Mysterious Origins
Sam Aurelius Milam III
 I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.—from Possible Worlds, 1928 by John B. S. Haldane |
The scientists tell us that the Earth formed about 5 billion years ago. Since a year is the length of time that it takes for the Earth to go around the Sun, I suppose that, well, I don’t know what to suppose. Were there years before the Earth was formed? The Earth’s beginning is sometimes described as a disk-shaped cloud of dust and gas. I don’t know why
it would be disk-shaped, and the scientists don’t seem to care,
but it doesn’t matter. A disk-shaped cloud of dust and gas isn’t
the Earth. It’s a disk-shaped cloud of dust and gas.
I’d describe the Earth’s beginning as the single tiny pebble that first fell against another single tiny pebble. Somebody else might argue that it wasn’t pebbles, but one Hydrogen atom that fell against another Hydrogen atom. Add an Oxygen atom and the Earth began as a water planet. So, when did the Earth, the actual Earth, actually form? It didn’t form 5 billion years ago, as claimed by the scientists.
It didn’t form 3 billion years ago or 7 billion years ago. The Earth didn’t form at all, not at any specific time in the past.
It accumulated from those pebbles, or maybe from those atoms.
There isn’t any point during that accumulation process to which a
scientist can point and say, “It formed there! Before that, it
didn’t exist! After that, it did exist!” Even the disk-shaped
cloud of dust and gas didn’t form at some specific time. It accumulated,
as did the subsequent Earth. That process of accumulation probably
took many more “years” than 5 billion. It probably took orders of
magnitude more than 5 billion years. Don’t worry about the Big
Bang getting in the way. The Big Bang never happened. The
universe has been here forever, so there’s been plenty of time in the past for those multiple orders of magnitude of years greater than
5 billion to have come and gone. Here’s another point that the scientists like
to ignore. Maybe they aren’t aware of it. Maybe they don’t care. That accumulation process hasn’t yet gone to completion. It’s estimated that about 44 tons of space debris fall onto the Earth
every day. So, the primordial accumulation process continues. The Earth hasn’t “formed” yet. It’s still “forming”, by the original and ongoing process of accumulation. How big will the Earth eventually get? I don’t know, and neither do the scientists. I get annoyed by those absurdly theatrical depictions, in the documentaries, about the “formation” of the Earth that show a dramatic video animation of a sizzling, molten glob.
Nonsense. It makes good theater and maybe it gives the animators something to do, but the Earth didn’t “form” as a molten glob. It
accumulated as a cold dead bunch of cold dead rocks. I once heard somebody,
maybe a scientist, claim that the heat that’s inherent in the alleged molten
condition of the early Earth came from internal compression, due to the
increasing gravity of the growing accumulation of material. More
nonsense. The planet accumulated over billions of years. Even
the most elementary understanding of thermodynamics tells us that heat
spontaneously moves away from regions of high temperature and toward regions
of low temperature. Billions of years provide plenty of time for any
internal heating, allegedly caused by gravitational compression, to
move by conduction to the surface where, lacking an insulating atmosphere, it would radiate away into open space. I heard somewhere the claim that the molten condition resulted from the impacts of falling debris. That’s even sillier than the gravitational compaction theory. While the U.S. government was conducting its series of nuclear tests from 1945 to 1992, and especially between 1951 and 1958, when the tests were almost one right after the other, it was evident that the high temperatures at the surface of the Earth, generated by the intense energy released by the nuclear explosions, dissipated quickly. The heat on the surface of the early Earth, caused by the impacts of falling debris at the surface, large ones probably being hundreds of years apart, would certainly dissipate into open space. The planet was a cold, dead rock, until the Moon arrived on the scene. Regarding the internal heating of the Earth, consider the Moon. The Earth stretches about 7 inches toward the Moon
due to the Moon’s
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