Good point. And it reminded me of another version of the Flood, that Noah lived down near the gulf, wherever the coast was back then, and the Flood was a double whammy, or maybe a triple depending on how you’re counting: first a massive storm or series of storms dumping immense amounts of snow up in the mountains from which the Tigris and Euphrates arise; then a massive warm front storm sweeping up across those same mountains thus melting the snow and setting off a once-in-ten-millennia flood; and last a storm hitting the gulf that drove a storm surge ten meters or more high. If Noah and pretty much the rest of civilization all lived down near the gulf coast, that combination could have been enough to not just wipe out farms but to actually over-top city walls and palaces and temples.
Of course nothing in that sequence would have launched anything upwards larger than ordinary storm debris, and none of that would have done anything but splash right back down.
Add to that God’s declaration that He creates catastrophes, and you’ve pretty much got modern geology covered.
A lot of young-earth material I’ve read struck me as being bad science fiction.
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That’s because the laws of physics make the idea impossible. Even if God had fashioned cannon barrels a hundred kilometers long that were several orders of magnitude stronger than regular rock, and had frictionless interior surfaces, and the magma at the bottom was at 10k° C, and just the most efficient amount of water got injected under a slab of rock filling the cannon barrels, steam explosions just don’t have the ‘oomph’ to launch anything into orbit.
The mass of the Earth is only relevant due to its gravity; the relative mass of earth v asteroids is meaningless.
Spreading the heat over the course of a month or two doesn’t change the equation enough to produce a different outcome; you’d just be vaporizing pieces of the earth at a time rather than the whole thing at once – and that’s got its own problems; vaporizing the earth in chunks raises the planet’s temperature and after a noticeable fraction of the asteroids got launched the planet would be too hot for water to remain liquid.
And that’s totally apart from the fact that launching chunks of the earth into space while vaporizing the places they came from is going to make the planet wobble catastrophically.
And meanwhile supposedly the tectonic plates are zipping along, which is a problem unless you want to posit that there were holes in those plates just the right size for these steam cannons to launch through.
Except in the case of the sort of simple science involved in something like this it’s easy to conclude that it’s not possible. It’s like the “But what if…?” mind experiment games we played in the physics building study center, frequently involving moving planets to different orbits or crashing planets together, though the instance most relevant to this topic was the question of “How much energy would it take to launch the entire Yellowstone system region into space and what would happen?” because the numbers involved are comparable (BTW, as I recall the conclusion, most of the continental U.S. would turn molten and the planetary temperature would jump upwards by several degrees).
At the moment the number of asteroids for which NASA has determined orbits is 1,302,214. This is considered to include the majority of objects larger than 10m across and over four-fifths of the total mass.
Spread that over six months and you’ve got an asteroid launching every twelve seconds if you just count the ones NASA has orbits for, and probably once every eight seconds. So over five times a minute a hunk of rock is being thrown up at greater than escape velocity, leaving columns of superheated air. Using an average asteroid size, before even the first month is past the atmosphere will be too hot for cloud formation.
So "cooling back to water: isn’t an issue because it will be too hot for that to happen.
In comparison to the energy involved, the heat output of all the flood basalt events in Earth’s history is negligible.
No – the larger the rock, the more energy required. This isn’t even physics 101, it’s high school physics. So the “massive scale” just makes it worse.
That the atmosphere is not huge is one of the things that makes this impossible: the volume is small enough to be heated quickly.
So they’re pretty. Images are irrelevant; it’s the math that counts.
Along these lines, you can look at youtube videos of people putting a 50 cal machine gun cartridge in a 12 gauge shotgun and shooting it. The bullet essentially being far smaller than the bore, there is little pressure generated and even though there is a lot more gunpowder in the shell, the bullet has little velocity.
For something to be ejected into orbit around the earth would also require the direction of ejection to be precise, and to get into solar orbit and escape the earth’s gravity, would require a huge force beyond that.
The Slow Mo Guys do a lot of stuff with guns, ballistics and the like. This one for example has a bullet being fired from a handgun at 80000 frames per second at two minutes in:
Including the ages of uplifted mountain ranges: just on the basis of the bending of rock formations without shattering them, the youngest mountains on the planet are many hundreds of thousands of years old.
Without doing the math, I suspect there’s not enough energy in the earth to do the job, so if you’re miraculously pulling energy from the planet you won’t end with plasma, you’ll have a rock frozen to the temperature of liquid hydrogen.
Which means a launch of a chunk of rock destined to be an asteroid every two or three seconds. The atmosphere will be too hot for clouds all the quicker.
The glass breaking so fast reminds me of the speed of sound in air and it being so much faster in solids and liquids because of their respective mechanical properties. (I wonder if it travels faster in elastic materials too, like rubber, but just gets dampened extremely quickly.)
One of the interesting facts to emerge from radioactive dating of meteoritic material is that it all dates to 4.2 billion years. In other words, these rocks are from the debris out of which the Solar System condensed and have been out there since the Solar System was formed.
I wasn’t really being critical. My memory for facts is awful unless they are important enough for me to make a mnemonic, which is almost never. I do have a knack for remembering the year of significant events in my threescore plus fifteen, though.
Yes, that is significant and belies YECist’s pretense.
We have not yet seen Oppenheimer. However, I taught an Honors course for many years on “the making of the atomic bomb”, so I don’t expect many surprises. We used a book by Richard Rhodes. The head of the program stated that if I could get 20 first-year Honors students to read that book, I was successful. I will tell a war story coming from that course. When the war in Europe ended, US military officials asked Germans what kind of air attacks did the most damage. The answer was “messing with rail transport of food and materials”. So, the US changed some of the normal daytime coming to blowing up rail junctions and “messing with the transport of food”. It worked. When General MacArthur arrived in Tokyo, he found a nation in near starvation. He wrote to President Truman and said “we need food and we need it now”. So, President Truman said OK and started sending food. THINK of what would have ensued if the war had gone on. Not only battlefield deaths in the millions, but starvation in the tens of millions. Neither MacArthur nor Truman took Joseph Stalin’s attitude “let the little bastards starve”. That is not in the book, but I can did up the reference if it is useful.
Not quite all: some material that was knocked off other planets is younger, and I think the median age is about 4.4 billion, plus some apparently from early planetoids that didn’t survive goes back to almost 4.6 billion (4.566 to be picky). As I recall at least one is an example of magma having splashed into space and cooled there!
, at least per the first hit when I googled it: