ASM036 Super Continents, Tiny Black Holes, and Water Older than the Sun

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super continents tiny black holes and water older than the sun all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer questions about science faith and life this week you can go to sandbox cooperative.com on september 27th at 7 00 pm central standard time i'm going to be doing a live webcast with q a with the sandbox cooperative again that's sandbox cooperative.com i'll see you there but for now let's get it started [Music] hey science mike my name's carly and i go to a very conservative christian high school and my science teacher loves answers in genesis he sends us there about once a week to read an article and this week our article was called noah's lost world and this was basically just their theory about how idea of a supercontinent or multiple supercontinents could fit with a literal reading of the flood and they say that uh when god created the earth in the first chapter of genesis that it was in the form of a super continent called rodinia which then broke apart during the flood and crashed back together temporarily forming a supercontinent called pangaea and pangaea was only in that form for the duration of the flood and as the land dried the parts separated and have settled where we know them today and i have never heard of this theory of rodinia before i've heard of pangaea but i just don't have any idea if it's credible if there's any scientific evidence they cite some fossil records and stuff but i mean i'm not really sure about that and so i was just wondering if you had ever heard of this and if you had any thoughts about it and if you could clear any of it up for me thanks hi carly uh wow a little nervous to answer your questions because i don't get a lot of questions on the show from high school students at conservative christian high schools that subscribe to the scientific theories of answers in genesis uh and any experience i have with answers in genesis is mainly them writing about how i'm a terrible influence on christianity so let's go ahead and start with an understanding that the people at your school and maybe even your parents would not like my answer and to do your own research don't just take what i have to say and accept it any more than you're just taking what your school has to say and accept it but but apply a critical lens look for flaws and my reasoning flaws and there's gather your own evidence and i want to admonish you for seeking out other perspectives that's really cool and i hope that this podcast doesn't end up in a school board meeting or local news so interestingly enough rodinia does exist or did exist that's a real thing in science pangaea of course is a super continent everyone is aware of pangaea is a time when most of the land masses on earth other than small islands were all on a single large land mass which we call pangaea and uh rodinia was much earlier a couple hundred million years earlier than pangaea now what's interesting is when you go that far back in time to rodinia there was no land-based life so it's difficult to use the fossil record to talk about you know plate tectonics in that era but what's interesting because of plate tectonics now we all understand and if we don't here's a quick review because the earth has a hot molten core our core is uh hot and energetic because of decaying radioactive matter and you have a molten core and then you have these solid plates on the surface of the earth they kind of float and glide along these these currents of magma and energetic material the surface configuration of the earth is constantly changing okay now this uh happens very slowly tectonic plates move generally between 10 and 40 millimeters per year with these bursts or sprints of up to 160 millimeters now that that's similar to the dimensions of like an iphone 6 plus [Music] so like when a continent a continent is just flying it travels the distance of the height of an iphone 6 plus screen in a year and typically a small fraction of that okay so these are changes that take a very long time but when you look at the earth's history interestingly enough there's even been global floods before i know people who listen to the show know that i don't accept noah's flood but i do accept that the earth was completely covered in water before there was any land-based life not just non-human life there was no land-based life whatsoever and in its earliest configurations really no life at all now the earth started out as kind of a ball of lava and fire it was a hellish place and then it's been a water world at some point since development it's been a snowball a few times just completely frozen everywhere typically when supercontinents break up and these geological formations what led to pangaea and led to where we are today started about four billion years ago with cretins these were you know proto-continents or proto-tectonic plates and then about three and a half billion years ago two of them connected and you got valbara which was the first super continent but it is only a super continent because it was the only one it was no competition it was much smaller than even a modern continent and then time went on we got to er that was more of a proto-continent and then 2.7 billion years ago you got to kinderland which its breakup caused what we believe was the first snowball earth 1.8 billion years ago you had colombia now those are all relatively speculative in geology some geologists accept those theories but this is all newer cutting edge stuff 550 million years ago is rhodenia and that's where we get very certain about geological history now there may have been a continent although i've probably murdered all these pronunciations i'll definitely murder this one pennodia that may have come between rodinia and pangaea either way it also predated land-based life so pangaea is the first super continent that stuff lived on if that makes any sense now because the plates still move and they still shift about 250 million years from now we should get another super continent we have this constant cycle of supercontinents merging and breaking apart and merging and breaking apart and we're just in the middle of that cycle right now now this obviously differs from what your science teacher and answers in genesis say and they say that you know we're taking a man's word over god's word etc etc that's a whole epistemological discussion i'm not going to get into other than i say that the evidence god left behind from god's creative work should speak authoritatively to god's actions i have trouble conceiving of a god who deceives us by crafting the earth in one way and and then leaving forensic evidence that that contradicts that but leaves divine texts that explain it that's a weird god now the other thing is the the idea that plague tectonics somehow accelerates because of a flood is nonsense we know what plate tectonics do when flooded because the oceans are doing it right now on the scale of a plate a flood doesn't turn a continental plate into mud right water doesn't penetrate down that much different as the bedrocks aren't even permeable at all so oceans aren't playing this huge role and certainly not a global flood wouldn't suddenly allow plague tectonics to happen dramatically faster the physics just don't allow for where is that energy coming from i'd like to see the equations so you've been given some good information rodinia is a very well understood science in geology as is pangaea as is plague tectonics and even as is a global flood four billion years ago long before any vertebrates or even complex life if anything we had simple microbial life at that portion of the earth's history but again don't take my word for it if you'd like to get a geologist take on the flood in tectonics check out the rocks don't lie i'll have a link to that it's a book i'll have a link to it in the show notes on asksciencemike.com [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hi science mike thank you for your podcast and work it has influenced much about the way i think about the relationship between science and faith this is a two-part question i was recently forwarded an article about nasa confirming that there will be 15 days of darkness on earth in november due to an astronomical event between jupiter uranus and the sun see link below i'm doubtful about the legitimacy of this because i think it would make bigger headlines than a small article however if this is possible what is the science behind it also many christians believe that god worked through evolution to create life if that is the case is it possible that god would work through scientific and astronomical events to fulfill some of the end time prophecies i listen to your podcast about blood moons and i agree with you i just have a hard time answering that question thanks okay let's there's three ways we're gonna go with this and we'll start with the most obvious and there absolutely will be 15 days of darkness in november you can bet on it uh nasa would confirm that if asked so go ahead and plan on 15 days of darkness in november just as you can plan on 15 days of darkness in any 30 day month because about half the time the surface of the earth is cloaked in darkness see what i did there every night the earth goes completely dark now of course that's not what you're talking about you're talking about 15 24-hour periods of darkness and that is not true that's not happening the link you sent me was to like a hoax satire site there are sites on the internet that their whole existence is to exploit poe's law and pose law basically is that it is difficult to tell a parody from extremism from actual extremism so they create sites that look like conservative or easily lampoonable audiences media and then release nonsense and see if it spreads and very often it does and they do this it's actually pretty clever to say that an astronomical event between jupiter uranus and the sun will cause this darkness because people think of jupiter and uranus as these giant planets in the news all the time we hear about planets transiting past the sun and so on the surface that seems plausible and here's what you have to think about what causes night it's the earth rotating on its axis so only half the planet is facing the sun now of course because of that tilt and the orbit of the earth parts of the planet do experience extended times and extended darkness especially as you get closer and closer to the poles but despite the fact that jupiter and uranus and saturn and neptune are all gas giants they are all very far from the earth and very far from the sun and even if they passed between the earth and the sun their shadow would be insignificant we see what happens when mercury or venus which are both much closer to the sun and earth than the gas giants when they transit across the sun you have to have a special telescope to see it or even notice now the moon lunar eclipses can be dramatic because it's so close to us that it can be a very similar apparent size in the sky as the sun and can cause it temporary darkness but the outer planets their orbits don't even transit between the sun and the earth at all because the art orbit is contained inside of theirs so you could be on jupiter although it doesn't have a surface you could be orbiting jupiter i guess and you could see the earth transit and from the sun but jupiter won't transit in from the sun from the perspective of earth jupiter does get an opposition from the sun and we can see it dramatically then but that's because the opposite is happening the earth is between jupiter and the sun when they're opposition how that goes okay so no there's no 15 days now your other question could god who has created life through evolution could god use astronomical events to create the end times well if god exists if we assume there's a conscious being with unlimited power who is omnipotent that god can do whatever god wants god could use astronomical events god could completely suspend the laws of physics if that's a matter of your faith believe as you will i don't make judgments about what god could or could not do i don't know enough about god or have any evidentiary platform to make statements about god's capabilities or what god may or may not do i simply follow god as part of a faith tradition called christianity now some christians do believe in end times prophecies if i start seeing prophecies from revelation clearly revealed we'll talk until then i'm going to do the matthew 25 thing and love the least of these hi science mike it's john trent i have another question for you this one involves a new study that came out that i read it says i believe 2014 and i hadn't seen it until the other day basically saying that earth that water is actually older than the sun it suggests that water came from the solar nebula or the so-called protoplanetary disk a cloud of dust and gas surrounding the forming sun so i was just wanting you to maybe speak a little bit more on on what you knew about that and how viable it ended up being i couldn't really find anything based off of my google searches and but i personally find it very intriguing in the sense of the creation story in genesis you know kind of touches on the earth was without form and void and there was darkness and you know kind of the idea of it being space darkness and then god was hovering over the face of the waters and if the waters were in this solar nebula you know i i just find it really intriguing that you can you know kind of do it the allegorical reading of creation and it it actually can make sense with you know the explanation of water being older than the sun because light hadn't been created according to you know the biblical narrative water was before the sun and the light so if it's older than the sun then that's pretty amazing to me so just your thoughts on that whole subject wanted to know what you think about it so thanks for all you do again and keep it up buddy well john part of the reason that space exploration is so important is because it gives us the ability to understand our own origins by looking at different parts of our solar system neighborhood we're able to get a better picture of how the earth was formed and what role the sun played and the creation of compounds in our solar system comets and other matter that originates further from the sun farther out in the solar system our time capsules they let us see the chemical composition of our proto-planetary disks this cloud this nebula that existed before the sun was formed and has an accretion disk was forming sort of the way stellar nurseries work is you have clouds of hydrogen and other dust that are moving chaotically and because of the conservation of angular momentum basically if you added up the momentums of all the random motions of particles inside this cloud you would get a value over time through uh atomic collisions and molecular collisions that all evens out and you get a spin and you get this disk and that's that's kind of the birthplace of stars that's how it happens and the study you're talking about they used computer modeling and samples of the earth's water and comet water to look at ratios of deridium which is an isotope of water basically it's it's water with a different number of neutrons and its corresponding nuclei modeled to see if our solar system could have made all of its water from scratch and it does not appear that it could that's not all that surprising because the only way that stars can create new elements is through the nuclear fusion that happens in their core and stars can't make anything heavier than iron that's the limit of nuclear fusion in a star but when you have a supernova explosion with massive stars much heavier elements than iron can be created and then spread across the cosmos in that process now that lets us know that on a universal scale at first we didn't have heavy elements after the big bang we just had basic elements stars formed had supernova explosions and then you had the materials to create solar systems with planets and heavier elements and things like water now water doesn't require super heavy elements you don't need anything heavier than oxygen to create water we see that water forms in interstellar space and according to this research lets us know that some percentage of the water in the solar system probably a significant fraction predate the birth of our sun and then you get this very genesis-like picture i agree that's beautiful formless and void hovering over the waters now of course most of the water in the universe is ice because it's very cold out there and by the time our solar system was being born the sky was full of stars there had already been multiple generations of stellar births and deaths before our sun and its planets formed but i do often find it interesting at least interesting for all of its talk of firmament and trees that predate stars the ways that genesis does make interesting metaphorical allusions to proper physics and cosmology a formless and void environment with water does seem a lot like our stellar nursery a universe created from nothing ex nihilo is also the current vogue in particle physics lawrence krauss a devout atheist staunch atheist wrote a book called a universe from nothing wherein he describes the way that essentially the universe is almost mathematically inevitable in a state of quantum vacuum or nothingness now some philosophers pick bones with the word nothing there but that is way out of my pay grade that's why i'm not philosophy mike but you're absolutely right the study read is correct the earth's water much of it does appear to predate the sun as to all heavy elements in our solar system they predate our sun you know the carbon in your body all these elements they were there before the sun was born now stellar ignition does cause a shock wave and and reactions to travel through a solar system so the sun did play a role in reconfiguring those pre-existing atoms we understand through the work of jeremy england for example that's very plausible that the sun's radiation helped manipulate the materials on this planet from being just molecules sitting around to life it was that energy source fueled by the sun and the surrounding bath that allowed it to disperse that may create a mathematical framework for life to emerge to me that's what i think about when i think about the spirit hovering over the waters the degree to which creative potential is etched into the fabric of the universe the way that gravity and electromagnetism work together to cause suns to form and accretion disks and planets and then somehow through abiogenesis and natural selection those raw materials begin to breathe and think and wonder and make creations with intent suddenly dust is formed into the image of god man genesis really is beautiful [Music] our last question came from the email inbox and it's a short one what is your opinion about cern getting turned on soon do you think they can really open up a black hole wow man i love the sciency questions this week um they're they're my favorite obviously science mike for a reason cern is the organization that runs the large hadron collider now the large hadron collider is the biggest particle accelerator in human history it's actually built on top of and incorporates the designs of earlier particle accelerations and it accelerates protons or large hadrons to very high relativistic speeds they get protons going near the speed of light and then they bang them into each other now interestingly enough this device recently got a tune-up it's been running at partial power for a long time that partial power um let us discover the higgs boson for example but now we've got it fired up after some upgrades to its magnets i'm not kidding you uh after they upgraded its magnets they're now ramping it up to full power for the first time and there were some news articles both at its original activation and this new activation that is it possible that the large hadron collider is going to create a black hole again it is creating energy levels um that are very high on the quantum scale but let's let's have some real talk for a second a proton moving through the large hadron collider has about the same energy as a mosquito in flight that dramatic pause was intentional that's the energy level you're talking about that's that's impressive a proton is a tiny fraction of the mass of a mosquito so the fact that we're putting that much momentum behind a proton that it has that much energy is truly impressive but when you take these two protons traveling in opposite directions and you bang them together and it's really a stream of protons you're creating energy levels that have never existed in human physics before but you're not creating energy levels that don't exist like in cosmic rays that bombard our atmosphere all the time so that's why we aren't afraid of black holes being formed by the large hydrogen collider there are already more energetic events happening in the natural universe than this very sophisticated machine our goal with the large hydrogen collider is to create on very very small scales similar conditions to the beginning of the universe very high energy you know some theories some speculative models say that those energy levels could create microscopic black holes but here's the thing a microscopic black hole would not be stable it would evaporate very quickly through hawking radiation it would not be something that could then grow and and gather mass and consume the earth or anything like that there is actually another idea that people worried about called strangelets which are where you get all the different kinds of quarks or or three different types of quarks kind of hanging out together and there were some concerns that strange matter would just make other strange matter i've never seen that happen there's also an idea in physics that the universe is not in its most stable configuration and there was some concern that the large hadron collider could create what's called a vacuum bubble which would be really cool to be a more stable configuration of the universe it's just we couldn't exist in it so we wouldn't want a vacuum bubble to occur but again if any of these things were possible cosmic rays would already be doing them cosmic rays are creating particle accelerator-like collisions constantly even in our own solar system even in the outer edges of our atmosphere so no i don't worry about black holes i don't worry about the large hadron collider destroying the universe i do get excited about the large hydrogen collider giving us a better picture of where the universe came from and a more complete understanding of reality at its most basic levels now sadly some of the most interesting ideas in theoretical physics today lie far beyond the energies of the large hadron collider a physicist once told me that to probe the levels of reality and experiment that we are probing with mathematics we would need a large hadron collider whose loop was