Moon's Age Revealed, and a Lunar Mystery May Be Solved!

The Moon can't be very young, because it takes time for tidal locking to finalise. Huge impact craters on the Moon also point to a much earlier time in the Solar System, as similar impacts would've happened on Earth.

As has been pointed above, the Moon's mass is too great for it to be placed artificially or captured by Earth. The idea of volcanos spitting magma into orbit to form the Moon is just silly and ignores basic physical laws. Only an impact by a large body could have displaced so much matter so far.

reply to post by wildespace


You're not the first to call my theory silly. So, I'll just state that I'm in good company.

The idea of a giant glacier dam bursting and inundating the northwest United States was called silly. A geologist named Bretz figured it out. He knew what caused the formation of the Badlands. It took him forty years to prove his theory. Part of the problem with acceptance to his theory was size. So, I argue my ideas follow all laws of physics and are a matter of scale.

Just because no one ever saw the black swan, it didn't mean it didn't exist- a mangled paraphrasing of that economics guy..

Remember it's simple. The moon was born of the earth.
Maybe we should colonize it. Mars is to0 far away.
Islands are born by volcanoes.
So, was our satellite.

Forgot link on Missoula Floods. When Bretz was in his nineties, they asked him how he felt about an award he had just received. He said all his fellows were dead and he had no one to gloat over.

en.wikipedia.org...

I think he was joking. Being silly. Sometimes being silly is the only way to survive forty years of frustration.

wildespace
The Moon can't be very young, because it takes time for tidal locking to finalise. Huge impact craters on the Moon also point to a much earlier time in the Solar System, as similar impacts would've happened on Earth.

You're forgetting something - the weather. Earth has a thick atmosphere that allows the presence of liquid water, which has eroded away the huge impact craters of the past. There's also plate tectonics.

reply to post by ericblair4891


Erm, I'm not sure that your theory would work. Surely the amount of pressure that would be needed to eject magma out of earth orbit would be so great that in the process it would leave sufficient debris behind to the sides to form massive volcanoes, as opposed to giant calderas? And besides how would that material have all met into one bolide that became the moon? It would take a single point of origin with the same amount of pressure in every eruption to create something like the moon. And surely pumping that amount of magma into the air every time would eventually sterilise the face of the planet?

reply to post by ericblair4891


How can you compare volcanic islands and floods on Earth to something being ejected into orbit? Just because someone's theory about the flood proved to be correct doesn't mean your theory is right also. Again, have you considered the physical forces recuired to launch something into orbit by volcanoes? It would probably shatter our planet, or affect its orbit considerably.

The giant impact theory is the most logical and believeable.

reply to post by wildespace


I compared the silly flood theory to my silly volcano theory.

I compared volcanic island to the moon because the have the same origin. The only difference is scale.

I'm sorry I'd write more but I'm watching earthquakes in Oklahoma and Chile. And, the volcanoes. So, I'll try to combine a couple points. We and send object into space using small amounts of fuel and controlled pressure. The explosion within the chamber would be the same process. The lots of pressure and fuel. Hydrogen and Oxygen. Lots of heat as well. And if we are talking billions of years ago, a much different atmosphere. Thinner. It was not one eruption. The earth continually erupted massively for eons. The largest were phreatic. The material ejected would also rain back to earth. The moon was from as the disk of several eruptions formed in the same way earth did when the sun had a disk of debris around it. Anyway, off to watch and see if Oklahoma hasn't fallen into the earth. Bad scene. Fracking and injection wells.

So. The giant phreatic (hydro-thermal eruptive explosions) volcanoes did not blow apart the earth. Good for us. They did however, determine almost everything on the planet. If volcanoes created the moon, then they are responsible for the tides and our spin. The moon makes life possible. Maybe that's why Mars really never formed into an earth-like planet. Venus, well, that's place is just volcano, volcano, volcano. The volcano planet.


Mars has a big volcano too.

reply to post by ericblair4891


Unlike the examples you have cited, the problem is one of physics.

Each example that you cited is quite possible given the physics that are involved. They are on a large scale......but work.

However, when it comes to putting something into orbit, even low Earth orbit, physics are still in play, but the way things happen is much more difficult.

One thing that all those examples you used have in common: gravity.

Water bursting from an ice dam, falls and flows across the surface of the Earth due to gravity. Ejecta from a volcano falls back to Earth due to gravity. Lava flows down the slopes of a volcano due to gravity. A pyroclaustic cloud collapses and rushes out, due to gravity.

To get something into orbit, we have to overcome gravity from the Earth, long enough so that whatever we are trying to put into orbit, when it falls, will do so at an angle that will cause it to literally miss the horizon.

