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Fine tuning: Size of Earth

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Further from that Eric Metaxas:

“If the earth were slightly larger, it of course would have slightly larger gravity, which has interesting implications. It’s not just that a person who weighs 150 pounds would weigh more. It’s that if the earth had slightly more gravity than it now has, methane and ammonia gas, which have molecular weights of sixteen and seventeen, respectfully, would remain close to our surface. Since we cannot breathe methane and ammonia, which are toxic, we would die. More to the point, we would have never come into existence in the first place.

On the other hand, if earth were just a tiny bit smaller and had a bit less gravity, water vapor, which has a molecular weight of 18, would not stay down here close to the planet’s surface but would instead dissipate into the planets atmosphere. Obviously, without water we could not exist.” – Eric Metaxas – Miracles – pages 38-39

Again, hat tip: Philip Cunningham

Comments
bornagain77: face palm. Notably, you didn’t point to a flaw in the puddle’s logic. bornagain77: The fossil record, not just the Cambrian explosion, is a huge pain for Darwinists. The fossil record clearly shows a succession of organisms and ecosystems. It also supports the nested hierarchy in time. bornagain77: Moreover you have ZERO evidence that random mutation and natural selection can build ANYTHING of functional significance Sure we do, but we have to establish the historical ordering first in order to discuss the mechanisms involved in the posited transitions.Zachriel
December 10, 2014
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jazzcat: I refuted the logic and the flaws in the analogy No, but you did demonstrate you entirely missed the point of the analogy. The puddle doesn't know about rain filling the hole, or water evaporating. The puddle's observable universe is how staggeringly well the hole fits the puddle. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70827-this-is-rather-as-if-you-imagine-a-puddle-wakingZachriel
December 10, 2014
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Fossil succession? Any actual evidence supporting this fantasy Zachriel?humbled
December 10, 2014
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Genesis 1:3 tells of the UV light burning away the thick clouds of early Earth. Love that Book:)ppolish
December 10, 2014
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UV destroys methane regardless of whether or not oxygen is present. Here is another abstract: UV shielding of early Earth by N2/CH4/CO2 organic haze:
However, methane and ammonia, both strong greenhouse gases, are destroyed by UV light. Sagan and Chyba (1997) proposed that the early Earth had an organic haze layer produced, as on Titan, by methane photolysis in the presence of nitrogen. Such a layer would preferentially absorb ultraviolet light, thereby allowing ammonia and methane to persist in the atmosphere. However, as in the case of Titan, such a layer would also have an antigreenhouse effect (McKay et al. 1999) which could oppose or even cancel any greenhouse effect generated by the shielded methane and ammonia.
Joe
December 10, 2014
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Joe @ 42, 43
UV destroys methane, which means methane wouldn’t last long without a shield. =========================== However, photochemical studies showed that any methane (Lasaga et al. 1971) or ammonia (Kuhn and Atreya 1979; Kasting 1982) in the atmosphere would quickly be destroyed.
Methane converts to water vapour and CO2 when it reacts with hydroxyl radical . Since oxygen was not there is early Earth, there was no Hydroxyl radical (•HO), that is the reason Methane prevailed until Photosynthesis began.Me_Think
December 10, 2014
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From the paper you ignored:
However, photochemical studies showed that any methane (Lasaga et al. 1971) or ammonia (Kuhn and Atreya 1979; Kasting 1982) in the atmosphere would quickly be destroyed.
Joe
December 10, 2014
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Me_Think- I provided a peer-reviewed paper that says otherwise. UV destroys methane, which means methane wouldn't last long without a shield.Joe
December 10, 2014
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Joe @ 39 Guess I do have to give a link. Here: NASA site
Early in the Earth’s history—about 3.5 billion years ago—there was 1,000 times as much methane in the atmosphere as there is now . The earliest methane was released into the atmosphere by volcanic activity. During this time, Earth's earliest life appeared. These first, ancient bacteria added to the methane concentration by converting hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane and water. Oxygen didn’t become a major part of the atmosphere until photosynthetic organisms evolved later in Earth's history. With no oxygen, methane stayed in the atmosphere longer and at higher concentrations than it does today.
Me_Think
December 10, 2014
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Mark Frank:
but the range even on earth is extraordinary.
Yes, it is quite the intelligent design. ;)Joe
December 10, 2014
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UV destroys methane (and ammonia). That means the early atmosphere couldn't have had "lots of methane". That is unless you use the unscientific special pleading of some type of shield.Joe
December 10, 2014
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Joe @ 34 UV is nothing more than a energy source. It will break bonds and produce free radicals.Me_Think
December 10, 2014
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Thanks jazzcat, I missed your post at 17bornagain77
December 10, 2014
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There is no rigid logic to it. The example does not even address the salient points of the evidence at hand for 'privileged planet' and 'privileged species'. i.e. it is 'not even wrong' as a counter-argument to the evidence we have. i.e. Theists: Why is the universe extremely fine tuned not only for life but life like human life? Atheists: Mud Puddles! Theists: face palm. as to: "Branching descent is strongly supported, by the nested hierarchy and by fossil succession." as you have repeatedly been shown, No it isn't. The fossil record, not just the Cambrian explosion, is a huge pain for Darwinists. Genetics is all over the map and certainly does not 'strongly support' common descent. Moreover you have ZERO evidence that random mutation and natural selection can build ANYTHING of functional significance, not even a single molecular machine, much less can it even begin to explain a human brain that far exceeds the complexity of the entire internet combined.bornagain77
December 10, 2014
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Branching descent is strongly supported, by the nested hierarchy and by fossil succession.
Branching descent doesn't produce a nested hierarchy and fossil succession has fish-> tetrapods-> fish-a-podsJoe
December 10, 2014
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Me_Think @ 18- What does UV do to methane (and ammonia)? Earth’s Earliest AtmospheresJoe
December 10, 2014
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Zachriel: I refuted the logic and the flaws in the analogy, see my post 17.jazzcat
December 10, 2014
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bornagain77: Your mud puddle example does not even rise to the status of being ‘not even wrong’! Notably, you didn’t point to a flaw in the puddle’s logic. bornagain77: Humans certainly did not evolve from lower primates Branching descent is strongly supported, by the nested hierarchy and by fossil succession.Zachriel
December 10, 2014
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Your mud puddle example does not even rise to the status of being 'not even wrong'! Atheism is epistemologically self defeating and is thus certainly not 'scientific'. Humans certainly did not evolve from lower primates, and Natural selection is not a 'reason', it is a vacuous explanation, a placeholder for ignorance, a gloss for 'it just happened' for no reason at all.bornagain77
December 10, 2014
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Actually, there were many reasons humans evolved, the primary adaptive mechanism being natural selection.
Unfortunately for that story natural selection has proven to be impotent.
There are many examples of organisms adapting to new environments, such as vertebrates adapting to a terrestrial existence.
That example only exists in imagination-land.Joe
December 10, 2014
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bornagain77: The mud puddle ploy of materialists is completely disingenuous to the evidence at hand. It's a parallel case. Notably, you didn't point to a flaw in the puddle's logic. Indeed, the specified complexity of the hole is off the charts. The puddle concludes the universe, the hole, is finely tuned for his existence. bornagain77: The original atheistic position/prediction was ... You mean scientific explanation. bornagain77: ... that the universe did not have life in mind and that life, and humans in particular, are ‘just a fluke’ that randomly happened for no particular reason at all. Actually, there were many reasons humans evolved, the primary adaptive mechanism being natural selection.Zachriel
December 10, 2014
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The mud puddle ploy of materialists is completely disingenuous to the evidence at hand. The original atheistic position/prediction was that the universe did not have life in mind and that life, and humans in particular, are 'just a fluke' that randomly happened for no particular reason at all. The discovery that both the universe and earth exhibit an extreme, incomprehensible, degree of fine-tuning for not only life but particularly for life like human life is something that confirms Theistic presuppositions and disconfirms, indeed is completely antithetical to, Atheistic presuppositions. For Atheists to pretend that these discoveries are of no importance is yet another clear example of the depths of intellectual dishonesty atheists are willing to entertain just so to defend their Nihilistic worldview.bornagain77
December 10, 2014
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tjguy: You believe that life evolved to exist in these extreme environments. Again, that is one hypothesis that one could hold to. Branching descent is strongly supported. There are many examples of organisms adapting to new environments, such as vertebrates adapting to a terrestrial existence.Zachriel
December 10, 2014
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MF @ 15
I did not meant to imply that all environments lead to life forms – but the range even on earth is extraordinary.
