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Our Moon May Have Formed From Multiple Small Ones, Says Report (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: A series of cosmic collisions may have spawned multiple moonlets that morphed into the one big moon we know today. Rather than one giant impact that knocked off part of early Earth and created the moon, a number of smaller collisions may have produced lots of mini-moons, Israeli scientists reported Monday. And those mini-moons, over millions of years, may have clumped together to make one large one. The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job. They say that would explain why the moon seems to be composed of material from Earth, rather than some other planet, too. It's actually an old theory revitalized now by the Weizmann Institute of Science's Raluca Rufu in Rehovot, Israel, and his team. Their findings were published in Nature Geoscience.
I should go find old theories and republish them as new ideas, then I can brag I was published in scientific journals.
"The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job."
this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
No, this is what science has always been: chasing existing theories, testing them from different angles, trying to find weak points. Only a vanishingly small part of scientific discovery is about making a huge, new discovery. But what we see here, and what you are complaining about is really the poor journalism that tries to inflate good, but humdrum scientific results and make a sexy sounding headline out of it. And once again it has served its purpose: to attract clicks to slashdot's website, which translates into advertising revenue. From their point of view scientific accuracy only matters in as much as it increases revenue - they don't care if the clicks come from real scientists and engineers or clueless teenagers.
What you are suffering from is called a displacement.
More precisely you appear to assume that scientists, like the creation myth in your favorite holy book, are claiming an absolute trust.
That does not work like that in the real world. Scientists create models and then try to invalidate them by comparing to reality.
Eventually all models become invalidated and are replaced by newer models that fit better with reality.
No sane scientist will ever claim that a specific model is absolutely true. That is why the article is full of "may" and "suggests". Same for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... page that describes the single large collision model.
The only thing that is correct in your post is that from the 5 scientists involved in your short story, the last one is probably the one that merits the most to be fired.
Why? Because scientists #1 and #3 are both proposing a model. Scientists #2 and #4 are defending those models. The only one that is not contributing in any useful way is scientist #5.
The problem is getting the AGW political activists out there to treat the problem in a scientific way, rather than another excuse to scream doomsday. "Deniers" are those of us who have seen these people be wrong about all their other apocalypses, and therefore find it easy to assume that they have to be wrong about this one too.
A surefire sign of the unthinking activist is their automatic rejection of any real-world solution to the carbon problem.
A surefire sign of the unthinking activist is their automatic rejection of any real-world solution to the carbon problem.
I don't think there is all that much difference between the doomsdayers on the one hand and the conspiracy theorist deniers on the other. Both sides have decided on their 'conclusion' a priori and mangle the available data to fit. The only real sceptics in all of this are the climate scientists; scepticism is at the very core of what science is. Blindly denying the observable facts - which both dommsdayers and deniers do - has nothing to do with being sceptical or thinking critically; it is nothing more than blind faith and represents the extreme of gullibility.
That said, it makes good sense to listen to the balanced, scientific viewpoints that are presented by climate science: humans do cause climate change, it is getting dangerous now, and we can actually do something constructive about it, not just in terms of short term mitigation, but also in terms of changing the stupid and wasteful habits that are a significant part of the reasons why we have climate change.