That's all an orbit really is: something that is falling, but keeps missing the Earth.

At sea level here on Earth, gravity is accelerating us at 9.82 meters per second squared. You want to get to orbit, you've got to over come that. The good news is: the higher you go, the lower that number becomes, and the thinner the air resistance.

However, we first still must overcome that gravitational acceleration. The more mass you try to do that with, the more energy it will require.

In order to get a mass the size of the moon into orbit, would require a larger energy release than any known chemical or geological explosion can produce.

The other problem is Isaac Newton: For every action, there is a opposite and equal reaction.
Apply that much energy to the Earth, and you will either drastically change it's orbit (the Earth's orbit is stable around the sun and consistent with models that show it formed right where it is, and has not moved as much as an energy release of that magnitude would move it).
Or it would literally shatter the Earth.

It's not that it's too big to imagine, or consider......it's just that the physics dictates that it can't happen that way. Not without drastic things happening to the Earth. And........how to impart that much energy into something, as chemical and geological reactions simple can not do it.

So let us take a look at multiple VMEs, smaller in size.

Now we are saying that it was a much small amount of mass being repeatedly ejected from the Earth. Much less energy involved, as long as the masses we are talking about are very low. The amount of energy involved is much less, has hardly in affect on the Earth.

But, you still need to get the mass of the moon up there.....so we are talking about something that would have had to happen over a very, very, very long time.

So long, it would negate the age of the moon. The moon would be a LOT younger, or would not have the mass that it has now.

Also: the volcanoes that do this would have to always eject within the same angle, not too much force, and not too little force.
Every time.

So it's not that people are too closed minded to think about it. The problem is that those that do look at it, who under stand physics and are willing the crunch the numbers for it, end up with numbers that do not fit.

So it isn't a case of "closed minded" people.

It's a case of: the physics won't work for it.

reply to post by eriktheawful


Let me see if I can simplify and clarify. It was many multiples of VME's. And yes you are right, it happened over a very long time. When earth first formed it crust and the atmosphere was thin and forming and the first water pooled. Maybe even froze in certain places. The argument should be about the age of the earth. This computer simulation, concocts different times until they can account for the problem of the moon and earth being nearly identical. Except, for the rock. Other studies show the moon is younger not older. Meaning the earth could have had lots of time to spew out lots of material. And it doesn't need to all be in the same direction to form a disk. They could have been shooting streams of magma and the earth could have been shrouded. If a Mars sized planet hit the earth, and didn't obliterate it, there would have been molten material thrown everywhere in the collision. Either way, gravity did the rest. The material furthest away formed a disk. And the stuff around earth, fell back to earth.

I think we disagree on the point of whether or not an explosion of a magma chamber has enough energy to throw material far enough away from earth so it doesn't fall back due to gravity. I think it did. The eruptions were massive and many. The earth 4 billion years ago was a hot mass. A volcanic hot mass.

I'm not going to argue the earth is plasma. Nope. I'm just saying our early was nearly completely molten and early earth behaved differently than it does today. It could have changed orbits. Spun wildly. The internal heat drives things today. Tectonics. Our earth is hot. Hydrogen is powerful stuff. Rocket fuel. Volcanoes erupt. Eject. I think it's elementary. And nothing I have stated breaks any laws of physics. If you applied them in a simulator, you could get some results. The problem still is there is no evidence because we must witness and ejection of this size. One way to prove my theory is when we find a newly forming planet spewing magma far from itself and creating a shroud or a disk. Our moon is big. And that's hard to account for. Which is why they keep monkeying with the collision theory. The have to find the mass. And to place it all really close to the early earth without originating directly from the surface. The mass came from earth. And the volcanoes shot it out there.

I think they also found out life formed on earth earlier than thought. So, the earth cooled quickly and a thin crust developed. The earth formed rapidly and had lots of time to throw lots of junk out into orbit and near orbit. The moon is earth's collective space junk.

If our space probes can be launch break earth's gravitational pull, so could a massive explosion.

www.space.com...

reply to post by ericblair4891


But every planet and major moon in the Solar System rotates on its axis. Even the gaseous giants, which don't have volcanoes.

reply to post by ericblair4891

Let's for a second assume that a very powerful volcano launched a chunk of lava to the height of the low earth orbit (at least 160 km up). You still missed out one very important thing: to stay in orbit and avoid falling back to earth, the chunk has to be moving horizontally at about 28,080 kilometers per hour. Otherwise, it simply falls back down. So, not only your ancient volcanoes have to be powerful enough to launch lava and rocks into space, they have to do it with an even stronger force and at such angle that the stuff is travelling at thousands of km/h with respect to the ground.

