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Planets May Form in Hundreds, Not Millions, of Years
Seanasy writes "Recent simulations on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Terascale Computing System suggest that planet formation may take a lot less time than previously thought. The results were published in SCIENCE."
After checking out all of the articles I did not see a mention as to a possible recalculation or restatement of the age of planets in our solar system.
Is it a possibility that any of the planets, including earth, are much younger than previously thought?
If so it could offer some information on how quickly life actually "forms".
Wow. And to think that Velikovsky was just about run out of the scientific community 50 years ago for putting forth a similar idea, among others -- that planets could form rather quickly, in years or hundreds of years, rather than the millions of years previously thought.
This is also sort of the subject of James P. Hogan's novel, Cradle of Saturn. If you've never read James P. Hogan, you should. Good, good stuff.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Unremarkably, you miss that the study suggests the gas giants formed quickly not recently.
... why? A staggering amount of evidence point towards a time period much, much longer. "Reasonable" is believing things in reasonable accord with the evidence, and the estimate need never be completely proved to be accepted as fact. That's just not how people do things in real life.
6,000 years is a lot more reasonable-sounding
Evolution, for that matter, is a fact under the same principle of overwhelming evidence. The debate or theory now centers on how it happened, which might be Darwin's theory or something else; if Darwin is disproved the fact of evolution will remain. You are free to believe otherwise, but won't change the real world any more than your refusal to believe in the fact of gravity will enable you to fly.
Is this disrespectful? Yes. I think it would be untenable to grant any belief a held by any person person with equal weight. I thought creationism, with its tenuous basis in the Bible, had been left by the wayside long ago, though I realize there will always be a core that will believe anything.
For anyone interested in more details, this story appeared here a week ago. An interesting comment pointed out that this theory has major implications in understanding the hundred or so "hot Jupiters" that have been found around other stars. Most have orbital periods of only a few days and orbit their star at a distance less than Mercury's. This new theory may suggest that hot Jupiters are actually newly-formed gas planets and perhaps even a transient phenomena.
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Your post is wonderful at describing and detailing the logic and flow of argument. Thanks for providing that clear explanation for those who are challenged in that arena.
None of us were around when the earth was formed, whether it be supernaturally or by an accretion disk or some other method. Therefore we must either infer or deduce to arrive at a belief of what happened. Since no reproducible experiment can absolutely tell us what happened in the past, there is no hard empirical proof. So we must make assumptions in order to arrive at a belief system, whether it be Biblical or the current scientific beliefs (and there are more than one of those).
One of the key assumptions for me as a creationist is that God does not lie, and if He says He made the universe in six days, then we (at least I) take Him at His word. A key assumption for most astrophysicists and astronomers is that the rate of radioactive decay is constant, that the earth was never inside the event horizon of a white hole, and that things are now as they have always been. In other words, that conditions are constant and that therefore tests made today will work the same tomorrow.
Did you notice that bit I threw in there about inside the event horizon of a white hole? If that did occur, it is absolutely possible for the earth to be formed in days while billions of years passed in the stars, due to time effects at the event horizon. This allows starlight to travel at current light speed to the earth and be visible even though the earth is relatively young. This "white hole cosmology" is a brilliant work by Dr. Russ Humphreys, a Ph.D. physicist at Sandia National labs. If you're interested shoot me an email and I'll send you more info.
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