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Was Earth a Migratory Planet?
astroengine writes "Why our planet isn't a "snowball Earth" — a dilemma called the 'faint young sun paradox' — has foxed solar and planetary scientists for decades. Since the Earth's formation, a planet covered in ice should have stifled any kind of greenhouse effect, preventing our atmosphere from warming up and maintaining water in a liquid state. Now, David Minton of Purdue University has come up with a novel solution that, by his own admission, straddles science fact and fiction. Perhaps Earth evolved closer to the Sun and through some gravitational effect, it was pushed to a higher orbit as the Sun grew hotter. But watch out, if this is true, planetary chaos awaits."
If this is the case, and the "chaos" that awaits is us migrating into a higher orbit, then whoopee, there goes us having to worry about the greenhouse effect... Oh wait... this isn't just another excuse not to curb our burning of fossil fuels is it?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
... another asteroidimpact caused a warming and creation of an atmosphere, while the byproduct of that asteroidimpact (called hencefort, the moon,) pulle us into a tighter orbit for those first few 100 laps around the sun, needed for the orbit to stabilise?
Earth is migratory
In fact, Earth received a Blue-green card as early as 3.5 billion years ago after passing a solar naturalization test.
"And then a miracle occurs" makes a good punchline but lousy science.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
It is the consensus of 99% of climatologists that the earth isn't a snowball and therefore it is a fact that the earth has slowly moved into a higher orbit at exactly the same rate that the sun has warmed so as to maintain a climate on earth appropriate for life. The more we fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and thus heat the earth, the further the earth will move away from the sun so as to maintain an optimum climate. These "inconvenient truths" prove that there is an intelligent designer of the universe.
Q.E.D.
Planet migration theories have been floating around since the 1970s. Nothing new, but I guess Discovery's standards are continuing to fall.
Doesn't it suggest that the Earth was heated up a lot at the time? That could have jumpstarted the greenhouse engine.
Could have altered its orbit, too, probably.
Get off my launchpad!
Kind of like this...
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
During its initial formation the Earth was molten and hot. As it cooled it continued to collect water from comet impacts or whatever (there is lots of water in a solar system). As it continued to cool eventually the planet reached an equilibrium between temperature, the amount of water on the it and greenhouse gases to keep it from cooling too much.
It's as simple as that.
Up until it found it was having humans. Then it had to settle down.
A substance that, when introduced into or absorbed by a living organism, causes death or injury, esp. one that kills by rapid action.
*breaths in*
That was just a bunch of CO2 I sucked in right there.
Even your argument that "everything is a poison in large quantities" is stupid, because it's not the CO2 harming you if you go in the garage and turn on the car - it's the fact you are not getting oxygen. The CO2 itself did not hurt you.
Plants also disagree with you. When you've made a plant frown how much lower can you go?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are a lot of "maybe"s out there when it comes to these science theories and discoveries, but adding a "watch out" for planetary chaos at the end is so drama-llamas. I'm not going to worry, because even if it came about, wtf can I (or anyone) do about it? Gotta live out what we got in the here and now while doing our best to observe the future--rationally, not Mayan-Calendarly.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Well, unless he's trying to be punny. Migratory planets were proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky in, among other things, his 1950 book "Worlds in Collision". His ideas were picked up by James P Hogan for his "Giants" series and other books. (James P Hogan was notable for adapting crazy theories into interesting books in his early years, but then digressing later in life to the point where he never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
... extra-solar planet, on the way in, hit earth, which was iced up back then, imparting both the heat neccessary to "atmospherize" (you like that!??) the planet, and the force neccessary to impel it into a "goldilocks" orbital. :)
Seriously, don't most of the astronomy articles dealing with our odd little solar system have their answers in that whacky old series of books called "The Earth Chronicles", written by that recently-deceased "kook" and "charlatan", Zecharia Sitchin?
We deserve another Dark Age; we sure haven't availed ourselves of Reason in this "enlightenment".
And before you "poo-poo" it, try reading just one of them. I've yet to meet anyone who wasn't trained in Anthropology who could hang through the first fifty pages (a real snoozer unless you care about how civilization developed...)
Got your G.O.O.D.s in order?
21.12.2012! Or was it 20.12.2012? It's much nicer looking date anyway. Like, two similar sequences of numbers a row. Oh, yeah.
it was brought here by a European Swallow?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Who's shoving on whom here? If you weren't interested in shoving, You would have kept your mouth shut. Go troll somewhere else.
Ah, so here's the deal. I'm the person that this article is talking about (David Minton, professor at Purdue University). I've been reading Slashdot for a fair number of years now, though it took me a long time to sign up and comment for the first time (I've always been a lurker at heart). Because I have a soft spot for all you basement dwellers (I kid!), I'm going to give you a bit of behind the scenes regarding this article, which kind of took me by surprise, actually. This is a bit long, so TL;DR: Science sometimes happens during panicked last minute coding sessions in hotel rooms prior to delivering invited talks that were procrastinated about.
