DUDE! That’s unfair. There aren’t many pretty pictures available that show the influence of gravity on a bunch of asteroids!
Ayyyyyy… 
Would “they” be natural forces mainstream science misunderstands – or a group of people?
BrainGlutton In the context of my post, The Fonz is referring to a group of people who form a powerful conspiracy.
Finally something I can get my teeth into! 
Which conspiracy?
Hey Fonz? Did you miss this or are you ignoring it?
edited for length and bolding mine.
I am a secretary at a mental health clinic for the chronically, dually-diagnosed adult population of a particularly poor suburb of Denver.
As such, I have experience with paranoid, psychotic schizophrenics and their belief systems. Your statement, which I have bolded, does nothing short of trivialize their extremely debilitating condition. They were not driven mad by some conspiracy they uncovered. They were driven mad by traumatic events, genetics, and predisposition to the condition (lots more, I know, but I’m trying to be concise). Suggesting what you appear to be suggesting (that they are just smarter than the rest of us) smacks of illusions of grandeur, and is extremely telling of what, in all likelihood, you have: paranoid, dillusional schizophrenia. That is, if you are not a troll.
Aside from your obvious delusions, you have repeatedly violated the rules of this board. My guest membership aside, I have lurked for a while now, and I’m surprised this bs even got this far.
Sounds to me more like he’s aggrandizing their condition. Not that that’s any better – or any more realistic.
True… now that I think about it, it seems like he’s more jealous of them than anything.
Just to add a little something to **Xylophone’s ** thoughts: The fact of the matter is, TheFonz that you don’t even “know” anything. As far as you have shown your cards, you’re just a parrot of other people’s ideas. You have no original ideas of your own, which makes you not a “knowledgeable” or wise person, but, at best, someone’s acolyte, and a very bad one at that.
The north half of Mars still has oodles of craters. If Mars had undergone a catastrophic “biting” event in the past few millennia, these would be gone.
The exact reason for Mars’s surface asymmetry is not yet known I don’t think, but here’s a brief comment on the question:
Given the choice of two explanations — (1) Venus swooped by and took a bite out of Mars, or (2) Mars shaped its own surface by its own geologic activity (though with some interesting north-south asymmetry) — I would favor the second, simpler, more plausible one. But I’ll also accept that planetary geologists just don’t know the answer yet. I’ll willing to wait until a well supported answer comes in. The “wandering Venus” hypothesis, on the other hand, is not well supported, or even supported at all.
Also, I would again point out that Earth has a similar asymmetry: lots of land in the northern hemisphere, much less in the southern. Did Venus do that too? Or, if Earth can be a little lopsided for no remarkable reason, why can’t Mars?
A geologist might be able to answer for those surface features. I bet there’s an answer that doesn’t require another planet’s passing by, or lots of lightning in an atmosphere that’s had hardly any clouds for eons, or plasma tornados (whatever those would be) — especially since these gouges, pits, and channels exist on other bodies of the solar system. (Europa, for instance.) Did Venus go around visiting most of solar system, wreaking havoc everywhere?
Here’s a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Assume two spherical asteroids each 10 km in diameter, made of generic rock. That puts their masses at roughly 3x10[sup]15[/sup] kg each. Even in the densest part of the main asteroid belt, at about 2.5 to 3 AU from the Sun, there are only about 6000 asteroids per cubic AU. The typical distance between nearest neighbors will normally be over 100,000 km.
Using the above, the gravitational force between these two neighboring asteroids, tending to attract them together, will be about 60,000 N.
Jupiter, with a mass of 2x10[sup]27[/sup] kg, orbits the Sun at just over 5 AU. At closest approach, our pair of asteroids will get to within 2 to 2.5 AU of Jupiter. Bump it up to 3 AU though, for a weaker tidal force, for a distance of 4.5x10[sup]11[/sup] m.
Then the tidal force from Jupiter (see tidal acceleration), tending to pull the asteroids apart, is about 880,000 N. Higher than the mutual gravitational attraction.
Obviously this is only one set of assumptions. You can play around inside the space of possible values, and even get some scenarios where the gravitational force outweighs the tidal force. That doesn’t mean the asteroid belt is going to accumulate into a planet anytime soon though, or that it ever was one. Mostly, when asteroids interact, they collide and smash themselves up into smaller bits.
Perhaps the most basic reason for assuming the asteroid belt was never a planet is that there simply isn’t enough of the stuff to make one anyway.
Suggestions that another poster are a troll, used as in insult, are permitted only in the BBQ Pit. Actual suspicion that another poster is trolling should be reported to the staff. No accusations of trolling are permitted in Fora outside the BBQ Pit.
In this case, the evidence seems to indicate a poster with an odd world view combined with a belief in conspiracies. Neither of these conditions are grounds for banishment. (If odd beliefs were grounds for expulsion, we could organize many of the atheists to have all the religious folk banned and many of the religious folk organized to have the atheists banned and then close the board.)
At this point, you are free to amuse yourself reading TheFonz’s odd claims or avoid frustration by not opening these threads, however, name-calling is not an option.
[ /Moderating ]
Sorry. I thought I had seen such jabs somewhere in this thread before, but I may/am be thinking about the pit thread on this topic. My bad.
Hm. We now have two sites from which Fonz seems to get much of his ideas. Perhaps if we examined their claims, as Fonz seems completely unable to follow a single topic or idea, we might explore the issues with the ‘electric universe’ theory with a bit more specificity.
The Thurderbolts site seemed kind of useless (I found it by googling the other day) – it appeared to offer the same broad general explanations we’ve seen here, along with the excuses for not presenting theory (“Math is hard!”)
But googling also found this site:
At least this one seems to be attempting to offer more in the way of explanation. Whether an evaluation of those explanations would turn up anything worthwhile, I can’t say – I am not a physicist, and it’s been a long time since I’ve studied any physics. But at least there’s more material on this site. Especially if you look at the “Scripts” link. Some of the links inside there are just references to the book that presumably this whole theory is hawking, but there are also some “scripts” that have more than just references to “the book”.
Hey tomndebb, why did you remove my post with the link to the hq.nasa.gov site talking about Saturn’s rings?
He’s in on the conspiracy, obviously.
I have removed no posts in this or either of your other threads.
I will not delete or remove a post without noting that fact and providing a reason.
If he is, he really needs to start coming to the meetings.
Fonz You have a better chance of getting a moderator’s attention by e-mailing them. Put SDMB in the subject.
Off the top of my head, I’d guess some kind of copyright concern.
Bryan Ekers While the odds of helping a paranoid schizophrenic over the internet are quite low (G Nome, Graham Wilson, The Isotope Money guy), there’s no reason to make them lower.
Fonz for the record, the only possible conspiracy you could organize amongst Dopers would be dedicated to spreading bad puns, Monty Python quotes, and getting Futurama back on the air.
At least one poster has succeeded in convincing us that something largely accepted as scientific fact was wrong. He argued, with many cites, that a certain species of giant squid (Mesonyteuthis?) was the result of sloppy science or fraud. It took him a few posts in a single thread to convince us.
Another poster spent years and many threads trying to convince us of- the existence of psychic powers, ghosts, souls, reincarnation, and that he had scientific evidence of them all. He failed miserably.
Don’t assume that we just don’t understand your cites. There are Dopers with degrees in physics, astrophysics and astronomy. We’ve got geologists too.
We’re not blinded by accepted models. We disagree with authority all the time. Sometimes, we even question the word of Uncle Cecil.
I’ve looked at your evidence and interpreted in a very different way than you. I suspect that the other posters have as well.