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.
This can only provide dates for the oldest rocks. The earth itself must be at least as old as it's oldest rocks, but may also be older.
What's your interpretation thereof? How old do you think the earth is?
Commonly known as the "structuralist" fallacy (function follows form). Evolution, by contrast is a "functionalist" theory (form follows function). Even Lamarck rejected structuralism 200 years ago.
Well done. I'd missed that.
Unless, of course, you've found rocks that were introduced from another source at a much later time. If we run into a piece of 20 billion year old rock, it doesn't really change the age of the earth in a practical sense.
In a sense, we do, all the time. The protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up the atoms that make up the rock are supposed to be that old, more or less. Maybe the heavy atoms, anything above hydrogen, are newer although made of older parts.
One answer is here, in this creationist comic book: In The Beginning.
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?
He is being civil. He is also accurately describing the poor state of creation "science". The fact that this accurate description reveals inadequacies on the creationist side is hardly *his* fault.
But if you feel it's an inaccurate characterization, you are invited to now present the evidence that the Earth is indeed only ~6000 years old, and/or was formed in 6 days or less, while at the same time explaining why the enormous amount of evidence for a much older Earth is not actually what it appears to be. Unless you can do so, his description will stand as accurate.
And are you sure you want to get off on another "evolutionists are [allegedly] condescending more often than creationists [*cough*], therefore they must be evil/wrong/whatever" tangent again? Most of us remember what happened the last time you tried that.
You'd be better served discussing the evidence, if you think you can. So far in this thread, you have not, you've just condescendingly sniped (oh, the irony).
Then why do evolutionists say it?
They don't, actually. Shall we add this to the growing list of amazing claims by you about what evolutionists allegedly do, which you fail to support when challenged to? Before long we'll have to start posting the Dataman FABNAQ (Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions).
What evolutionsts *do* sometimes do is point out that certain creationist positions would apparently require a "trickster God", one who purposely "planted" evidence which gave misleading implications about his creation.
Even a child should be able to grasp that this doesn't mean that the evolutionists *are* saying God is a trickster; on the contrary they're rejecting that position and thus pointing out that any creationist hypothesis which implies that God is such a "faker" must necessarily be flawed.
When has gravity changed? Has it changed recently? Speed of light changed recently? Is it now faster...slower?
Constantly refining the date of the planet tells me what? Is it right this time? I can answer that. No. It will be changed again and again and again.
I am not mocking and sneering. Just pointing out the fact that people put faith in something that changes so often over a short period of time.
For the same reason that wolves still exist even though domestic dogs descended from them.
Most often, evolution causes species to split off from each other (one part going one way, the other part another way), not "one species entirely changes into a different species". That's why there are now millions of different species on Earth, instead of one.
When humans and chimpanzees split from their common ancestor (which, while still an ape, was neither human nor chimp, nor any modern form of ape), the subpopulation which was destined to become humans evolved one way, the other subpopulation evolved towards "chimpness" (and then itself split off into the two species of modern chimpanzee). Meanwhile, even then there were several other independent lines of apes on their way towards becoming gorillas, orangutans, etc.
That's why there are still apes even though humans arose from apes. This is Biology 101 -- ask me a hard one.
Priceless!
Time to ask for a refund.
Well, we know the sun and the stars "burn" hydrogen in a fusion process which creates heavier elements, up to iron. Even if there were some heavier elements formed initially in the big bang, 13 billion years later and bazillions of star fires later, there are now MORE heavier elements and less hydrogen.
Since the earth has a disproportionately high amount of iron, and since iron is the end of the line in fusion burning, it is more than a good bet that we aren't due to initial iron from the big bang, but we are reformed iron from a second or third generation exploding star.
Now we also know from looking at stars around the universe that they fall into a certain pattern for size, brightness, spectrum, lifetime, etc. So we can estimate the general age and lifetime of the sun.
The factors line up for both the sun and the earth reforming from previous star matter at around the same time. The events the would lead to one formation would likely lead to the formation of both (all the planets, actually) at the same time.
There are just a few too many timelines lining up to suggest a complete coincidence of the earth forming elsewhere and wandering into the suns gravitational field -- including the relative circularity of orbit, plane of orbit, and direction of orbit -- very hard to explain by capture mechanics.
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