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Can an Atheist Please Explain to me how the Earth came about? (1 Viewer)

Jay-Dupree

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when a star collapses, its core becomes so dense and the gravity becomes such that the collapsed gasses are compressed into heavy elements like iron, zinc, calcium, and every other element the earth is made of.


I know this part but well where'd the star come from?


it's a legit question, and imo one that man will probably never be able to answer logically.<!-- / message -->
 

Captain Gh3y

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By random chance! It came out of nothing and assembled itself randomly into a planet. Then a goo on earth turned into earthworms, which somehow turned into monkeys, which then turned into us.

That's the theory.
 
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Enteebee

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There is a universe where energy has always existed and there was no beginning, this one spawned our own known universe.
 

Captain Gh3y

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No but seriously, google is your friend. It holds answers to all of life's questions (just watch the source).

Astronomers think that the Sun was formed from a giant cloud which was rotating slowly, about five thousand million years ago, and that the Sun is slightly older than the Earth.

By studying radioactive decay of certain elements in rocks geologists can determine how old those rocks probably are. The oldest rocks they've found on Earth that I know of are between 3 and 4 thousand million years old, but the oldest meteorites that have been discovered turned out to be about 4.5 thousand million years old. Assuming that the Earth and Sun were formed at about the same time as the oldest meteorites and making allowance for some period of time that the meteorites were still too hot to freeze the evidence of their age, the age of the Earth is estimated at about 4.7 thousand million years.

Most of the cloud from which the Solar System formed was made of hydrogen gas, but there was also a little bit of other stuff, such as oxygen, silicon, and carbon. Because of gravity, all of the gas wanted to concentrate in one place, but when the gas got closer to the axis of rotation, it started to rotate faster around that axis, just like an ice skater rotates faster around her axis when she pulls in her arms. The fast rotation of the gas meant that it could not all be concentrated in one place, and what happened instead is that the gas concentrated in a flat disk (like a pancake) with most of the material in the center. The material in the center concentrated more until it got so hot and dense that it could start generating energy through nuclear fusion of the hydrogen. At that moment, the Sun became a star. The rest of the material clumped together and formed the planets, including the Earth.

Astronomers think that the hydrogen gas that is now in the Sun was created in the Big Bang, when the whole universe came into being. We're not sure exactly how long ago that happened. Most observations indicate that the universe is between ten and twenty thousand million years old. This hydrogen gas formed really giant clouds at that time, and those clouds concentrated and formed galaxies. Some of the hydrogen gas floated around in our own galaxy until something made it concentrate and form the Sun and the Solar System. We don't know what caused the gas to start concentrating. Perhaps it was the shock wave from a nearby supernova explosion.

In the Big Bang, only the very light elements hydrogen, helium, and a little bit of lithium were formed. All the other, heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and silicon were formed later, inside stars. When the some of the early stars exploded as supernovas, then these heavier elements got mixed with the hydrogen gas that was still floating around, and so these elements ended up also in our Solar System. The carbon, calcium, and oxygen atoms that are an essential part of your body; the silicon, iron, and oxygen atoms that form most of the Earth's inside; the oxygen atoms that are needed to form water; as well as the nitrogen and oxygen atoms that form most of the Earth's atmosphere: all of these atoms were formed inside very, very hot stars a long time ago. Of course, the hydrogen atoms that are part of your body and of water are even older: they were formed in the Big Bang.

Stars very seldomly form alone. Usually many dozens of stars are formed from a single big cloud of hydrogen gas. The Pleiades are one such group of stars. Such sister stars eventually move off in different directions, and after about a thousand million years you can't tell anymore that these stars ever belonged together. The Sun may have some sister stars out there, but we don't know where they are.

Before Earth

Earth was not around at the beginning—the universe began without us some 10 billion years earlier than Earth. The universe started out with only two elements, hydrogen and helium gas, which formed stars that burned these elements in nuclear fusion reactions. Generations of stars were born in gas clouds and died in explosive novas. The conditions in those novas produced the heavier elements we have with us today. This is well-documented cosmology and astrophysics.

Long, long ago (some 5 billion years ago) in a perfectly ordinary place in the galaxy, a supernova exploded, pushing a lot of its heavy-element wreckage into a nearby cloud of hydrogen gas and interstellar dust. The mixture grew hot and compressed under its own gravity, and at its center a new star began to form. Around it swirled a disk of the same material, which grew white-hot from the great compressive forces. That new star became our Sun, and the glowing disk gave rise to Earth and its sister planets. We can see just this sort of thing happening elsewhere in the universe.

While the Sun grew in size and energy, beginning to ignite its nuclear fires, the hot disk slowly cooled. This took millions of years. During that time, the components of the disk began to freeze out into small dust-size grains. Iron metal and compounds of silicon, magnesium, aluminum, and oxygen came out first in that fiery setting. Bits of these are preserved in chondrite meteorites. Slowly these grains settled together and collected into clumps, then chunks, then boulders and finally bodies large enough to exert their own gravity—planetesimals. This whole process is rather well modeled by scientists like those at the Planetary Research Institute.

