falemagn wrote:
I don't recall having said that. However, it being artificial is a possible explanation and there's no reason to discard it as unfounded unless you can come right now with an alternative, natural explanation that can be proven.
I hadn't discarded that explaination, but in my humble experience the wildest hypothesis generally turn out to have a far more mundane explaination. I refuse to allow my emotion override my curiosity.
An example of a naturally occurring hexidecimal shape can be found inside any Amythist bearing geode stone, no-one would suggest that is anything other than naturally occurring?
But you do notice the huge difference in magnitude, don't you?
My point was that it's entirely possible for such structures to exist in nature. I make no bold speculations as to their origin, I was merely pointing out the above observation
The only thing that I can think of is a huge crystal, perhaps a carbon one. A diamond, that is. Might it be a piece of the core of a... dead star somehow entrapped by the gravitational force of Saturn in an orbit around it? This would be coherent with the evidence that the black part is made of organic material, it would be coherent with the somewhat singular orbit around saturn, both for shape and inclination, and it would be coherent with the geodesic shape.
A simple test as described in Niven and Pournelle's
Lucifer's Hammer is to take a large bowl of flour and drop a marble into it. You'll note that a circular crater forms. Throw the marble from an oblique angle and unless the marble rolls along the surface, the resulting crater will also be round. Throw in a non-sperical object and the crater will still be round.
I suppose the above debunks my own skepticism, but tectonic activity can throw up some pretty strange features.
Clarke too hypothesises that the interior of a large gas giant may well contain enough carbon under sufficient pressure and temperature to produce one pretty mean diamond... However, if Iapetus is indeed the impact site of such a substantial piece of carbon lodged in the surface then the body would "wobble" about it's rotation like a drunk swinging an axe?
