Posted on 06/07/2003 3:50:41 AM PDT by Pharmboy
WASHINGTON - The Earth became a major planetary body much earlier than previously believed, just 10 million years after the birth of the sun, researchers say.
Experts now believe that the inner solar system planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — actually began forming within 10,000 years after the nuclear fires of the sun were ignited about 4.5 billion years ago, says Stein B. Jacobsen, author of an analysis appearing Friday in the journal Science.
Early in its life, the sun was surrounded by clouds of dust and gas. This material slowly clumped together into larger and larger pieces. Eventually, enough was concentrated in four bodies to form the inner solar system planets.
Within 10 million years, the Earth had reached about 64 percent of its present size and was the dominant planetary body within 93 million miles of the sun. Mercury and Venus orbit closer to the sun and Mars is farther out.
The final major event in the formation of the Earth, says Jacobsen, was probably the collision with a Mars-sized planetary body. This huge smashup added many millions of tons of material to the Earth. Some material also went into orbit of the Earth and evolved into the moon.
This massive collision, the final major event in the Earth's formation, is thought to have happened about 30 million years after the sun was born.
An earlier analysis of some chemical isotopes in the Earth's crust had concluded that the planet formed about 50 million years after the sun. But Jacobsen said a reinterpretation of the data, along with new measurements of chemicals in some types of meteorites, supports the conclusion that Earth's basic formation came much earlier.
Wrong, after microscopes were invented and bacteria could be identified as the causes of some communicable diseases, the germ theory of disease was developed. It was then soon discovered that viruses caused some communicable diseases. The old theory had to be revised to include these new infectious agents. Diseases, which once were though to be transmissible because they occurred frequently within the same family or community, have been shown instead as the result of genetics research, to be inherited through inbreeding. More recently it has been shown that prions can also be the cause of contagious infections; the theory was again revised. This prion discovery happened decades after the development of antibiotics. Only knowing the partial truth was certainly not futile for patients cured by each new advancement. There are still afflictions that can't quite be explained and may never be fully understood. Would you say medical research is futile because we will never understand all the reasons for why things go wrong with the human body?
To your second point, no it is not guess work. A guess is when you say flying pigs stole the sandwich after your lunch disappears when you back is turned and you have no clue as to where it went. Science is the attempt to come up with a working explanation for observed phenomena. However since we are not gods, and can’t possibly know the universe in its entirety, there may be evidence lurking out there that completely blows away the theory or invalidates most of it. It is hoped that these theories may allow us to know something about the universe even if part of the theory is wrong. If 95% of what we know is useless, than 5% is still good for something.
Yes I'm fully aware that evidence is not an issue for creationists. Their inability to produce any to explain how the earth was created in six days does not deter them.
This is a very interesting statement. Galactically speaking, you could basically say that a 10,000 year difference is insignificant. Therefore the earth formed simultaneous with the nuclear fire of the sun being ignited. Could that mean that the nuclear fire of the sun has some kind of eddying effect that created the planets? I think it may suggest that. I think there are things about the rotation of the earth that we don't understand fully. It may not be just angular momentum.
Anybody know?
You can't rule it out any more than you can rule out the possibility that our reality as we know it is just a computer program and we're really stuck in the matrix. Science never rules anything out, since all theories are subject to revision or repudiation. However, in order to have a scientific theory that someone powerful enough faked the age of the universe, you’re going to have to do better than dubious religious texts.
Would you like to have a civil conversation or will you continue to descend to the level of other evos and pretend condescension is science?
Science ALSO agrees!
I validate THIS statement each time I look in the mirror!
Not ALL creationists are of the 6 day variety.
And MY favorite Evo stumper:
If 'E' really works, then there ought to be all kinds of random thingies hanging off of most creatures we see, us included. These unknown parts should just be WAITING to change into something better, or something REALLY useless!
"We apologize for the inconvenience." -- God's Last Message to His Creation.
Because scientific claims are always subject to revision in light of testing against observation, internal consistency, consistency with other well established theories, and the like. Scientists are constantly thinking of new ways to test previous conclusions, and new data sets that can be employed in the process. The content of science is constantly changing because that very content if produced by an unceasing process of rigorous and aggressive criticism.
You don't have to like this, or respect this, and it's your right to mock and sneer all you want, but this is the nature of science.
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