similar to a planetary orbit uh something far beyond human engineering and so many of the ideas in theoretical physics are stuck in theoretical physics we don't have a mechanism to test or probe them with experimental means with the large hadron collider we're sort of exploring the standard model of physics which is has been the accepted idea in quantum physics though incomplete for quite some time stuff we've been talking about since the 50s and the 60s even refined certainly but the fundamental ideas richard feynman talked about so no don't worry about black holes even if you know a microscopic black hole did form the large hydrogen collider which is extraordinarily extraordinarily extraordinarily unlikely that model may not even be valid we understand that that would not be a stable thing anyway it would uh it would evaporate long before it could interact with any matter in a significant way so don't worry you're not going to be consumed by the large hadron collider i do want to let you know if you want to lose sleep over black holes we understand that there are rogue black holes that have been ejected from a mutual orbit with another black hole that are streaking through the universe at near relativistic speeds now because of the size of the universe the chances of them striking anything is very very very very incredibly low but that would be one plausible way the earth could be destroyed by black hole the good news is it would happen so fast a black hole moving at high speeds colliding with the earth none of us would know anything happened we'd just be gone it'd be crazy so uh and again when i say worry about that don't worry about that the the odds of that are so so astronomical that it it won't happen right statistically it's a non-event uh but it is more plausible than uh being destroyed by the large hatching collider [Music] well that's another episode of ask science mike i know a lot of you really hang out for the pastoral and life questions and we just did four really sciencey questions i don't know i loved it uh if you were really bored that episode i apologize that that one was for me i picked the questions this week and i just picked four that really interested me i had a ton of fun so if you fell asleep wake up don't miss your subway stop and i do have links with more explanations for everything we talked about on sciencemike.com if you want to bone up on science that's the way to do it listen this week lots of stuff going on i'm going to be in new york on saturday at the global citizen festival that is an event that talks about relieving poverty on a global scale it's amazing work if you're going to be at the global citizen festival it's huge but if you see me come say hello i'd love to see you and then as i said at the top of the program on sunday i will be at the sandbox cooperative at sandbox cooperative.com that's in rochester minnesota if you're in rochester i'd love to see you at the event but otherwise it's streaming on the web if you'd like to be part of a live science mic event this is your chance it'll be live streaming the video you can see the talk and then you can ask questions in the q a it'll be a mixture of in-person questions and internet questions we've got belong london with the liturgists if you go to belong two weeks left to get early bird pricing and the price goes up you don't want to miss that also going to be at storyline in chicago i'd love to see you at storyline lots of great speakers there and talk about living a better story in your life of course next year we're doing ask science mike live we're doing a tour multi-city if you'd be interested in hosting that at your church or your college or your venue i'd love to talk to you just go to my booking page send a note to my booking manager and we will get you on the list to be a part of ask science mike live now we need your questions keep them coming more people are starting to use the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter soundcloud and youtube so i do check that you can also put your questions right on ask sciencemic.com you can send me a voicemail right on the website or type a message that's you know longer than a tweet and i'll get it there now a science mic does cost money to put in your ears there's so many listeners that there's web hosting costs there's obviously huge time costs so my show is listener supported so if helping foster open honest conversations about science faith is important to you you can go to ask sciencemike.com click on the patreon link and you can learn how you can donate every single dollar helps i'm seeing lots and lots more people give it the and five dollar level and that's what i'm looking for i would much rather see you know with as many downloads as a show guess i'd rather see hundreds or thousands of people giving a dollar than a few people having to get a lot more than that so if you've got a buck five bucks a month i would really appreciate it of course the show's always going to be free and you can change or cancel a pledge at any time i have seen some of the people who helped get the show started who are giving it really very high monthly levels pull those donations back as more people are donating i think that's great i don't want anybody to put themselves in financial hardship supporting the show there's enough listeners nobody should have to greg nordin is our producer and craig does a great job and it is really thankless work so if you want to go to sciencemac.com and find greg's twitter handle this week and send him a thanks for the work he does i would appreciate it the theme song is by jeff botifer he's an amazing musician he can make music for you there's a link to his twitter profile on asksciencemike.com as well thanks for listening you guys [Music]