So about five years ago my graduate school advisor and I wrote what was my very first peer-reviewed paper, which was on the subject of the Faint Young Sun Paradox. The paradox goes something like this: The early Sun was fainter than it is today, so all things being equal the Earth should have spend the first half of its life frozen over. Geologists tell us it wasn't, so something wasn't equal. What was it? We investigated the idea that the Sun may have been slightly more massive (something like 2-7% more massive), and that it had to lose most of that excess mass over a few billion years, which is at odds with measurements of mass loss of Sun-like stars. So we published it, and I went on to do other things in grad school, mostly involving trying to figure out the early impact bombardment history of the solar system, which we think may have been influenced by an early period of migration of the gas giant planets.
Fast forward to a few months ago, and a fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (the place they run the Hubble from) contacted me to ask if I'd like to give a talk about my old mass-losing Sun paper at a workshop that was planned to bring together astrophysicists, geologists, climate scientists, and planetary dynamicists to talk about the Faint Young Sun problem. They wanted me to also talk about planet migration and how that might fit in to the problem. Sure, why not? Revisiting the problem would be fun! The thing is, I've just started a new faculty job, and part of my job is helping get a new planetary science group built up at Purdue, so I've been extremely busy. And, well, I procrastinated. Big time. There was always some pressing thing to do that took time away from getting ready for the workshop. So the next thing I know, it's a few days before the meeting and I still haven't really thought about the faint Sun in about five years. So I dust off my old files, start futzing around with a talk, and the next thing I know I'm on a plane to Baltimore.
Late the night before the workshop is about to start, I'm racking my brain trying to come up with something new to say. You see, I've been thinking about early solar system history, and planet formation. Migration is a big deal in those early days. It's easy to get planets to move around in young solar systems. But the Faint Young Sun problem is a problem for the Earth's mid-life, not it's adolescence. Then I remembered a paper I really liked that came out a couple of years ago by Jaques Laskar and Mickaël Gastineau. They showed that our own solar system could potentially destabilize after a few billion years of seeming-stability due to Mercury's proximity to a chaotic region. It's described briefly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System#Laskar_.26_Gastineau
What if something like that had happened *already?* So I futzed around with an N-body gravitational dynamics code remotely from my hotel room, in my pajamas, playing around with plausible initial solar systems where Earth stared just a tad closer to the Sun, but close enough to solve the problem of being frozen over, and Venus started out as two separate planets and then went unstable after many billions of years, scattering Earth to its present location in the process. And, when I checke
O.M.G. you are a genius!
PRAY FOR MORE OIL! God will provide my brothers!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Your post is neither less stupid than the GP nor informative.
Re: Sucking
It was also just a bunch of CO2 you blew out.
Re: Your ridiculous claims.
*Everything* that kills you works by disrupting something your body needs to do to live. You might as well say paralyzing venoms don't kill you, it's the lack of oxygen because your lungs aren't working. Does that mean venom isn't poison? No.
Re: Car scenario
The CO2 in your scenario doesn't kill you. The CO does that. CO2 CAN kill you, though. Maybe you've heard of hypercapnia. (Note the URL, too.)
Re: Plants
Just because something is not poison to ONE organism does not mean it is not a poison.
2 Kings, Chapter 4.
That makes no sense. Early in Earth's life it was a molten ball of lava because it was just forming and it had a heavy atmosphere since volcanoes spit out green house gasses like crazy.
As far as I knew early in Earth's life it was extremely hot, as even after life starting it was far far hotter then now and far too hot to have snow/ice.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
All geological accounts indicate that Mars had liquid oceans.
Under this theory, Mars being significantly further from the sun should have been a Hoth planet. Instead, Mars oceans gradually evaporated and with insufficient gravity to retain even the heavier gases, Mars lost not only its oceans but most of its atmosphere.
The theory presented in this articles blows. First the needed level of energy to push the Earth away from the Sun would be ... errr ... astronomical.
But more than that, it does not explain Mars loss of oceans.
Wish I had mod points for you. Maybe if I make a Sprinkled Parmesan sacrifice to His Noodlyness, I'll get some....
Thanks
Was gonna mod this down, but i'll reply instead. Sure there are lies about global warming. That said, what do you, personally, think what variables are responsible for climate of earth? Are you making the case that humans have affected exactly NONE of these variables? Because, that sounds kinda far fetched ;P
Do you have to believe in man made global warming to believe that bringing up and burning long burried carbon, turning it into CO2 is a bad idea?! Especially when we are doing other things like turning areas of land that burried the carbon into barren concrete?! Do you have to believe in man made global warming to accept that there are ways to get energy without hugely upsetting balances?
This isn't my field, but I think the idiot is the one who calls others idiots based on such a narrow scope.
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
We have been a "snowball Earth", but life changed that some 2-3 billion years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenian
Without life, Earth would probably have remained a snowball Earth.
What is the problem?
One of the amazing consequences of the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser theorem (KAM) is that the Earth orbit is stable, despite the influence of Jupiter. Stable in this context means that the orbit perturbations caused by Jupiter and the other planets don't cause the Earth orbit to move too close or too far from the Sun, causing dramatic changes of temperature.