reply to post by AngryCymraeg


We spin on a cock-eye axis. And we wobble. Also, if you believe some, the spin of the internal solid core of the planet.

reply to post by wildespace


When there was a VME, it would be like the engine on a rocket. Thrusting material, and spinning us. This would create that force. The earth itself would speed up its spin. Like one of those crazy spinning fireworks. The molten material would be thrown off behind us in the opposite direction flinging the material into space. And like I said earlier, we'd change our obit in relation to the sun. This could move the molten material even further away from the originating start point of the earth. So, the material wouldn't being thrown the full distance. The rest is made up by the wandering earth. Until the eruptions slowed down and the orbits settled in a balance between earth and the moon mass. And it's not a balance really, the moon is moving away. But earth and the moon got into a rotation.

ericblair4891
reply to post by wildespace

 

When there was a VME, it would be like the engine on a rocket. Thrusting material, and spinning us. This would create that force. The earth itself would speed up its spin. Like one of those crazy spinning fireworks. The molten material would be thrown off behind us in the opposite direction flinging the material into space. And like I said earlier, we'd change our obit in relation to the sun. This could move the molten material even further away from the originating start point of the earth. So, the material wouldn't being thrown the full distance. The rest is made up by the wandering earth. Until the eruptions slowed down and the orbits settled in a balance between earth and the moon mass. And it's not a balance really, the moon is moving away. But earth and the moon got into a rotation.

Again, you ignore the horizontal part of the vector. Material ejected upwards will not increase the earth's spin, neither will it achieve orbital velocity, no matter how hard you throw it up. Earth's gravity doesn't stop somewhere, it goes on infinitely (just getting weaker with distance), and the only way to truly defeat it is to achieve the escape velocity.

But let's for a second agree that your magical super-powerful ancient volcanos launched lava sideways with enough force to spin the Earth in one direction (btw, wouldn't other volcanoes erupting in the opposite direction cancel that force out?). Since there is equal reaction to every action, the launched lava would travel slower as the result (because some of the force went into spinning the earth up a bit). Also, as the lava is now travelling in opposite direction to earth's spin, it's orbital velocity would need to be larger than if it travelled in the same direction.

The more you elaborate on your scenario, the more impossible it becomes physically. And why are you using this scenario to explain earth's and moon's rotation? All objects that formed in the Solar System have been rotating from the start.

ericblair4891
reply to post by AngryCymraeg

 

We spin on a cock-eye axis. And we wobble. Also, if you believe some, the spin of the internal solid core of the planet.

Mars has a 25 degree tilt. Jupiter has a 3 degree tilt. Saturn has a 26 degree tilt. Neptune has a 28 degree tilt. Uranus has a whopping 97 degree tilt. Mercury has a 2 degree tilt. And Venus has a incredible 177 degree tilt.

Earth's "wobble" (better known as precession) is due to the Earth being tugged on by both the moon, the sun, and even Jupiter.

In order for your volcanoes to create the Earth's spin (which, btw, how did the gas giants and the sun get their spin then?), they would have to erupt in a more lateral sense, instead of the more vertical that we normally see in most volcanoes. And they would have had to do that most of the time.........and they would of had to erupt with the force of over 7 quadrillion megatons of TNT worth of energy, each time (to over come the inertia of the mass of the Earth in order to impart angular momentum), AND....they would have needed to always erupt in the same, or very close to the same direction.

Someone could do computer simulations, sure. However, in order to do the simulation, they would have to put the numbers in from the math......and before you even get that far, the math shows: this isn't going to work.

Smaller eruptions over time, ejecting smaller amounts of material, so that they then gather and form the moon (sorry, would take way too long. The moon would not be as big as it is then, because of the amount it moves away from Earth each year, not enough material would have created it....it would get too far away from newly ejected material in a lower Earth orbit. The only way for that newer material to get to a higher orbit, is for it to have more energy added to it.....that's how you get from a lower orbit to a higher orbit: more thrust), those smaller eruptions would not have nearly enough energy to over come the inertial of the Earth's rest mass. No where near enough.

The giant impact hypothesis on the other hand........it actually works...and is why (for now) it's the most widely accepted theory.

Here is why:

Computer simulations based upon the most current theories of planet formation about a star, show that the early solar system had a lot more rocky bodies around the sun in the inner solar system. Most models produce about 20 "rocky planet" sized objects.
Many of those end up being flung out of the solar system, or end up spiraling into the sun.

Others end up impacting each other, resulting in destruction. Or, in the case of the Earth: a new moon.

