Empire in Crisis (26 page)

In my novel, I make reference to bizarre mathematical
relationships between the Sun, Earth and Earth’s moon. That is not literary
license. When one takes a close look at those three celestial bodies, it’s
clear there really is something strange going on. Unlike the numbers associated
with any other planet or moon in our solar system, those related to our planet,
its moon and the Sun are all nice round numbers that appear over and over and
over again.

I’ll start with the number 366 that I make reference to in
the story.

-The Earth rotates 365.25 times each year. Now you might
say that if you round that number off you don’t get 366, and you’re right, but
you do get a number that is only a small fraction of 1% different from it.

-The Earth is 366.175% the size of our moon.

-The moon orbits the Earth 366 times in 10,000 days. How’s
that for a nice round number?

Now let’s look at the following digits: 27322

-It takes 27.322 days for the moon to make one complete
orbit of the Earth and return as close as possible to the same point in the sky
relative to background stars. This is known as a sidereal cycle, and it is
different from the 29.53 days it takes for the moon to appear in the same
phase, such as full moon back to full moon again. That period is called the
lunar calendar cycle.

-The moon is 27.31% the size of the Earth.

-If you divide 100 by 366 you get 0.27322.

Next we’ll look at the number ‘400’

-The Sun is 400 times larger than the moon.

-The Sun is also 400 times farther away than the moon,
which explains why the moon and sun appear to be the same size during an
eclipse.

-If you divide the moon’s circumference of 10,920.8
kilometers by the 27.322 days it takes the moon to orbit the Earth, you get
399.7. And when you round that off, you get 400. There is no reason why the
size of the moon divided by the length of its orbit in days should round off to
400, but it does.

-The moon rotates at a rate of 400 kilometers every 24
hours.

-The Earth has a circumference that is approximately 40,000
kilometers at the equator. Since it rotates once per day, that means that the
Earth is rotating almost exactly 100 times faster than the moon.

Since we’ve touched on the number 100, let’s see where else
it shows up.

-If we multiply the circumference of the Sun by 100, we get
a number that just happens to be equal to the polar circumference of the
Earth(40,000km) multiplied by the circumference of the moon(10,920.8km).

-The Earth travels around the Sun at an average speed of
29.78 kilometers per second. The speed of light is thought to be 299,792
kilometers per second. If you divide the first number into the second number
you get 10,067. That’s very close to the same 10,000 figure we came across
earlier (366 lunar orbits every 10,000 days). 10,000 is 100 x 100.

The last number we’ll look at is 109.2.

-The Sun’s diameter is 109.245 times the diameter of the
Earth.

The distance between the Earth and the Sun when the Earth
is at its highest (farthest) point in the orbit is 109.267 times the diameter
of the Sun.

-The moon is just over 400,000 kilometers away from the
Earth at its farthest point. If you divide 400,000 by 100 you get 4,000. If you
then divide 4,000 by 36.6 you get 109.29.

-If you divide the moon’s circumference by 100, you get
109.2.

-40 lunar sidereal cycles equals 1,092.9 days, and 37 lunar
calendar cycles equals 1,092.6 days.

-If you divide 400 by 366 you get 1.0929

If only one or two of these numbers showed up, their nice
roundness could be chalked up to coincidence, but 366, 273, 400, 100 and 109.2
each show up multiple times. Nothing else in our Solar System even comes close
to having this many ‘coincidences’.

Most of this information came from a book entitled ‘Who
Built The Moon?’ by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler. As you can probably
tell from the title, they are convinced, and make a convincing case which I
have only scratched the surface of, that the moon was deliberately engineered
by some cosmic agent. I won’t spoil the book’s conclusion for you; if you want
to know by whom, you’ll have to read it for yourself. The moon and its
relationships to the Sun and Earth certainly is a mystery.

There is one more ‘coincidence’ that is so strange that I
don’t know what to think about it. Take any period of time in days, for example
5,000 days. If you divide 5,000 days by 365.25 days in a year, you get 13.69
years. If you divide 5,000 by 27.322 days you get almost exactly 183 lunar
sidereal cycles. If you then divide 5,000 by 29.53 days, you get 169.32 lunar
calendar cycles. 183 minus 169.32 gives you 13.68 (vs 13.69 in the first
calculation). Regardless of the number you start with, the final two numbers
will never be more than 0.01 apart, and yet one number is based on Earth’s
orbit around the Sun, and the other number is based entirely on the moon’s
orbit around the Earth. Why should there be any direct relationship at all?

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

Dietmar Arthur Wehr

While I love military SF action with space and ground
battles, the handling of high level strategy and grand strategy has always
fascinated me and EiC is my attempt to write a story that explores what goes on
at that level. Empire in Crisis is part of a new series called the Empire.
Unlike my other series, each book in this series can stand on its own feet and
these books will be written so that they can be read in any order. I don’t know
when the next book in the Empire series will be written because my next project
will be something else. What exactly has not yet been decided. If EiC does
really well in terms of sales, I’ll be tempted to come back to the series
sooner rather than later.

As with all my books, if you liked this story I would ask
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Long Live Space Opera!