From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Worlds in Collision/collusion/confusion
Date: 30 Sep 92 20:15:03 GMT
Reply-To: swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <9209291852.AA12577@rod.mitre.org> jmeritt@rod.mitre.org (Jim Meritt) writes:
|
|} [birth of comets by being expelled from the sun - not his idea]
|} [page 14]
|...
|Thus, comets CANNOT currently be ejected.
|
|BTW:
|While looking through the journal Icarus, volume 86 Number 1, July
|1990, I found the following article entitled "The Origin of
|Short-Period Comets" by Mark Bailey and Chris Stagg. The first
|paragraph reads as follows:
|
|        It has recently been shown ...
|        that the observed number of short-peroid is consistent with a
|        spherically symmetrical Oort  cloud source, provided that it
|        contains a moderately centrally condensed inner core
|        parameterized by an "inner edge" corresponding to orbits
|        with a minimum semimajor axis a_0 \approx 4000 AU and an
|        energy spectrum power law-index \gamma \geq -1. ...

An interesting side note - a large, comet-like body has recently been
discovered in *exactly* this oribital zone.  This is considered fairly
strong supporting evidence for this 'inner core'.

|} "... the presence of oxygen in the terrestrial atmosphere is unexplained."
|} [page 16]
|
|Perhaps the concept of "photosynthesis" (can you say 'plants'?) was foreign
|to him.  Most other people have no problem explaining it at all.  In fact,
|the time when this "pollution" occurred has been dated and is the first
|really big extinction as the non-oxygen bacteria got wiped out by the
|waste product of the plants.  We are looking at around 1.4 to 1.5
|billion years ago.

In fact I like to call it "the largest extinction event of all time".
(I may be exaggerating, since the exact magnitude of the event is
unclear, but the sheer paucity of living lineages that can be traced back
any further than that is strong eviedence of its breadth).

|
|BTW:  The volatiles in the tails of comets appear to be mostly water.
|Water burns rather poorly...

Uh, yeah - isn't water 'burned hydrogen`?
Most materials don't burn twice very well.

|During the reign of Ammizxaduga, king of Babylon (between -1701 and
|-1581) there were a series of observations of venus appearing and
|disappearing with the rising and setting of the sun (it is either the
|morning star or the evening star, but both never appear at the same
|time.  They apparently recognized this fact.)

I would think the identification of Inanna with both would tend to suggest
that in and of itself.

So much for the 'stupid ancients' theories, like the 'bicameral mind'
business.  If they could figure out that the morning and evening star
were one and the same just from naked eye observation, they were doing
quite well.

| There were five
|iterations of ephemeris data, bringing the orbit of venus as indicated
|to within two hours of the place/time modern orbital calculations would
|have it.

And, givin the likely uncertainties in correlations, this is probably well
within the error bars of the calculations used.

|} "The ability of many small insects... and to live in an atmosphere
|} devoid of oxygen..."
|} [page 187]
|
|Not that I know of.  Not to mention the minor detail that a metabolism
|which obviously runs in an oxydizing atmosphere just would not make it
|in a neutral (like Venus and Mars) or reducing (like Jupiter) atmosphere.

And vice versa.  To critters that are not adapted to it, oxygen is a
*very* powerful corrosive.  Just because we happen to be so well protected
biologically that we do not notice this intense toxicity does not mean
it is not real.
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
Newsgroups: talk.origins