That is the data. It is indisputable. Certainly different organisms are well suited to exist in very different and in some cases extreme environments. But so what?! Now comes the interpretation. The materialistic interpretation is the one you hold to. You believe that life evolved to exist in these extreme environments. Again, that is one hypothesis that one could hold to. There is another possible hypothesis that would fit the data just as well. These organisms were designed to be able to live within a range of environments - with a certain amount of genetic diversity which would allow them to adjust to a number of different environments. We see camels with amazing eyelids that enable them to weather the terrible dust storms they face in their environment. That is the data. Were they designed to live in the desert or did they evolve these functions to enable them to live in the desert? We see design features for sure. No one questions that. The question is who or what is the architect of that design? Again, both are possible hypotheses. Based on what we know about information, design, the genetic code, the cell, etc., we think the best answer to this question is a "who" rather than a "what".tjguy
December 10, 2014
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tjguy: Which makes more sense will be a matter of personal opinion which is why there are people who hold both interpretations. You do know what happens to the puddle at the end of the story?Zachriel
December 10, 2014
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MF @2
This is a classic case of the puddle that is just the right size to fit the hole it is in. There are life forms that exist in all the most extreme conditions on earth now and in the past. There is even evidence that some life forms can survive space travel. If gravity was slightly different the earth might not support us but it is quite possible it would have supported some other life form instead.
Your interpretation of the data is possible. Our interpretation of the data is also possible. Both interpretations fit the data. Which makes more sense will be a matter of personal opinion which is why there are people who hold both interpretations. You cannot prove your interpretation and neither can we prove ours, but the design hypothesis makes a ton more sense to me.tjguy
December 10, 2014
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In the following video, Dr. Hugh Ross reveals that the conditions necessary for advanced life to exist in the universe occur during a narrow window during the universe's history,,, Hugh Ross - The Anthropic Principle and The Anthropic Inequality - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/8494065/ Anthropic Principle: A Precise Plan for Humanity By Hugh Ross Excerpt: Brandon Carter, the British mathematician who coined the term “anthropic principle” (1974), noted the strange inequity of a universe that spends about 15 billion years “preparing” for the existence of a creature that has the potential to survive no more than 10 million years (optimistically).,, Carter and (later) astrophysicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler demonstrated that the inequality exists for virtually any conceivable intelligent species under any conceivable life-support conditions. Roughly 15 billion years represents a minimum preparation time for advanced life: 11 billion toward formation of a stable planetary system, one with the right chemical and physical conditions for primitive life, and four billion more years toward preparation of a planet within that system, one richly layered with the biodeposits necessary for civilized intelligent life. Even this long time and convergence of “just right” conditions reflect miraculous efficiency. Moreover the physical and biological conditions necessary to support an intelligent civilized species do not last indefinitely. They are subject to continuous change: the Sun continues to brighten, Earth’s rotation period lengthens, Earth’s plate tectonic activity declines, and Earth’s atmospheric composition varies. In just 10 million years or less, Earth will lose its ability to sustain human life. In fact, this estimate of the human habitability time window may be grossly optimistic. In all likelihood, a nearby supernova eruption, a climatic perturbation, a social or environmental upheaval, or the genetic accumulation of negative mutations will doom the species to extinction sometime sooner than twenty thousand years from now. http://christiangodblog.