Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Crenshaw
Maury Markowitz wrote:
wrote:
Was the Moon in a close Earth orbit essential in preventing a runaway
greenhouse effect like we see on Venus. The Earth was much more
volcanically active in it's youth and would have put out much more CO2
and other greenhouse gases. Did the Moon siphon off much of the Earth's
atmosphere in earlier times.
As we learn more the answer increasingly seems to be that the earth
was "unstable" before life became so dominant. Prior to this there were
a number of complete freeze-overs where the entire planet was covered in
ice. It is believed C02 built up from volcanoes, causing rnaway
greenhouse and melting the ice. The CO2 would then be react chemically
with the now-open oceans, scrubing it back out.
lot of science speculation that Niven used in his stories came from
Tommy Gold, an iconoclastic astronomer who was part of the steady state
universe crowd (with Fred Hoyle) and also is known for having gotten in
a row with NASA during Apollo.
No, pretty good actually. Gold was the guy that got onto TV by
claiming the moon probes would sink in the miles-thick dust on the moon.
OF COURSE it's miles thick, its been there practically forever and
there's no mechanism to solidify it back into rock like there is here.
So they built the landers and tested. Nope, no problem. But Gold
wouldn't stop even when confronted by direct counterexample. The TV
robots eventually gave up listening to him -- something that no longer
happens unfortunately.
He still turns up, unnamed, in various creationist books. Why? Because
the lack of thick dust on the moon means it can't be very old, right?
Exactly right. And, as you said, there's really no limit -- at least no
practical one -- to the depth of the dust.
For that matter, it's not much different here on earth. Imagine trying
to sweep up all the dirt on a desert. You can sweep up the top layer,
but there's always more below it. It's the same way most places on the
moon, because debris from impacts has been raining down everywhere, for
like forever.
On the earth, eventually you'll hit bedrock. Same on the moon, but the
depth varies greatly depending on where you are.
For the record, I'm a Christian myself, but those crazy creationists are
always saying stupid things that reflect badly on the rest of us. I
wish they'd just shut up and go away.
Jack
Maury |
Likely some of the details, even the mainstream thinking will change, and still be wrong after the change. My math does not go much beyond high school, so I often cannot check the work of the experts, so I don't know what will change, but there does seem to be suspicious comparisons.
The moon likely has and had little effect on green house warming. Earth has always had some green house warming, otherwise it would be almost as cold as Mars is now. My guess is more green house gas might warm Earth 9 degrees f = 5 degrees c, but not much more, unless the atmospheric pressure increases drastically as at Venus which has about 90 times more atmosphere than Earth. I have not seen a graph or chart that shows the the amount of green house warming that results from higher atmospheric pressure, but I am quite sure Venus is hot, partly because it has a thick atmosphere. My guess is neither Earth nor Venus ever had "run away" green house warming of significance, as the hockey stick graph has been discredited in my opinion.
No fosil evidence has been found for ice age at Earth the first 3.6 billion years = all the ice ages have occured in the most recent one billion years, and only about half of Earth's surface was covered by the worst ice caps.
This is surprising, as the Sun produced only about half as much energy 4 billion years ago. This is the result of nuclear fusson math and theory, which was sufficiently correct to produce reliable fusion = H bombs.
It is difficult to measure, with extreme accuracy, the distance to the sun, because the surface is very hot plasma, but some reports of Earth moving a few millimeters per year away from the Sun have not be debunked as far as I know. A few billion millimeters does not put Earth lots closer to the Sun, but it could account for no ice ages the first 3.6 billion years. The recent recession from the Sun, if real, may be a recent change, but there is little reason to think the resession rate has changed a lot over the past 3.6 billion years. I'm also a Christian, but I also have little use for much of the ceationist's sudo-science. Neil