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Discovery of Water In Moon May Alter Origin Theory
MarkWhittington writes "Scientists, working on a NASA grant, have made another startling discovery concerning water on the Moon. It seems that the interior of the Moon has far more water in it than previously thought — as much as the Earth does, apparently. Researchers made this discovery by examining samples of volcanic glass brought back to Earth by the Apollo 17 astronauts. These tiny beads of glass have about 750 parts per million of water in them: about the same amount as similar volcanic glass on Earth. It is postulated that more water than previously imagined exists deep below the lunar surface and was brought up and trapped in these crystalline beads by volcanic action billions of years ago." Phil Plait's original post adds more detail.
Since the accepted theory about the origin of the moon is that it is the result of a large body impacting Earth (I watch the Universe, no scientific background here at all), is it not possible that the samples that they're finding on the moon are part of the Earth transferred in the impact?
Now we know why all the whalers went to the moon.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Just nuke the damn moon and let's get done with it.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
Or best offer. No undercover agents, pls.
Couldn't it be possible that the comet impacts created the water containing glass? A sufficiently large impact should melt some rock that may look lite it was brought up from inside the moon. The current theory is that water is deposited by comets; why not the glass too?
And by a metaphorical interpretation of the Bible, that's probably not far from the truth. You would expect that given billions of billions of subatomic particles combining in a great cosmic soup, the first things that would form are light elements, and some of the first compounds would be compounds of light elements—water, for example—long before the sorts of heavy elements and compounds that make up rocks would form.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
To be exact: If you believe that the bible is the literal word of god, and that god told the humans the exact truth about everything, instead of stories which keep them happy.
Just imagine the situation:
Moses: OK, so how did it all start? ... ... ...
God: Well, in the beginning I created space, time and matter in a big bang
Moses: In a what?
God: In a big bang. All of space and all the matter was concentrated in a point
Moses: Where was this point?
God: Everywhere.
Moses: But that doesn't make sense.
God: It makes perfect sense. You just don't understand it.
Moses: Nor will the other people. I need something I can tell them and which they will understand!
God: But it's exactly what I did!
Moses: But the people don't care if that is so. They want something they can understand, even if it is wrong!
God: sigh Well, then, what about that: In the beginning I created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go."
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
You're following a fallacious premise in-line with your predispostion to address Christianity exclusively by forming a Straw Man Fallacy regarding it.
It makes not the slightest difference to the correctness of a position how many people can be named historically to have held an erroneous opinion about some aspect of it. Literally no field of study could pass this criteria--and shouldn't, because it's merely an intentionally-impossible criterion to meet, to attempt to insure for oneself that they won't need to address a particular topic on the proponderance of good argument for it.
This is what is "disingenuous" here, specifically your approach to the subject as is in-line with the majority of atheistic "argument". What matters to any intellectually-honest person is whether a particular position is -viable at it's best-, not how many instances there were that some student or follower of the overarching topic held an erroneous view. This is the very definition of a Straw Man Fallacy.
Anyway, provide your counterexamples. I've demonstrated the views of one of those considered a "church Father", which, is essentially the -very definition- of early Christianity. You've provided nothing. As of today, the preponderance of support for the YEC/six-day-creation is originating specifically from the Evangelical movement, whereas what could be the "orthodox" you reference, the Catholic Church, currently acknowledged evolution, and Origen is fully considered foundational by the actual Orthodox Church.
So, gain a margin of backing of your position by posting some actual evidence of your stance, or using terminology meaningfully. Feel free to start on either one.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
This strange world view is held by lots of people, and I've never quite understood why.
First of all, the 'written record' has been translated at least twice before you've heard it, and not even between contemporary languages, but across a vast gulf of time which has resulted in many subtle changes of meaning that are lost of modern translators. Second, the old testament also suffers from the ambiguity of written Hebrew, which omits the vowels from words.
This is all after things have been written down, but it was much worse when only an oral tradition existed.
Have you ever played Chinese whispers? The error rate with even a trivial sentence is enormous, even if the experiment is performed in seconds, so that everyone's memory of the phrase is fresh. Now try to imagine how this would go across 1000 generations of people, each one waiting 3-20 years to pass on some knowledge to their descendants. Factor in the slowly changing nature of language, errors in memory, embellishments to make stories sound more interesting, individuals adding their own personal opinion, deliberate dissent from the status quo, or whatever...
Even if somehow, magically, some facts were correctly passed down for thousands of years, across many generations, languages, places, and peoples... you'd have no way of knowing that the process was successful! You couldn't tell which fact was still true, and what had become distorted, or embellished, or plain false. There is absolutely no way to differentiate between lies and truth based on age or authority alone.