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html At the 38:10 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Huterer speaks of the 'why right now? coincidence problem' for dark matter and visible matter: Dragan Huterer - 'coincidence problem' - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qTJc1Y7duM#t=2290 The Privileged Planet by Gonzalez, which also holds that any rare life supporting planet in the universe will also be 'privileged' for observation of the universe, has now been made into a excellent video,,, The Privileged Planet – video playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ohuG3Vj_48&list=PLbzQ4aXdqWD-9kjFsSm-cxNlzgrkJuko7 “The same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist also provide us with the best over all conditions for making scientific discoveries.” - Guillermo Gonzalez - Astronomer The very conditions that make Earth hospitable to intelligent life also make it well suited to viewing and analyzing the universe as a whole. - Jay Richards The Privileged Planet hypothesis has now been extended by Robin Collins PhD.,,, The Fine-Tuning for Discoverability - Robin Collins - March 22, 2014 Excerpt: The most dramatic confirmation of the discoverability/livability optimality thesis (DLO) is the dependence of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) on the baryon to photon ratio.,,, ...the intensity of CMB depends on the photon to baryon ratio, (??b), which is the ratio of the average number of photons per unit volume of space to the average number of baryons (protons plus neutrons) per unit volume. At present this ratio is approximately a billion to one (10^9) , but it could be anywhere from one to infinity; it traces back to the degree of asymmetry in matter and anti - matter right after the beginning of the universe – for approximately every billion particles of antimatter, there was a billion and one particles of matter.,,, The only livability effect this ratio has is on whether or not galaxies can form that have near - optimally livability zones. As long as this condition is met, the value of this ratio has no further effects on livability. Hence, the DLO predicts that within this range, the value of this ratio will be such as to maximize the intensity of the CMB as observed by typical observers. According to my calculations – which have been verified by three other physicists -- to within the margin of error of the experimentally determined parameters (~20%), the value of the photon to baryon ratio is such that it maximizes the CMB. This is shown in Figure 1 below. (pg. 13) It is easy to see that this prediction could have been disconfirmed. In fact, when I first made the calculations in the fall of 2011, I made a mistake and thought I had refuted this thesis since those calculations showed the intensity of the CMB maximizes at a value different than the photon - baryon ratio in our universe. So, not only does the DLO lead us to expect this ratio, but it provides an ultimate explanation for why it has this value,,, This is a case of a teleological thesis serving both a predictive and an ultimate explanatory role.,,, http://home.messiah.edu/~rcollins/Fine-tuning/Greer-Heard%20Forum%20paper%20draft%20for%20posting.pdf Greer Heard Forum: Robin Collins – “God and the Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Discovery” – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBWmMU7BXGEbornagain77
December 10, 2014
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Of related note to Denton's 'Privileged Species', we now know that the earth has a surprising special position in the universe,,, Why is the solar system cosmically aligned? BY Dragan Huterer - 2007 The solar system seems to line up with the largest cosmic features. Is this mere coincidence or a signpost to deeper insights? Caption under figure on page 43: ODD ALIGNMENTS hide within the multipoles of the cosmic microwave background. In this combination of the quadrupole and octopole, a plane bisects the sphere between the largest warm and cool lobes. The ecliptic — the plane of Earth’s orbit projected onto the celestial sphere — is aligned parallel to the plane between the lobes. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~huterer/PRESS/CMB_Huterer.pdf Of note: The preceding article was written before the Planck data (with WMPA & COBE data), but the observations were actually verified by Planck. A Large Scale Pattern from Optical Quasar Polarization Vectors - 2013 & Testing the Dipole Modulation Model in CMBR - 2013 Is there a violation of the Copernican principle in radio sky? - Ashok K. Singal - May 17, 2013 Abstract: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) observations from the WMAP satellite have shown some unexpected anisotropies (directionally dependent observations), which surprisingly seem to be aligned with the ecliptic\cite {20,16,15}. The latest data from the Planck satellite have confirmed the presence of these