture.
- The tech culture developed space travel.
- The culture either arose in this solar system sometime in the distant past, or developed means of interstellar travel. Let's assume the latter...
- The travellers found our solar system out of (presumably) billions of star systems in this galaxy alone.
- The travelers were enough like us that they had political divisions, or some other reason for conflict (or, possibly, there were two alien tech cultures that both found our solar system at the same time or at least overlapping times, and came into conflict).
- The conflicts between alien factions resulted in one or more shooting wars.
- The weapons used in said wars included something that produced chains of craters.
- The theater of war included multiple diverse environments on different bodies within our system.
- The weapon was powerful enough to leave large craters, but not so accurate that it could eliminate a target without a "blanketing" approach to targeting. (This would seem to conflict with the otherwise high technological level implied by earlier assumptions.)
- The weapon could be aimed accurately along one dimension (the "y-axis", if you will) but not the other -- hence the need for multiple strikes along the x-axis. Or, possibly, the targets being attacked were all stretched out along a straight line.
- All of these alien presences seem to have left no obvious artifacts or survivors, at least not obvious enough for us to have discovered to date. That is, the only clear evidence we have of the aliens or their wars is the crater chains themselves.

Hypothesis 2 calls for no assumptions beyond our current knowledge of the solar system environment, volcanoes and tectonics, the geology of the various bodies, and the observed behavior of comets and asteroids.

On the other hand, it seems to me that hypothesis 1 requires some leaps of faith that Evel Knievel would have balked at.

Now where does our razor slice?

Gullible Jones brings a couple good points to the table, Thank you, and what ego?

SeanF counters the one gullible thought though. Yes, just how advanced would we have to be, say to adequately defend our own world just against stray space rocks?

Tofu, an interesting read in the other thread about interplanetary war. As I mentioned before though, you need to think bigger. Far BIGGER.
These two crater chains
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/cscC1.jpg
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/cscC2.jpg
I am told by x military are indicative of something that got hit and exploded just above Ganymede (the 13 strike one) and the other of something that got hit on the surface of Ganymede. Besides submarines Tofu, there is also air to air combat for tactical study.
This from our web site;
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/ganymede.html
Two of three anomalous crater chains on Ganymede are shown here. The chain on the left is 60 km long, and the chain on the right is 160 km long. Note the "splash pattern" around and emanating away from the crater chains. It has been surmised that the pattern on the left is indicative of something having been hit on the surface and exploding causing the depression in the approximate shape of what was there. The picture on the right is surmised to have been something that was hit above surface and exploded showering material in the pattern that we see.

Correctomundo Russ Watters, yet close does count in horseshoes, hand grenades, napalm, ATOMICS, and Weapons of Mass Destruction that are “technologically possible”. Of note are the “other” crater chains also visible in the second link to a picture of Davy Y area.

Donnie B has some good points and yet the same can be said for how very complicated it would be for just one crater chain even like the Davy Y one to “just happen”. Let alone dozens of others that are of even better alignment across a broad range of sized and shaped crater chains.

Of the known crater chains the largest of which has 40 k wide craters and is about 600+ k in length. What would be the size of the warhead if we used today’s known yealds in atomic bombs? Or, in other words, how much weapon mass would be needed to make a crater 40k wide with an atomic bomb? It is stated of the Barringer crater in Arizona that the force generated by its impact was equal to the explosion of 20 million tons (MT) of TNT.

I think Bikini Atoll was the largest ever exploded by man and it was a 20MT (megaton) explosion and made a crater less than a mile across? What would be the size of MT for a crater 40 k across?

__________________
It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

Whatever happened to your decision?

I liked it.

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Is that what I said?

__________________
SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Oy Craterchains, look at the "Interplanetary War" thread. If an advanced alien race really wanted to take out a planet, they could direct an asteroid at it.

And tell me, what would be the point of blasting a planet with a spray of nukes that weren't accurately targeted? That would be a massive waste of time and money. It would be better to use a single missile with a computerized guidance system.

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Read again.

Those strikes were obviously not misses.

__________________
It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

What was the average IQ of this alien race, may I ask?! Because you'd have to be a complete idiot to put military installations in big, straight lines!!!

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

You really need to read more objectivly Gullible.
Why do you think it was a military "instalation"?

__________________
It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

Okay, then, what would it be? ](*,)

Edit: and "installation" is spelled with 2 ls.

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

What makes you think it was aliens in the first place, CC?

You know, I keep telling myself not to read the more bizare threads in ATM, but I keep doing it anyway, I must be a glutton for punishment.

Every time I take a peek in here, ATM is turning more and more into something like GLP Lite, but with more coherence and less flaming, but with just as much incoherence and bad science.

Here's a little advice for you CC, I forget where I got it, nor am I entirely sure when I got it, but this has been in my documents folder for ages. I belive a buddy e-mailed it to me a while back. If anyone can tell me where this is from, I'll credit the appropriate source.


It might not be entirely appropriate to the discussion, but it parralells nicely.

Kesh;
In the “first place”, I didn’t think of ET’s. Just like all the rest when I first saw a picture of a crater chain, the 13 strike pattern on Ganymede with the “splash pattern” near one end of it, I read what the scientists were saying. FieryIce asked “What is the mathematical probability of that?” At first I thought it was odd, very odd, and highly unlikely it could happen. After clicking on the links from the APOD and seeing several more with the same “pattern” of spacing and unique lineal alignment across many differing sizes and lengths my “belief” that a broken space rock as scientists were saying came to an abrupt halt.

Why?
Experience with war and explosives gave me the added dimension of another possibility.
Three years later I am even more convinced these types of crtater chains are caused by war. And, WE couldn’t and didn’t do it.

That’s why.

StormSeeker
Thanks for the “advice”. But I’ll leave all that to the “real scientists”. I am just an explorative investigator.

__________________
It's not what you know or don't know, but what you know that isn't so that will hurt you. Will Rogers
http://www.craterchains.com/ns/nspage.html

Look, man, haven't you read what others have said about tidal forces? Are you going to listen? Are you going to tell us why the current explanation is impossible, or are you going to just say that it is?!

__________________
If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Personal belief does not proof make.

The "Real scientists" have already told you several times. Just because it's not what you want to hear doesn't make them wrong.

And "Explorative investigator" is a pretty good job descripton for what a scientist does.

And as for leaving it to the "Real Scientists", basicly, if I understand you correctly, you've come up with a pet theory but want somebody else to do the hard work, right? But only as long as the results are what you want to hear. Do I have this part correct? If not, please enlighten me.

On sencond thought, no, don't enlighen me. I should know by now, I really should. I should know better than to get drawn into these types of discussions.

Again, I reiterate, the burden of proof is on you. And simply pointing at pictures and say "Look! No natural force could have done that!" is not proof.