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lets play " whack a moehle "
Topic Started: Apr 12 2009, 09:34 PM (1,917 Views)
Mainecoons
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I once did this thing called the EST training. One of the most memorable parts of it was their explanation of knowledge. In a nutshell, there are 3 kinds of knowledge:

1. What we know.
2. What we don't know.
3. What we don't know that we don't know.

This whole discussion falls into that third category. You'll never solve this riddle as you simply lack the infinite knowledge base required to do so. This is why we have "faith."
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And then there's the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld:

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.


But seriously, folk, I agree with "You'll never solve this riddle as you simply lack the infinite knowledge base required to do so. This is why we have 'faith.'"

That is the point I'm trying to make with Mike about the difference between reason and knowledge. and faith and belief.

But he conflates the two.
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ngc1514
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With the exception that Amend's puzzle is coherent, logical and has an answer: "Paige is bad at math. "
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Not familiar with the comic. To me it looks like the student is throwing out bits and pieces of information, like spaghetti at a wall, hoping something will stick, but to the teacher it is sound and fury.
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ngc1514
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Chris
Apr 20 2009, 07:14 PM
Not familiar with the comic. To me it looks like the student is throwing out bits and pieces of information, like spaghetti at a wall, hoping something will stick, but to the teacher it is sound and fury.
Paige's lack of math skills - in comparison to Jason's prowess - is a long running theme in Foxtrot. Amend even throws in a bit of PASCAL programming every now and then and (which of course endears me to the strip) some astronomy.
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the breeze
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gravitational interactions between the white dwarf and the ordinary star are such that a strong enough stellar wind is sent from the white dwarf to blast the Fluorine beyond the gravitational pull of both stars, putting it into outer space, so that future generations of stars can absorb it. Then we have enough Fluorine for life chemistry.

A Trillion Galaxies - but as far as physicists know, only ours can support life

Two American astrophysicists concluded about a year ago that rare indeed is the galaxy that has the right number of this special kind white dwarf binary pair in the right location, occurring at the right time, so that life can exist today. The universe contains a trillion galaxies. But ours may be the only one that has the necessary conditions for life to exist.

The right star is needed. We can't have a star any bigger than our Sun. The bigger the star, the more rapidly and erratically it burns its fuel. Our Sun is just small enough to keep a stable enough flame for a sufficient period of time to make life possible. If it were any bigger, we couldn't have life on planet Earth. If it were any smaller, we'd be in trouble, too.

Smaller stars are even more stable than our star, the Sun, but they don't burn as hot. In order to keep our planet at the right temperature necessary to sustain life, we'd have to bring the planet closer to the star.

Tidal Forces

The physicists in the audience realize that when you bring a planet closer to its star, the tidal interaction between the star and the planet goes up to the inverse fourth power to the distance separating them. For those of you who are not physicists, that means that all you have to do is bring that planet ever so much closer to the star, and the tidal forces could be strong enough to break the rotational period.

That's what happened to Mercury and Venus. Those planets are too close to the Sun; so close that their rotational periods have been broken, from several hours to several months.

Earth is just barely far enough away to avoid that breaking. We have a rotation period of once every 24 hours. If we wait much longer, it will be every 26 or 28 hours, because the Earth's rotation rate is slowing down.

Going back in history, we can measure the time when the Earth was rotating every 20 hours. When the Earth was rotating once every 20 hours, human life was not possible. If it rotates once every 28 hours, human life will not be possible. It can only happen at 24 hours.

Speed of Earth's Rotation

If the planet rotates too quickly, you get too many tornadoes and hurricanes. If it rotates too slowly, it gets too cold at night and too hot during the day. We don't want it to be 170 degrees during the day, nor do we want it to be below –100 at night, because that's not ideal for life.

We don't want lots of hurricanes and tornadoes, either. What we currently have is an ideal situation, and God plays this. He created us here at the ideal time.

We need the right Earth. If the Earth is too massive, it retains a bunch of gases such as Ammonia, Methane, Hydrogen and Helium in its atmosphere. These gases are not acceptable for life, at least, not for advanced life. But if it's not massive enough, it won't retain water. For life to exist on planet Earth, we need a huge amount of water, but we don't need a lot of ammonia and methane.

Remember high school chemistry? Methane's molecular weight 16, ammonia's molecular weight 17, water's molecular weight is 18. God so designed planet Earth that we keep lots of the 18, but we don't keep any of the 16 or the 17. The incredible fine-tuning of the physical characteristics of Earth is necessary for that.

Jupiter Necessary, too

We even have to have the right Jupiter. We wrote about this in our Facts and Faith newsletter a few issues back, but it was also discovered by American astrophysicists just this past year. Unless you have a very massive planet like Jupiter, five times more distant from the star than the planet that has life, life will not exist on that planet.

It takes a super massive planet like Jupiter, located where it is, to act as a shield, guarding the Earth from comic collisions. We don't want a comet colliding with Earth every week. Thanks to Jupiter, that doesn't happen.

What these astrophysicists discovered in their models of planetary formation was that it's a very rare star system indeed that produces a planet as massive as Jupiter, in the right location, to act as such a shield.

We Even Need the Right Moon

The Earth's moon system is that of a small planet being orbited by a huge, single moon. That huge, single moon has the effect of stabilizing the rotation axis of planet Earth to 23½ degrees. That's the ideal tilt for life on planet Earth.