anisotropies\cite {17}. Here we report even larger anisotropies in the sky distributions of powerful extended quasars and some other sub-classes of radio galaxies in the 3CRR catalogue, one of the oldest and most intensively studies sample of strong radio sources\cite{21,22,3}. The anisotropies lie about a plane passing through the two equinoxes and the north celestial pole (NCP). We can rule out at a 99.995% confidence level the hypothesis that these asymmetries are merely due to statistical fluctuations. Further, even the distribution of observed radio sizes of quasars and radio galaxies show large systematic differences between these two sky regions. The redshift distribution appear to be very similar in both regions of sky for all sources, which rules out any local effects to be the cause of these anomalies. Two pertinent questions then arise. First, why should there be such large anisotropies present in the sky distribution of some of the most distant discrete sources implying inhomogeneities in the universe at very large scales (covering a fraction of the universe)? What is intriguing even further is why such anisotropies should lie about a great circle decided purely by the orientation of earth's rotation axis and/or the axis of its revolution around the sun? It looks as if these axes have a preferential placement in the larger scheme of things, implying an apparent breakdown of the Copernican principle or its more generalization, cosmological principle, upon which all modern cosmological theories are based upon. http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4134 In fact, a movie has been recently been released, in limited distribution thus far, announcing, as far as I can tell from not personally seeing the movie yet, that the Copernican principle is being overturned by recent discoveries in astronomy: Does the Universe Revolve Around Earth? - The Principle - video interview Excerpt: three probes of this radiation all showed the same proof that the universe and its galaxies appear to be arrayed around Earth and the Milky Way. "All of the radiation which comes from everywhere in the universe - there's no place we don't see it - it's all coming toward us and aligned with us," Sungenis said.,,, there is provable design in the universe and Earth's at the center of it - like what scientists found with the 2005 Sloan Digital Sky Survey of all the visible cosmos. "As far out as we could see in the universe the galaxies were aligned in concentric spheres around - guess what - Earth, or our galaxy," http://m.cbn.com/cbnnews/healthscience/2014/October/Film-Shocker-Does-the-Universe-Revolve-Around-Earth-/ Moreover, there are many independent characteristics required to be fulfilled for any planet to host advanced carbon-based life. Two popular books have been written, 'The Privileged Planet' by Guillermo Gonzalez and 'Rare Earth' by Donald Brownlee, indicating the earth is extremely unique in its ability to host advanced life in this universe. The 'Rare Earth' hypothesis has been now extended by Dr. Hugh Ross and his team: Rare Earth - Michael Strauss PhD. - video https://vimeo.com/91775975 Linked from Appendix C from Dr. Ross's book, 'Why the Universe Is the Way It Is'; Probability for occurrence of all 816 parameters approx. equals 10^-1333 dependency factors estimate approx. equals 10^324 longevity requirements estimate approx. equals 10^45 Probability for occurrence of all 816 parameters approx. equals 10^-1054 Maximum possible number of life support bodies in observable universe approx. equals 10^22 Thus, less than 1 chance in 10^1032 exists that even one such life-support body would occur anywhere in the universe without invoking divine miracles. http://www.reasons.org/files/compendium/compendium_part3.pdf Hugh Ross - Evidence For Intelligent Design Is Everywhere (10^-1054) - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4347236bornagain77
December 10, 2014
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fifthmonarchyman @ 11
Would bacteria or cockroaches ever have the ability to study their environment and ponder their good fortune? Would such an environment be amendable to study at all?
Only cockroaches can survive Nuclear explosion, at-least up to 10,000 rads. Bacteria too are remarkably flexible and are known to survive in extreme environment. They are truly remarkable creatures. They will be the inheritors of Earth if we are wiped out.Me_Think
December 10, 2014
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Mark Frank: This is a classic case of the puddle that is just the right size to fit the hole it is in. Actually, it's the hole that is just the right size for the puddle!Zachriel
December 10, 2014
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