The simulations show that it is very possible for both our Earth and a Mars sized body to have formed in about the same orbital distance from the sun. Over time, their paths cross, at a oblique angle.
That impact was enough to shatter the Mars body (and darn near the Earth). It also is more than enough energy to:

Increase the Earth's spin.....and move it's axis.

Because the Mars sized body formed in the same orbital path as the Earth: it has the same materials of the Earth.

Now we have both the left overs from this planet and Earth material, that have more than enough energy to be in orbit (because the other body already had enough energy to be in orbit, and an impact of that size, would certainly be enough to have material from Earth get into orbit). Enough of the material is outside the roche limit, and is able to start conglomerating into the moon.

The orbit of this new moon is such that it will be very slowly moving away from the Earth. The good news is: it was close enough for gravitational braking of the Earth's spin (as the impact would have increased the Earth's spin to about a 10 hour day).

----------------------------

They are all theories of course. I'm certainly not touting it as "fact", when even scientist will shake their heads and say, "No, not fact, only theories.".

However, the problem with some theories is that the math does not fit. As we learned more about our Earth, the moon, and our solar system, some theories fall out, as new information that we gain make them not fit anymore.

It could be that down the road, we meet an alien species that found records of an even more ancient alien species, that recorded how it all happened.......and it might be that they put the moon there (not that I believe in the whole "hollow moon" theory, etc).

So for right now, all we have is theories. Some have supporting evidence, while other's have none. Some answer most questions, while others have too many holes in them.

Without a time machine and pictures though, for now that is all we'll have: theories.

ericblair4891
reply to post by AngryCymraeg

 

We spin on a cock-eye axis. And we wobble. Also, if you believe some, the spin of the internal solid core of the planet.

Erm, yes. Please address my point however.

The sun, and our planets, obtained their spins and orbits via ejections and impacts and gravitational forces.
The answer is all of the above.
Oh and math, isn't just the numbers, that's a construct.
I'm still not a believer in the proof that one equals one.

Le'ts forget about my magical mystery moon volcano theory. And go back to square one. If that's possible. I'm having a chicken and egg moment. The computer simulation places the moon age older back to the beginning of our solar system. However, the rocks, the math of the rocks, shows that the moon is probably younger than we thought.

To explain the isotopes, the math of the simulation conflicts with the math of the physical rocks. Well, that means if you put your "faith" in physics, you must side with the solid evidence. We can argue with the dating of the moon rocks. Because the rocks on the surface of the moon might not give an accurate date because they can be contaminated by impacts.

The impact theory puts the collision about 4.5 billion years ago.
The new theory puts that earlier to almost the very beginning near 4.6 billion years ago.
The rocks from the moon are suggesting could be as young as 4.4 billion years.
This means the debate leaves open a giant window of a few hundred millions years.

So, let's forget about my volcanoes. This new theory has a date which conflicts with the rocks. Given that, the stronger argument is the moon is younger and not older.

ericblair4891
I think we disagree on the point of whether or not an explosion of a magma chamber has enough energy to throw material far enough away from earth so it doesn't fall back due to gravity. I think it did.

I'd like to point out again that orbital motion (for example the Moon's) doesn't work that way. No matter how far you throw material up, it will fall back to earth, unless it achieves escape velocity. But the material that formed the Moon didn't achieve escape velocity; the Moon is still firmly in the grasp of the Earth's gravity. Rather, the Moon is orbiting our planet at thousands of km per hour, and it moved even faster when it was closer to the earth. As I mentioned, material needs to be travelling at over 28,000 km/h in low-earth orbit, horizontally in relation to the earth's surface. Please explain how ejection from volcanos can achieve that.



If you can't grasp the basics of orbital motion, perhaps speculating on the origin of the Moon is too long a stretch for you.

reply to post by wildespace


I love condescension.
my up runneth over
I wrote a long answer. But then erased it. Because I wrote in earlier post that the ejecting material thrust changed earth's orbit. It could have even changed the direction of our orbit, and spin and...

Oops, I'd better err on the side of caution and stop speculating.

edit

[ there's a fight breaking out in the control room- escape velocity is not an absolute number- trajectory- john (edit, Gerald Bull) bull- we have a meltdown-] [someone else breaks free and starts mashing keys- 'wildespace' is right, much of the material did come back to earth. there was a constant process ejection loops- --don't write anymore please. - some ejections did reach escape velocity and broke free, some material fell back as wildespace insists, and, and some material never broke free, nor did it come back, it found some sort of weird balance. and settled, in an orbit, somewhere, out by where moon orbits...-]

reply to post by ericblair4891


You have another problem with your theory. There are multiple supervolcanoes, dating back millions of years. They're all over the planet. That's your problem. They all point in different directions. If your theory held water then we'd have multiple bolides up there.