Posted on 08/07/2008 9:57:23 PM PDT by neverdem
Goldilocks isn’t the only one who demanded everything to be “just right.” The Earth and its fellow seven planets also needed perfect conditions to form as observed, and those right conditions occur rarely, a new computer simulation shows.
The new simulation, described in the Aug. 8 Science, is the first to trace from beginning to end how planetary systems form from an initial gas disk encircling a baby star.
“The really striking result of the new model is how chaotic and even violent the average story of a planet’s birth is,” says Edward Thommes, an astrophysicist now at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
The process is typically a big mess. “Planets get into each others' ‘personal space,’ gravitationally scattering each other. They compete with each other for gas from the disk that gives birth to them and lots of planets are lost along the way,” he says. “It's almost like reality TV.”
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Hat tip to Matchett-PI. He gave me the link on another thread.
Creationists have been talking about this for years - it is called the Anthropic Principle. And the concept was developed initially by non-creationists.
“Although we may be weird, we’re by no means unique,” he says.
No kidding?
Of course, there are many meanings of the term “anthropic principle”...but the point is, “perfect conditions for humans” is absolutely no evidence toward creationism.
I am old enough to remember way back when we did not have the technology to detect planets around other stars. Most scientists believed that planets were extremely rare.
A few of us, who believed in conservation of angular momentum, felt that planets were fairly common, but we just didn’t have the technology to see them.
Now that we have the technology to see planets, but not earth-like ones, we have started to believe that planets are common, but earth-like planets are rare.
In a few more years we will be able to detect earth-like planets, and will discover that there are a lot more of them than anyone suspected...
Bingo.
Yep. It's why I find it particularly amusing whenever they show some over-educated starry-eyed cosmologist on TV insisting that he's certain that life is common in the universe....
Scientists start with just as many assumptions if not more than your average Joe.
Conclusive evidence? No, of course not...short of a time-machine (or direct revelation) such evidence is not possible. And that would be "perfect conditions" for all forms of life on Earth, not merely humans.
However, if it can be shown that life on Earth is plausibly unique in all the unimaginably large universe...that does cause one to ponder.
The whole (now common) "life is common" theory in science about the universe is based on definite evolutionary assumptions--that time and chance are all that are necessary for creation, even of life--and the idea of a Supreme Being is cut out of the picture by default.
That is what led Frank Turek to write a book titled, I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist
Though around what type of star? Ours is a G2V. There's one nearby, but it's part of a trinary system. The next one is hundreds of light years distant.
Conditions for technological life might well be a lot rarer than we once thought.
These scientists better keep working hard to find my home.
‘Slow Life’ and its Implications
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I was fortunate to have spent some time in conversation with one of the leading physicists in the world a few years ago at a conference he keynoted. He is intensely uncomfortable with the observed "tuning" of the constants of the general model BECAUSE it points to a creator who did the tuning--the tuning is way too improbably to have happened by chance. Even worse, from his perspective, it points to a tuner who planned on having humans around.
He has spent a good deal of the past decade working on theories to get around that implication with not much success.
Thanks for posting this article.
OK. But in an ‘infinite’ universe, rare is still a large number.
“However, if it can be shown that life on Earth is plausibly unique in all the unimaginably large universe...that does cause one to ponder.
The whole (now common) “life is common” theory in science about the universe is based on definite evolutionary assumptions—that time and chance are all that are necessary for creation, even of life—and the idea of a Supreme Being is cut out of the picture by default.”
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Cause one to ponder what? Why a “Supreme Being” would need to create “billions and billions” of stars, and wait for billions of years (16 billion, at least, according to the latest estimate I saw) to create our itty bitty, “unique” Earth so he could provide a place for humans to evolve from earlier forms of hominids? I had hoped we would find the Supreme Being could snap his supernatural fingers and create our physical domain a little more quickly and efficiently. But no, we got stuck with the “slow God,” I guess. You religious people crack me up.
btt
““perfect conditions for humans” is absolutely no evidence toward creationism.”
Perfect conditions for a type of life form to exist, suited to the environment, might be.
God has many creatures. Many. Heck, we haven’t even found all the currently existing forms of life, on this little rock.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.”
...
“Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so.”
...
“Thus the heavens and earth were completed, and all their hosts.”
...
“This is an account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.”
(from verses in Genesis 1 & 2)
If a “Creator” did some “tuning” to create an Earth that is so “unique,” why did that “Creator” have to create a universe that is so unfathomably large, and then have to wait 16 billion years before that “unique” Earth spawned human life? I hate to cast aspersions on your deity, but your god is one slow and inefficient creator.
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