Chaos theory when gravitation is involved is not so chaotic as one could expect: the KAM theorem tells us that multi-body systems governed by gravitation law have intrinsic stability regions.
Believe what you want, as long as you don't try to shove it someone else's throat and that includes kids at school, who am I to say that your bearded imaginary friend on his fluffy cloud isn't as great a buddy as my friend Harvey over here?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
And as an afterthought, He created the sun.
And the moon to rule the night, though for some reason it spends half its time in the daytime sky.
The problem I have with a lot of people is I don't try to shove my belief in god on them
Remind us who brought this nonsense up?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He's a fraud.
I'll give you 74 virgins
74 virgins for all eternity? If they stay virgins, you're probably in Hell. Otherwise... even if you just bonk one per quadrillion years, you run out before you've put a scratch in eternity.
Lurid offer, but meaningless if you pause to think about it. Once per quadrillion years is like offering you a chance to be a Slashdotter for all eternity.
My religion, OTOH, offers you one skilled courtesan. Or gigolo - my Heaven offers something for everyone.
Or dominatrix...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Life would make the Earth more prone to be "cold" because on the grand scale of things it tends to lock up CO2 in carbonates and organic molecules that get trapped in sediments and buried (look up the carbon cycle). As life proliferated this means the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would go down, reducing the greenhouse effect. This appears to have nicely counter-balanced the gradual increase in solar luminosity over billions of years. If we had the atmosphere now that was probably present back in the Archean, we'd probably look more like Venus by now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
Water intoxication, also known as water poisoning, is a potentially fatal disturbance in brain functions that results when the normal balance of electrolytes in the body is pushed outside of safe limits (e.g., hyponatremia) by overhydration, i.e., over-consumption of water.
Under normal circumstances, accidentally consuming too much water is exceptionally rare. Nearly all deaths related to water intoxication in normal individuals have resulted either from water drinking contests in which individuals attempt to consume large amounts of water, or long bouts of intensive exercise during which electrolytes are not properly replenished, yet excessive amounts of fluid are still consumed.[1]
Water, just like any other substance, can be considered a poison when over-consumed in a specific period of time. Water intoxication mostly occurs when water is being consumed at a high quantity without giving the body its proper nutrients it needs to be healthy.[2]
Excess of body water may also be a result of a medical condition or improper treatment, see "hyponatremia" for some examples. Water is considered the least toxic chemical compound, with a LD50 of 90 g/Kg or more. [3]
I guess between the believers and non-believers we're even. See Matthew 28:19. Part of the damn religion says "go bug everyone who doesn't believe until they believe... and the Christians DO!).
Since it's believed that the moon was created by a Mars-sized object slamming into the Earth, it makes sense that the collision could have moved the Earth's orbit at least a little.
The "Wandering Earth" could spark some good SF, though.
Free Martian Whores!
How could there not be a Monty Python joke in here somewhere?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
It's just water! 99% water.
With just a trace amount of LSD.
Trying to reconcile the garbage that is man made global warming with real science. It forces more and more people to adopt stupidity and idiocy instead of rational thought.
I fully expect the MSM to be chock full of lies, but here at /. I expected a little more honesty and rebellion. Ars-technica is now riddled with idiots who believe in man made global warming. Are you here the same now as well? Have you surrendered that much honesty and objectivity?
The Republican party now has its catechism of things you have to repeat in lockstep, kind of like the old Communist party. One of them is denying climate change.
I found this from http://faculty.ucr.edu/~martink/pdfs/Kennedy_2008_Nature.pdf
"The start of the Ediacaran period is defined by one of the most ,635 Myr ago. [...]
severe climate change events recorded in Earth history—the recovery
from the Marinoan ‘snowball’ ice age,
The distinctive features of Marinoan deglaciation that define the
base of the Ediacaran period can be attributed to the effects of
permafrost methane clathrate destabilization. In contrast to the
balanced feedbacks and progressive glacial–interglacial cycles of
Cenozoic deglaciation, the violent opening of the highly volatile
shelf-permafrost methane clathrate pool could act as a trigger to
catastrophic climate and biogeochemical reorganization of the
Earth system, abruptly bringing the long-lived and icy Cryogenian
period to a close and setting the stage for the appearance of metazoans
and dominance of a new Earth system. This event both identifies
the range of function of the climate system, and demonstrates a
mechanism activated by strong climate forcing not unlike projected
future effects of atmospheric CO2."
Okay as others have pointed out the parent is confusing CO and CO2
Wrong. I was VERY CAREFULLY pointing out CO2 (the gas specifically mentioned, carbon dioxide) is not toxic, being explicit because CO (carbon MONOXIDE) is in fact toxic. It just so happens both are found in car exhaust...
Even though your post supports the argument that perhaps people are truly too stupid to be allowed to post AC, I still support the AC system. You may want to read up on the next subject before you post again though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, too much CO2 is lethal. mkay?
I never said it was not lethal. Just not toxic.
Words mean things, m'kay?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley