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stalhandske 16-Jul-18, 21:23 |
Of course! But the "r" and the "t" are next to one another on my keyboard and I made a mistake. I don't understand why you have to rub it in. |
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stalhandske 16-Jul-18, 21:35 |
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stalhandske 16-Jul-18, 21:46 |
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stalhandske 16-Jul-18, 22:04 |
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stalhandske 16-Jul-18, 23:25 |
If you read my posts carefully, you'll see that I don't disapprove. I was very specific about Christianity, the Bible, and their relation to science. I repeat that: It would be interesting to learn how you view the huge discrepancy between scienfific fact and the interpretation of the Bible in terms of dates. |
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I am afraid that I just cannot accept the dates proposed by science. I think that science "fact" is not always fact. Science of ever changing. I used to read with interest some of the posts on your previous club, Fiat Lux. This is no disrespect to the writer of that post, but does that writer truly believe that we evolved from bacteria? Perhaps that writer was not suggesting such a thing. I don't believe that humans and other creatures evolved at all. I believe that everything on this earth was created, and if it was created, there has to be a Creator. John 1:1-3 says that, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made". NKJV. The Word is Jesus. John is the Beloved Disciple, very close to Jesus and the writer of The Revelation of Jesus Christ. |
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stalhandske 17-Jul-18, 00:13 |
shirlmygirl "Creation science, like tasteful pornography, is an oxymoron. God the Creator did indeed work in mysterious ways, but they were far beyond the ability of the ancients to imagine, so they made up stories. The essence may be true, but to claim that the Genesis account contains anything like a verbatim description of what went on is nonsense. Can you imagine God trying to explain evolution to people who had no way of knowing how old the earth was, no idea of how far the earth is from the sun or, indeed, that the earth goes around the sun, had no idea what genes were and therefore no notion about heredity? It beggars the imagination." |
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stalhandske 17-Jul-18, 00:27 |
Let me just say this: This quote from the Bible does not exclude the possibility that Creation was much earlier, some 13.6 billion years ago (the Big Bang), or that humans (and other creatures) did evolve from unicellular organisms (bacteria), of which there is overwhelming scientific evidence. It would still be entirely true that "All things were made by Him". In my view you believe in interpretations of the holy Bible that were made by humans. If I were a very strictly religious person, but one that nevertheless trusted science, I might say that your opinion is almost blasphemous! |
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Shirlmygirl <<It certainly seems like an amazing, incredible miracle that the earth, and all its vibrant life, producing "after its kind" as the Bible says, appears at this time, to be a solitary, inhabited planet in the vast realms of space.>> The exoplanets (planets beyond our solar system) are incredibly far away. So far we cannot resolve surface features, and can only barely conduct spectroscopic analysis on a few of their atmospheres. We cannot image them directly, we only detect them via periodic wobbles in their primaries, or by transit light reductions. So to say these worlds must all be uninhabitable (though most are for our purposes) only highlights our own ignorance, not our understanding. <<When I refer to the water beneath us, what comes immediately to mind is the volcano erupting in Hawaii. How much lava is down there that it can keep pouring out? The earth has a molten core. How absolutely amazing. Does it keep on making new lava to replace what has poured out?>> Molten mantle. I am not sure, but I think the core may be solid. Hot, but essentially solid. The mantle, which is around three thousand miles thick, remains hot due to the slow decay of long lived nuclear isotopes. Material pulled into the mantle along plate margins (subducted) is melted, much of which wells back onto the surface through faults and fissures or volcanic plumes. Some plumes have been enormous, flooding the Earth in gigatons of basalt, such as much of Eastern Washington and Oregon. The Columbia Basalts, which if memory serves are about 15 million years old. <<Perhaps the scientifically minded can answer that question. Will God unleash all the volcanoes of the earth to destroy it before He makes it new again? God's Word says the earth will be destroyed by fire.>> Many Christians imagine this to be nuclear fire. We have no reason to believe any big ruptures are imminent, though they have occurred in the past. Just not on a global scale. Cometary impacts also generate enormous heat. <<I am not disputing science. I believe in it and admire it. What I find very hard to believe is that this earth is millions of years old.>> Floating down the Grand Ronde River I noticed the water carried particulate which ate away at the extremely hard basalt. Deep gouges worn over tens of thousands of years. The river itself had chewed through deep layers of basalt, each layer requiring hundreds of thousands of years. Colorado River water carved the Grand Canyon in a mere five million years or so, but Columbia Basalt is far tougher to chew through than soft Arizona shale and sedimentary sea floor rock. I have also noticed northern slopes are steeper and less eroded than southern slopes exposed to more sun. The irradiation weathering would require millions of years to alter slopes with this average degree of difference. They do not change in a day, year, or even a decade, but gradually over centuries of time. <<And if the earth is millions of years old, why is it that Jesus, the Son of God, came to the earth only a little over two thousand years ago? Are scientists going to disbelieve that Jesus truly is the Son of God, sent to reconcile men (and women) to God, The Father, as did the Jewish leadership at that time, responsible for the Crucifixion of our Lord. It certainly is their choice to do so.>> Brian's misinterpretation of your Bible states the world is 6000 years old and humans occupied it all but the first five days. Why did Jesus wait until year 4000, as reckoned by the Jewish calendar, instead of year 2000 or even year one? Jesus could have come while Adam and Steve were lolligagging |
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Fossils A series of eruptions occurred from 17 million to 6 million years ago over the region east of the Cascades from you, covering hundreds of thousands of square miles. These basalt flows buried forests, including gingkgo trees which went extinct on this continent. Long before the arrival of man. As your friend notes, the earliest hominids in the Americas are 13,000 years old. |
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Another subject. It certainly was interesting to hear about the "lava bomb", as it was described, that exploded out of the volcano on Hawaii yesterday. |
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Earth's Moon |
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Earth's Moon The moon produces no light of its own, save maybe a tiny bit of infrared from trivial decay of long lived isotopes suffusing lunar regolith. No visible light, at any rate. Neither does Earth--in the visible spectrum--except for the lightning strikes, volcanic eruptions, and photo-luminescent bacteria in bug guts and some marine organisms. Oh, our lovely aurora, of course, solar radiation guided into ionizing atmospheric gas closer to the magnetic poles. |
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Our Sun Too close the surface water boils off. Too far, it freezes. Either way the odds of life getting started diminish, given water's wonderful molecular transport ability. If I were going to hunt for life around other stars, I'd look for planets in tighter orbits than ours around dimmer, redder stars. These stars will outlast ours by billions of years. Our star is 5 billion years old, but will expand into a red giant, essentially baking Earth, in other 4 to 5 billion years. Before that, only a billion years from now, it will likely have grown hot enough to render it uninhabitable for our species. So maybe that is the way the world ends, in solar heat. Or, more likely, we'll induce a runaway greenhouse effect such as Venus (the hottest planet in our solar system) suffers. So much carbon dioxide, the Earth cannot handle it. In eons past our world sequestered carbon in coal, oil, chalk, and limestone deposits. But we are liberating these at incredible rates, currently about ten billion (10,000,000,000) TONS per year, which results in 40 billion tons of CO2. The reason for the 4 to 1 ratio is simple, the molecular weight of carbon is 12. Depleted carbon, which these ancient deposits are (no C14, thank you very much--meaning they are all well over 50,000 years old). Oxygen, on the other hand, weighs in at 16. O2, 32 (atmospheric oxygen is a diatomic molecule). So when carbon combines with oxygen, heat is emitted, as is the carbon dioxide. The heat is used to boil water to steam, which in turn drives a turbine, producing electricity. That's the biggest source of industrial (anthropogenic) CO2. SO 12+16+16 = 44. 44/12 = 3.6. So for every ton of coal or oil burned, 3.6 tons of carbon is emitted. But I'm getting sidetracked--the question was regarding stars like our sun. When you gaze upon a nice distribution of stellar populations arranged by luminosity and temperature, you get the Hertzsprung Russell Diagram, or HR Diagram. Again, stars just a bit above our sun down into the red dwarfs should all be good candidates for life. I have heard arguments that small mass stars would NOT make good candidates, but tend to discount those a bit. Still, we can be picky if you want, and consider only stars like ours. We toss the core suns just because there is hellacious radiation in there. We pitch the rim stars given a dearth of heavy metals. Our world is rich in iron and elements heavier than iron, meaning it was suffused with the byproducts of a supernova explosion at some point before it formed. There is pretty decent evidence our world incorporates byproducts of neutron star merger nucleosynthesis, given the higher ratio of gold than for which standard supernova nucleosynthesis could account. So only about ten percent of stars that much like our sun. Let's pitch the fraction that are binaries or higher order clusters--problematic as these pitch intermediate worlds, so only too hot or too cold are left. That's probably half. Oh, let's get a starting point--there are 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, which you can see stretch through Cassiopeia, Cygnus, through Sagittarius and all the way around on a nice moonless night. We will conservatively go with 100 billion, just because. Roughly half those are in the halo, a much smaller fraction are in the rim. So say 40% of the remainder is 40 billion stars, of which 10% like our sun gets us down to 4 billion sun like stars in our galaxy. Now note--there are trillions of other galaxies, but we'll ignore them as all too far away to be of genuine interest for our immediate purposes. So binaries--we pitch another 50% to pare us down to 2 billion solitary sunlike stars within the "habitable" belt of our galaxy. Out away from the radiation rich core, but in from the metal poor rim. Two billion sun like stars. What fraction of those possess planets? More particularly, what percent possess "Earth" like worlds within the star's habitable zone? In 1990 we could not answer that question, but today we can. It turns out to be about 22%. So 20% (we like to be conservative) of our 2 billion sun like stars gets us down to four hundred million (400,000,000). That is stars like our sun with "habitable" planets. We think life is extraordinarily likely given suitable conditions, concerning how fast it sprung forth on our own world, more than three point five billion years ago. On the other hand, for most of that 3.5 billion years life never progressed beyond the single celled stage. We might well imagine 90% of 400 million worlds sprout life, but to be conservative let's whittle it down to half. 200 million life bearing worlds. It could be more, or a lot less. It COULD be only one, but that just seems so unlikely. How many of those worlds evolve multicellular life? That question is much harder yet. It took this side of forever to happen here. If we use the ratio of years of multicellular life to life, we get seven hundred million divided by 3.5 billion, or 20%. Where were we? 200 million life bearing worlds? 