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Collision With Earth's "Little Sister" Created the Moon
astroengine writes The primordial planet believed to have smashed into baby Earth, creating a cloud of debris that eventually formed into the moon, was chemically a near-match to Earth, a new study shows. The finding, reported in this week's Nature, helps resolve a long-standing puzzle about why Earth and the moon are nearly twins in terms of composition. Computer models show that most of the material that formed the moon would have come from the shattered impactor, a planetary body referred to as Theia, which should have a slightly different isotopic makeup than Earth.
The same could apply to evolution, to most of cosmology, to archaeology, to Egyptology, how the pyramids were made, to how cells formed, to just about every aspect of science.
It's just sheer ignorance to suggest that it's not worth pursuing.
Science is about looking what's ALREADY out there. Formulating a theory that ties some parts of it together and maybe how it originated.
Then testing your theory on other, sometimes unrelated parts of the universe. If they work, great, we have a certain amount of knowledge and ability to predict what might happen next. If they don't, great, we know that we have the wrong idea / made an incorrect correlation somewhere. Both are knowledge you can use to improve your next hypothesis and so get closer to a probable answer.
Without simple bases like these, you can't answer the bigger questions. And suggesting the knowledge is useless because "we'll never know exactly what happened" is like saying that studying an air-crash into the Alps is pointless because "we'll never know exactly what happened"... there's still things to deduce, lessons to learn, knowledge that you can use going forward to improve people's lives.
You're an idiot. And a not particularly forward-thinking one either. Proving that, even only to a certain probability, the Earth, Moon and this object were of the same composition suggests where all of them might have come from. It suggests what to look for. It suggests how planets themselves might form. That suggests how we might find places where planets might be likely to form. That suggests how we look for those places. That suggests what might be interesting areas of the universe.
In the same way that some dickhead can claim that the world just popped into existence 6000 years ago and consider themselves "just as correct" as hundreds of years of scientific study by hundreds of thousands of scholars, you're just as much an idiot to suggest that this knowledge is as worthless as you claim.
And the reason you see so many earth-moon-creation theories (actually hypotheses until they are proven) and papers every month? Because it matters. And because each one - by its disproval - gets us closer to an answer, and builds on the knowledge of the previous, and is an area of intense study by respected scientists. And all that stuff in the news you see about how we've located thousands of planets around foreign stars that we didn't even know were there before, how we've managed to detect Earth-like ones in that, how we might choose candidates to mine in the future? That's all possible because of those papers.
And, even simpler than that, just simple geology here on Earth is improved by that knowledge.
If you don't get that science is merely a way to predict the future using the evidence of the past, you're a fucking moron.