A Hollow Moon?

firstmen_2023-02-25

One of the most persistent crackpot ideas in astronomy is the notion that Earth’s Moon is hollow—an alien construct cleverly disguised as a cratered natural satellite. Apart from lurid tales of science fiction, this has actually been cited as the explanation for a variety of scientific findings about the Moon, including its initially apparently anomalous moment of inertia, the shape of large craters, which appear as if their depth was limited by encountering a hard shell below the surface, and the unusual seismic response to shallow Moonquakes, which were described as the Moon “ringing like a bell”.

For a deep dive (or is it wallow?) in Moonbat crackpottery, see George Leoard’s 1977 book Somebody Else Is on the Moon, which has been preserved at the Internet Archive.

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One of David Weber’s early efforts built on this trope, to pretty good effect (by my possibly low standards):

Empire from the Ashes (Complete Dahak trilogy).

(I have both electronic and oversized paperback versions of this. Some science fiction is like comfort food.)

Some of the plot devices in this series re-appear in more polished forms in his later work.

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