20% of THAT figure is 40 million. Moving from there to worlds containing intelligent life is trickier still. In our world's experience, we note the brain cavity to body mass gradually increases over geologic time, across a wide range of organisms. Reptiles, dinosaurs, and birds (all diapsids), mammals (synapsids), and I'm not sure about turtles (anapsids). Maybe not them. But the other two groups, and possibly the fishes too. There might be all kinds of different intelligence, but the one of interest to us sparks technology, and THAT is largely dependent upon the ability to make fire. So of Earth's species that can make fire there have been only a small handful, all closely related to us. We came on the scene, developing fire technology, somewhere between one and two million years ago. Actually, Homo sapiens is a mere 300,000 years old, but earlier hominids made fire. So we'll go with a million years over 700 million years of multicellular existence to give us the fraction of sapient (thinking or self-aware) metazoans (multicellular critters). THAT is a very small number, 0.14%. So that times 40 million metazoan worlds nets us roughly 60,000 "intelligent" worlds. In our galaxy. In the vast universe beyond we of course multiply that by the big galaxy count--or some hundreds of billions. You still following along, Shirley? I'll give your eyes a rest here for just a bit. |
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I Don't Copy & Paste I wrote all that. I looked up the stats from various sources, and failed to give proper citations for those stats. If you want the links are still purple in my browser history, I can probably find them again. But the wording is pure Pasha. 300,000 years for Sapien history comes from memory, some source I read a little over a year ago (while teaching astronomy). I had been using 200,000 years, but 300,000 year old sapien skeletons were discovered in Morocco. So our species fanned out over Africa, but did not leave the continent for more than two hundred thousand years. When we did finally venture out, we encountered Neandertal, Denisovans, and others in Europe. None of our earliest ancestors spreading down through the Americas encountered other primates at all, until we entered South America. There the primates were very different (new world orders) from the species still in Africa, and the more ancient lemurs in Madagascar. The 300,000 year figure was regarded as very solid by the researchers engaged in that project. Fascinating to think they could stare across the Strait of Gibralter, which you could cross by foot five million years earlier (before mankind existed). So the earlier species venturing into Europe did so through the Middle East, just as we managed a hundred thousand years later. Astonishing to regard such vast stretches of time. |
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Zea Mays These strains we know were doing pretty well several thousand years ago. They never made it back to Europe, Asia, or Africa. This is how we can be fairly certain there was no trade established in the many centuries from the first colonization of the Americas to the voyages of the Portuguese explorer. No seed crops found their way back to Europe or Africa--and seeds are so easy to transport. Our species came to the New World, probably from the North, all the way down to lower South America, around 13,000 years ago. There may have been some subsequent migrations over the ensuing thousands of years, but we don't see evidence of backward migrations, and the "forward" migrations appear to have stopped more than 6000 years ago. The reason we know this is because there isn't any genetic mixing of the New World people until after Cristobol Columbus tortured and enslaved the brown skinned people he ran across. I was throwing out a guess of 6000 years for the last New World migration, but it may have been earlier--if it occurred at all. The earliest new world specimens appear to be quite different from those living here now, indicating significant change in the population. en.wikipedia.org And because I ran across "Buhl Woman," there is this: en.wikipedia.org I used to always joke about going to Buhl, but I'm not sure I ever made it there. I have been to Kennewick, where Kennewick Man was discovered. Very sad both of these specimens have been "repatriated" to local tribes, when in fact they were highly unlikely to have been members of those tribes. And I am very sympathetic to Shoshone causes, having been raised on a Shoshone/Paiute reservation. |
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stalhandske 17-Jul-18, 20:53 |
shirlmygirl It was obviously meant to be taken with several grains of salt and some humour. The logic goes like this (unless it was clear already). blasphemous=sacrilegious against God or sacred things. Suppose two things: There is a God and science is correct. In that case God created everything and the seeds for everything ca. 14 billion years ago (Big Bang). Human beings, not understanding the deep meaning of His word (the Bible), interpret it erroneously and hold the view, for example, that earth is 6000 years old. Which is then offensive against a holy matter = blasphemous. < But I don't believe for one minute that we evolved from monkeys and apes.> Well, you are correct in that belief! No scientist believes that either. shirlmygirl: <There is no point in continuing this discussion.> OK, so I won't elaborate on that matter. |
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While Stalhandske is Right People sometimes ask, "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" This question is equivalent to, "if I evolved from my cousin, why does my cousin still exist?" The answer is that you did not evolve from your cousin, but that you and your cousin share a common ancestor--your grandparents. That we evolved from earlier primates is a plain and somewhat simple fact. The evidence for this is overwhelmingly conclusive. |
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