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Early Earth Atmosphere Favourable to Life
mathinator writes "A study by researchers at the University of Waterloo indicates that Earth in its infancy probably had substantial quantities of hydrogen in its atmosphere, a surprising finding that may alter the way many scientists think about how life began on the planet. The new study indicates that up to 40 percent of the early atmosphere was hydrogen, implying a more favourable climate for the production of pre-biotic organic compounds like amino acids, and ultimately, life. The paper was authored by doctoral student Feng Tian, Prof. Owen Toon and Research Associate Alexander Pavlov of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, and by Prof. Hans De Sterk of University of Waterloo's Applied Mathematics department. The paper was published in the April 7 issue of Science Express, the online edition of Science Magazine"
It appears the posted versiond oesn't mention that it was a collaboration between University of Waterloo and University of Colorado at Boulder. The only researcher in Waterloo was Prof Hans De Sterck. Just like to make sure that is clear
While Faith might be a big deal to many, I think we can believe in God without relying on just Faith.
One of the first proofs on the exsistance of God that I read came from Rene Descarte. Descarte asked the question how can any man believe that what he perceives is truthful. He was asking, if I see a yellow sun, how can I trust my perception that the sun is really yellow. Maybe what you see is red, but we both call it yellow. His anwser was, humans are not perfect. But the thought of God is perfect. Furthermore, anywhere you look, people will have an idea that there is a God, a seed is in every human being. Descarte conclused that since we are imperfect beings, how can we concieve of a perfect God unless that knowledge was seeded in us at birth. Descarte also wrote, that God would never decieve us. God is Truth.
I also was reading Memory and Identity by Pope John Paul II this past weekend. He had a very interesting chapter in why we need God. If you believe that Adam and Eve lived in Eden, and they ate from the tree of knowledge, then there are large consequences. Before eating from the tree of knowledge, they never sinned. They lived according to Gods' Will. But after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, they knew good and evil like God knows good and evil. What that means is that they could judge like God judges, they could pick what was good and evil. And that is where all human suffering origniates from. Evil is defined as the absence of some good. And since only God knows true Good, we must live according to his definition, and not ours. Take sex for example. Pope John Paul II wrote there is something better in having mystery, rather than viewing all people as a sexual object. By having mystery, you view people more completely, not just quickly dismissing them. That is why pre-marital sex is evil- there is some good missing.
As society gets more secular and starts making judgements without God, we will become more miserable. That hole people have in their life, the suffering, it is our longing for something more satisfying and Good than the choices we have made.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Yes it is slightly suprising. Hydrogen "evaporates" out into space unless it is forms some heavier molecules. What this simulation showed was that the rate of evaporation was propably lower than what was previously assumed. This means that life had time to form, and start binding the hydrogen into heavier compounds.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Just because a very high proportion of Hydrogen in the gases near the Earth as it was being formed, it doesn't follow that the Earth's atmosphere was composed mostly of Hydrogen. Hydrogen molecules can easily escape the Earth's gravitational field because they have a high enough velocity at normal temperatures, whereas heavier molecules generally don't. So you would expect to find a much higher proportion of heavier molecules forming the Earth's atmosphere, because once the Earth collects them and they tend not to escape. The new finding is that the temperature in the early atmosphere was lower than previously thought, so the Hydrogen had less energy so it escaped less quickly leaving a higher proportion behind. Note that even this paper is only claiming "up to 40%" of the atmosphere was Hydrogen, much lower than the percentage you'd find in free space.
I don't know if those are real Einstein quotes. As he himself said, many things that he didn't say about religion are attributed to him.
Anyway, those quotes sound like metaphoric speak, and the first one is not about god, it is about love.
But my quote, where he clearly states that he does not beleive in god, is taken from a letter he wrote, and can be verified:
Albert Einstein, The Human Side
by Albert Einstein, Banesh Hoffman (Editor), Helen Dukas (Editor)
God does not exist in any form. Deal with it.
I'll be waiting to see video of the repeatability of your experiments. I'm sure they aren't solely based on observations. Of things supposedly 14 billion years in the past. Because I'm sure someone had a camcorder rolling.
Effectively, we did! Because the speed of light is not infinite, the further we look out in space, the further back in time we can see. We can see a very long way out, and so a very long way back. The COBE satellite picked up microwave radiation that originated over 13 billion years ago.
The evidence for this age is very easy for anyone to understand. There are things called 'standard candles': stars which behave in a certain way, and are a certain size, and have the same brightness. We can detect their faintness and shifts in their spectrum, and easily calculate how far away they are, and so how old they are.
Also, theories are proved by the repeatability of observations, not the repeatability of processes. We can't re-run billions of years of evolution, but we can have testable theories about what we should find as fossils. We can then go out and test these theories by digging up bones...
No, he really didn't.
Or even better...
Of course, Christians like to repeat the lie that Einstein believed in their particular god. You're not one of those lying Christians, are you?