Posted on 06/15/2014 2:13:49 PM PDT by rickmichaels
Creation stories tend to be outlandish, in keeping with the near impossibility of explaining why the world is the way it is — from the week-long labours of the Old Testament God, to the eternal cycles of the Hindu creator Brahma, to Raven’s metaphysical trickery in Pacific Northwest First Nations tradition.
Fanciful as they are, however, these myths have nothing on modern science, whose creation story — which already involves a mysterious Big Bang, perhaps one of many creations ex nihilo in infinite succession — this week got even weirder.
At a geophysics conference in California, a series of discoveries was announced that show — not for the first time, but in unprecedented detail — the Earth as we know it today was born of a violent collision between two ancient planets, so forceful it reduced both to molten rock and silicate vapour, and nearly blasted both into cosmic smithereens.
“It would have been a very, very bad day for the Earth,” said Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, associate professor in the Earth and Planetary sciences Department at Harvard University. “One potential outcome could have been complete destruction.”
It came close. The cataclysmic meeting of the proto-Earth and the smaller, Mars-sized planet Theia — known as the Big Splash — set the Earth spinning faster than ever, tilted its axis by 23 degrees, and created the moon from the debris that was blasted into orbit.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalpost.com ...
The quote is attributed to him but he said in a number of ways. Check out this link: http://www.chesterton.org/ceases-to-worship/
Da floor iz lava!
Da red wunz go faster...
Since as they say, the Moon is mostly made of Theia, the obvious thing would be that unlike the picture, the two bodies did not hit “head on”, but that Theia hit Earth with an off-center blow, with much of it glancing off to form the Moon. Call it a contest between gravity and momentum.
. . . only NOW to have Man-induced Global Climate Change certain to doom our world…
“Earth and Planetary sciences Department at Harvard University”
A university about as credible as the Onion is for news.
We have the ability to observe and find out. A far better question is why is there something, rather than nothing?
If there was nothing, who would be around to observe it, and what would they observe?
We can see light going back close to the beginning, and that tells about the state and composition of matter and energy in the Universe at that time. We can observe and know the laws of physics, which takes us back to an instant after the beginning. There’s no reason for us to be ignorant.
bullplop.
Antelope Freeway 1/2 mi
Antelope Freeway 1/4 mi
Antelope Freeway 1/8 mi
Antelope Freeway 1/16 mi
Antelope Freeway 1/32 mi
Antelope Freeway 1/64 mi
Thank you Firesign Theater ... circa ... in the days of my youth.
Did Liberals back then blame Bush?
“They have footage of that collision. In color.”
Some of the light emitted from the collision still exists and is still traveling through space about 4.6 billion light years distant from us. If it were possible to collect that light in an observation instrument and resolve it into an image, you could still quite literally make a video recording of the event, and then bring it home to Earth using a transport method that does not require FTL (faster than light) travel such as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
It exists. Either it always did, or it came into existence. There is no other option.
“She must have been hauling tail to not get caught in a solar orbit.”
Theia was in a Solar orbit as indicated by the 5km/s collision speed. The orbits of proto-Earth and Theia intersected in the aftermath of the earlier collisions which formed those earlier bodies.
“If there was nothing, who would be around to observe it, and what would they observe?”
We are around today to observe the part of the light, radio, X-ray, Gamma-ray, and Cosmic ray energy which is just now arriving after a 4.6 billion year journey through the intervening space. The farther away an object is in space the farther back into time we can observe the events that were taking place when the electromagnetic energy departed the scene of the event. When we observe the star nearest to us, Proxima Centauri, we are observing what the star looked like and was doing about 4.2 years ago; because it took the light from that star about 4.2 years to travel through space and reach us here on the Earth.
When you look up into the sky at night in the general vicinity of the star Betelgeuse and the Orion nebula, there is a fuzzy nebular patch nearby which is the Andromeda galaxy of stars. Like our Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy is a large spiral galaxy composed of a vast number of stars, dust, and gas. It is located about 2 million light years distant from us. When you stand outside and look at the Andromeda Galaxy, the light coming into your eyes left the Andromeda Galaxy about two million years ago, and that light is only just now arriving here on the Earth where it enters your eyes. This means the events we are now witnessing in the Andormeda Galaxy occurred about 2 million years ago, and we have no way of observing what is occurring in the Andromeda Galaxy at this moment in time.
In fact, when you look at the more than 6,000 stars visible with the naked eye in the night sky, what you are seeing is a composite view of time. This view is not how the Universe exists now at this moment in time. Instead, the view is distorted by the lag in the time it takes for the light to travel to us. Some of the stars seen in the night sky no longer exist at this time. They exploded and are dissipated into clouds of dust and gas splattered across their local space, or they have been torn apart and consumed by a Black Hole singularity. The cataclysmic events that destroyed these stars have not yet been observed on the Earth because the light emitted during these events have not yet traveled across the intervening space to reach us here on the Earth.
It is for that same reason we are able to see events that were taking place in the first hundreds of millions of years of the existence of the Universe, because the light and other electromagentic energies emitted by those events are only just now arriving here on the Earth from those most distant locations.
Firesign Theater is probably much more enjoyable to most people than learning calculus or physics.
why doesn't themoon rotate on its axis????seems to me that a glancing hit would create a rotation...
almost as much fun as Nick readin’ his name on his office wingow .... Regnad K’cin.
“why doesn’t themoon rotate on its axis????seems to me that a glancing hit would create a rotation...”
The Moon does rotate on its axis: one rotation per orbit around the Earth-Luna barycenter. The rotation was formerly different, but the Earth’s gravitational pull on the Moon/Luna locked the rotation down to one rotation per orbit.
After the local school shooting (Seattle Pacific University) and seeing the kids faith-filled response; widely covered in the media across the world I thought of them while singing it.
And again think of those lyrics when reading this thread.
I have no problem thinking that for some reason it was beneficial for the earth to be the way it was before it was struck and the moon created. And obviously it is beneficial to have the moon. Life would probably not be here if the moon wasn't the proper size and distance from the earth. (Plus - we get really cool solar eclipses - which of course means the sun is the perfect size and distance too!)
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