I almost boycotted the Super Bowl this year because the thought of watching Taylor Swift (who I am convinced is a Lizard person if they exist) celebrate as her fake romance to Mr Pfizer reaches yet greater heights, was just too much to bear.

But then another thought occurred to me that I might get to watch a sad Lizard Swift mourn the loss of what might have been and so I decided to risk it. Seeing that she was booed pretty heavily when she flashed across the jumbotron was the best part of the whole affair, and it gave root to an idea — this is the beginning of the end for her. We have passed the peak of the societal sickness that has led to cultural obsessions of people such as Taylor Swift. Soon the budding counterculture will turn on her. For some reason that makes me really happy.

Trump was cheered, by the way. Maybe….maybe America “is so back” as people are fond of saying online. The only real reluctance for me to agree with that sentiment is Trump’s apparent allegiance to Israel over American interests, but seeing all the changes he’s enacted has forced me to hold out hope that he really is playing 5d chess and Israel will get its just desserts when the time comes. We’ll see.

Anyway, this post is, believe it or not, about Hollow Earth, not US politics and entertainment culture.

The game was only of mild interest to all of us so my two sons and I talked a lot about HE. The Super Bowl turned into a workshopping session where we talked about several issues. Here are a few highlights of what we came up with:

Middle Earth

I was kicking around the idea last week that Middle Earth was the area inside the earth instead of on the earth’s surface. That would mean everything you read about in the Hobbit and LoTR happened in a HE setting. But I never got very comfortable with that idea because I really like the idea I came up with last week that the Jaredites were the first to discover and alight the promised land of the HE. And after our workshop I’m glad I didn’t try to force it. One of my sons suggested that Middle Earth is actually the earth’s surface and that it is aptly named because “earth” is something like this:

The hollow and middle earth section are pretty self explanatory. The upper earth would be Valinor and Eressea that were taken away into the unseen world. It wouldn’t include the entire visible universe, just those pieces of earth missing and the place from which God speaks (i.e. heaven).

I like this idea quite a bit. Keep in mind that the original form of Arda was some form of a flat earth. Tolkien illustrated it as follows (this would be looking down at a disc-shaped earth from above):

From the side it would be more like this:

When Eru remade the world after Pharazon’s assault, he cut out Valinor and Eressea, then folded the rest of the earth together into the globe we know of today. The reason I bring all this up is because if you fold a flatish disc into a ball, you’d have a void space inside of it — IOW plenty of room for a hollow earth and the Middle Earth nomenclature is still just as applicable because it would be between the HE and Valinor/Eressea, and thus, in the middle.

The Physics Are Still Tough

It’s hard to make sense of the physics angle of HE. There are several scientific ways to disprove HE and I am in no position to refute any of it in scientific terms. All we could really come up with is what I said in my last post about the prevailing scientific theories lacking a universal application in all settings which leaves us room to explore. But we couldn’t really solve any of the problems. For example does HE look more like A or like B?

The biggest problem with A is you’d have gravity pointing in opposite directions for people on the outer surface as it does for those on the inner surface. But it’s a little easier to see boats “sailing” through inner-earth oceans or rivers to reach surface A. On surface B, gravity points the same direction that we are used to up here on the surface, but how did the boats not fall from the HE sky when they reached the HE firmament from the earth’s crust?

Maybe there are some creative solutions to make that work without suplexing modern physics but my boys and I couldn’t think of one.

Warlike Lamanites

My sons wondered why the people up top wouldn’t go in and conquer the inhabitants of HE. Fair question. I suspect the Lehites that are there are not primitive savages who would be easily daunted. In fact I suspect they possess strength and abilities that would be daunting even to our modern machines of war. Or it could be that there is some kind of barrier that is not easily crossed. Or that getting to the HE is quite difficult with enough men and weapons to take on a warlike people such as the Lehite remnant.

There were a few other discussions but those were the highlights. All in all it was a fun night.