For comparison, the science and facts you denigrate has dragged us out of the dark ages, and made it possible to bring people back from the dead, grant sight to the blind, and cure leprosy.
The prevailing theory for some time now (guessing a decade, maybe two?) is that the very early Earth was hit by by a sizeable object, at an angle and speed that didn't outright shatter the Earth but blew enough of the combined masses away from each other to form the Earth and Moon as we more or less know them today.
Also, water on Earth is theorized to have come from comets bombarding the infant planet. In the amounts necessary to fill the oceans today, it only makes sense that a lot of water-rich comets hit the moon instead of Earth.
It's only in the last couple of years that they confirmed there was any water at all on the moon, and that's at its polar regions which gets scant amounts of sunlight.
It's possible what water remained on the lunar surface was vapourized by the sun and blown away by solar winds billions of years ago, so only sub-surface water remains for most of the moon.
At least it's not an entry on the Fox News website.
Oh, yes, at least. Better that we wait a year for some other news source to pick up the story!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Where did I use the word "plagiarism". Does that even make sense in comparitive mythology (that's right my overly religious severely ignorant friend, there's a whole field of study tracing the similarities between mythologies). The Sumerians, via the Akkadians, laid the ground work for a considerable amount of later Middle Eastern and Western culture; writing, mythical and religious motifs (including the cosmography, the Hero and the Flood and so forth), codified laws, heck, even timekeeping and unit measures.
Why are you so shocked by this? Did you think somehow the Semitic peoples of Canaan wouldn't be heavily influenced by the Sumero-Akkadian religion just as they were in many respects by the Egyptian civilization? The ol' Promised Land sat on top of one of the most important trading routes even in prehistoric times, and it was heavily influenced by not just goods but ideas. A thousand years later the descendants of those ancient Canaanite tribes would again be influenced by Hellenistic thought, and from that was born modern Judaism, Christianity, and eventually Islam.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My what a big cultural chauvinism you have.
God would not have had to go into genetics to have told the truth in scripture. It would have been enough to have said, "Simple creatures became more complicated creatures over a long, long period of time." You really believe the intellectual capacity and ability to reason in the age of the Pharaohs was so much less than it is today? You're really saying that because science hadn't been invented, He had to make up a ridiculous story? You think allegory is easier to understand than simple, declarative statements about what really happened?
Now it's time for you to say, "His ways are not our ways."
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is always the punchline to every discussion with a believer.
Why do you even bother with all the other huffing and puffing? Why not just jump to "That's it! La la la!"?
You don't need an encyclopedia or foreword to explain the simple facts of little bitty simple creatures becoming mammals and man over a long long period of time. Is that so much harder to understand than taking Adam's rib and forming it into a woman? Is the supernatural so much easier to grasp than the natural, even for the people who lived at the time of the Pharaohs? They could figure out astronomy and enough physics to build the pyramids, I think they could have handled the simple truth without the need for a whacky creation myth.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The disruption of the Giant Impact (I think it's big enough to deserve capitals ; in the Earth-Moon system, there is only one such event, though it seems more common in the solar system as a whole) was such as to vaporise or finely disperse a large proportion of the volume of the proto-Earth - a quarter or so. That went up into short lived orbit, and would have degassed quite effectively, and several percent of it stayed up to form the Moon while the rest re-impacted over a few years. 750ppm is a lot of water to remain after that, and to survive the heat of re-accumulation too.
This is quite a problem.
The easiest way I can see for getting around it is to have the Giant Impact happening during the period of the "cometary" impacts that delivered water to Earth.
The Bad Astronomer says, in his TFA :
That could go with the Giant Impact happening during the "cometary wetting" phase, as long as the source of the comets accreting to proto-Earth and proto-Moon was consistent for both bodies. Which given that they'd have been sampling the flux of "comets" (wet asteroids, whatever) across the Earth-Moon-system's orbit, isn't a terribly difficult constraint, I'd think.
I think it's also important to say that I think that you don't have to have all "comets" from (say) a 2.5 to 3.5 AU snowline ; you could probably achieve the same effect with (say) 40% from 2.5 to 3.0AU and 60% from 4.0 to 4.5AU (the numbers are illustrative, not meant to assert any particular model). So if you've got a reasonably uniform flux of objects cycling around in the developing solar system, then getting a consistent mix of objects to accrete onto two objects in overlapping orbits isn't a particularly demanding constraint.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"