The axis on planet Mars moves through a tilt from zero to 60 degrees and flips back and forth. If that were to happen on Earth, life would be impossible. Thanks to the Moon, it's held stable at 23 ½ degrees.

Just as with the universe, in the case of the solar system, we can attach numbers to these. In this case, I've chosen to be extremely conservative in my estimates. I would feel justified in sticking a few zeros between the decimal point and the one. I would feel justified in making this 20 percent, 10 percent, for example, and on down the line.

We Even Need the Right Number of Earthquakes

I've got so many characteristics here, and I let the Californians know that you have to have the right number of earthquakes. Not too many, not too few, or life is not possible. I share them with my wife, who doesn't like earthquakes, but I just tell her that when you feel a good jolt, that's when you have to thank God for his perfect providence.
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ngc1514
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What a load of crap, breezy!

Quote:
 
That's what happened to Mercury and Venus. Those planets are too close to the Sun; so close that their rotational periods have been broken, from several hours to several months.


You posted it, so how about defining what you mean by "rotational periods have been broken?"

The Keplerian 3 Laws of Planetary Motion state quite simply that a planet's orbit is an ellipse and the orbit sweeps out equal areas of the ellipse during equal intervals of time.

Newton came along a few decades later and combined the Three Laws of Planetary Motion into his Law of Gravity.

It's Kepler's Third Law that interests us here in regard to "broken" rotational periods. The Third Law is the so-called law of harmonics in that it shows how orbits between different planets relate to each other. Simply put, it looks at the ratio of the orbital period of a planet and the radius of the average distance of the planet from the sun: the relationship is T^2/R^3. (T=orbital period and R=the radius of the average distance from the sun).

Now, if a planet's orbital rotation period was "broken", the relationship in the Third Law should not hold true.

Rather than working with days and miles, it's easier to just relate the orbital relationships to 1 earth year and 1 astronomical unit (AU) which is defined as the average distance of the earth from the sun (about 93,000,000 miles for the scientifically illiterate in the audience.)

Planet..........Period in....Avg. Dist.....T^2/R^3
...................Yrs=R.......in AU=T

Mercury........0.241.......0.39...........0.98
Venus..........0.615.......0.72...........1.01
Earth...........1.00.........1.00...........1.00
Mars............1.88.........1.52...........1.01
Jupiter.........11.8.........5.20.......... 0.99
Saturn.........29.5.........9.54...........1.00
Uranus.........84.0........19.18..........1.00
Neptune.......165........30.06...........1.00
Pluto............248........39.44...........1.00

Now, if a planet's rotation was "broken" it is to be expected that the relationship of distance and period would likewise break down. And if tidal forces were the determining factor, the relationship should vary by the distance from the sun with the biggest discrepancy between Mercury and Pluto. As you can see, such does not exist.

You are, of course, welcome to pull out your trusty (and probably rusty) calculator and plug in the values for T and R I used (from The Astronomy Data Book by Robinson and Muirden or find your own on the Web.

Kepler formulated his laws 400 years ago and no one has noticed any of the orbits being broken. Your source is either a loon or a liar.

And you, breezy, are a fool who doesn't understand the first thing about science. No, it's not the not knowing the first thing about science that makes you a fool, it is the posting of things you don't understand that lock in the appellation. I'd be a fool if I started posting large chunks of Latin text (a language I don't understand) just because I thought the text supported my position.

Edited by ngc1514, Apr 21 2009, 04:43 AM.
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ngc1514
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Oh yeah... and the rest of the stuff in that last posting is just more special pleading and the weak anthropomorphic principle.

And lies...

Quote:
 
The axis on planet Mars moves through a tilt from zero to 60 degrees and flips back and forth. If that were to happen on Earth, life would be impossible. Thanks to the Moon, it's held stable at 23 ½ degrees.

Mars' axis of rotation is close to that of the earth at 24.75 degrees and does not vary from 0 to 60 degrees nor does it flip back and forth (whatever THAT means!)

Lies... Lies... LIES! Your source is nothing but lies!

You should be ashamed of yourself for furthering the lies.
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the breeze
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providence.

At Least 41 Fine-Tuned Characteristics, to have One Planet that Supports Life

The bottom line to all of this is that we have 41 characteristics of the solar system that must be fine-tuned for life to exist. But even if the universe contains as many planets as it does stars, which is a gross overestimate in my opinion, that still leaves us with less than one chance in a billion trillion that you'd find even one planet in the entire universe with the capacity for supporting life.

This tells us that we're wasting valuable taxpayer money looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Worse than that, we're wasting valuable telescope time. In the words of William Proxmyer, “It would be far wiser looking for intelligent life in Washington than looking for it in other galaxies.”

Planet Earth: Not an Accident

It also tells us that God wasn't wandering throughout the vastness of the cosmos saying, “Wow, that's the best one, I'll use that”. No. With odds this remote, we must realize that God especially designed and crafted, through miraculous means, planet Earth, so that it would support life and human beings. Planet Earth is not an accident; it is a product of divine design.

I would also say that's true of life on Earth. The fossil record testifies of life beginning on planet Earth 3.8 billion years ago. Over those 3.8 billion years, we have more and more species of greater and greater complexity and greater and greater diversity. But there's no fossil tree. We have no evidence for the horizontal branches.

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ngc1514
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We think the earth is a wonderful planet because WE evolved to fit it. It was not created to fit us.

WAP abuse! WAP abuse!
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