As time went by, planetesimals grew by collision with other bodies, and as their mass grew larger, the energies involved did too. By the time they reached a hundred kilometers or so in size, planetesimal collisions produced a lot of outright melting and vaporization, and the materials—which we can confidently call rocks and iron metal—began to sort themselves out. The dense iron settled in the center and the lighter rock separated into a mantle around the iron, in a miniature of Earth and the other inner planets today. Planetologists call this differentiation, and it is documented not only for the planets, but also for most of the large moons and the largest asteroids (from which come iron meteorites). The asteroids Ceres, Pallas and Vesta survive from that time, miniature planets.
Earth Is Born

At some point during this time, the Sun ignited. Although the Sun was only about two-thirds as bright as it is today, the process of ignition (the so-called T-Tauri phase) was energetic enough to blow away most of the gaseous part of the protoplanetary disk. The chunks, boulders, and planetesimals left behind continued to collect into a handful of large, stable bodies in well-spaced orbits.

Earth was the third one of these, counting outward from the Sun. We know that the process of accumulation was violent and spectacular, because the smaller pieces left huge craters on the larger ones. Our studies of the other planets in the Space Age document these impacts everywhere we've looked.

At one point early in this process a very large planetesimal struck Earth an off-center blow and sprayed much of Earth's rocky mantle into space. The planet got most of it back after a period of time, but some of it collected into a second planetesimal circling Earth. It's still there—it's the Moon. Since this theory took center stage in the mid-1980s, it has become everyone's favorite. And as geophysicist Don Anderson once explained, "The objection that such an event would be extremely rare is actually a point in its favor, since the Moon is unique."

The oldest surviving rocks on Earth were formed some 600 million years after Earth first formed. So all of the activity of Earth's birth was already ancient history (except for a possible "late bombardment" of the last stray planetesimals around 4 billion years ago). The oldest rocks, dated by the uranium-lead method as about 3.96 billion years old, show that there were volcanoes, continents, oceans, crustal plates, and life on Earth in those days. While the eons that followed were full of strange stories and far-reaching changes, the Earth had taken on its basic structure long before.

PS: The evidence for this story is not the kind of things that geologists find visible in rocks. It's the result of patient evidence-collecting from meteorites and the geology of the other planets, analyses of very large bodies of geochemical data, and generations of serious argument among many different sets of specialists. You can take it or leave it, since it doesn't affect the price of beans, but if you want to learn science or have it taught in your schools, this is the story of Earth—this and no other.

MOAR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth
 

stazi

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Jay-Dupree said:
when a star collapses, its core becomes so dense and the gravity becomes such that the collapsed gasses are compressed into heavy elements like iron, zinc, calcium, and every other element the earth is made of.


I know this part but well where'd the star come from?


it's a legit question, and imo one that man will probably never be able to answer logically.<!-- / message -->
imo, this guy from a fairy tale can answer it. it's far more logical to think that theres this big giant ghost dude who waved his magic wand and created everything.

i mean random generation is so much less logical than having some guy create everything
 

conics2008

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they think its random chance.. haha

Atheists are still evolving.
 

Enteebee

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conics2008 said:
they think its random chance.. haha

Atheists are still evolving.
tbh it's more 'I don't know', you can't even say 'random chance' unless you know there's some sort of a mechanism by which there is A chance...
 

scarybunny

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Don't they say that there's sort of a cycle of the universe- it expands as far as it can go, then starts contracting until it becomes a tiny little dense ball that explodes?

And it's been going on forever and will continue on forever?

Something like that.
 

stazi

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i once met a blonde christian who believed in dog
 

Enteebee

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Ok basically... my mind exists and this world, all of you, the planets and the stars etc are creations of my subconscious - You're all a part of my dream and if there is a 'god' he is just another part of it.
 

stazi

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i agree with the above. i'm a character on the Sims, albeit a really orsum one.
 

scarybunny

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You have cool hair and when the social worker came to take your baby you locked it in a room surrounded by toilets so she couldn't get in.
 

withoutaface

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Random chance is still a better explanation than "He just is" or "He has always been".
 

scarybunny

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Righto then.

Can't say I keep up with the models.

See, isn't that nice. I can change my ideas in light of new theories!
 

Mumma

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I think this is somewhat relevant. A famous encounter between Laplace and Napoleon, translated of course -

Someone had told Napoleon that the book contained no mention of the name of God; Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with the remark, ' Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.' Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy, drew himself up and answered bluntly, 'I did not need to make such an assumption.' Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, 'Ah, but that is such a good hypothesis. It explains so many things!'

... and imo one that man will probably never be able to answer logically.
Not with that attitude.
 

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