CompuServe Thread

Kamron, As between genius and insanity, the line between open mind and gullibility is a narrow one. The concept of a flat Earth was never widespread and supported in a scientific context. Indeed, educated peoples have surmised a spherical Earth as early as 500 BC. Keeping an open mind should not be confused with being culpably and chaotically iconoclastic. Jim

Hi, Kamron– Welcome to the forum/section! > "The concept of a flat earth was also widespread and supported." The flat earth was never popular with subscribers to the scientific method. A better example of what you intended might be… Well, Einstein and quantum mechanics only overturned Newton in new regimes, not familiar ones, and Kelvin's miscalculation of the age of the earth was never accepted by geologists, only physicists… Aha, the underlying notion that the Sun was powered by gravitational collaps was fashionable enough in its time, and just as dead now as it was fashionable then. > "There are some problems with the current plate theory. No theory is totally immune to problems. Let's see if they are tougher than the problems any competing theory might have… > "What was the original cause of the first plate to ride up over its adjacent partner?" Why do bubbles floating atop boiling water ride up over descending convection currents? Because they are lighter, which makes them the ones to go higher in a shoving match whose geometry only allows up or down results. That answer seems to fit plate subduction as well. Or maybe it is more that the subducted plate is being pulled down harder than the lighter plate. > "Why are there only a trace of sedimentary deposits on the ocean basins?" The rivers let out into the continental margins, the shelled sea life concentrates on those margins, and so on. If the deep sea floor is "young" and moving "fast", why should it accumulate much in the way of sediments? > "Only one third of the earth has primordial crust. How could this one third been so succesfull in eradicating the balance of all the other crust?" Why do the bubble-rafts atop boiling water fail to balance out to cover the whole surface? I suspect it is because the currents keep sweeping them to the places where the convection currents descend (where they stop because they are lighter), always pushing them out of the way of the fastest horizontal motions. And I suspect the continents do not spread out much for similar reasons. > "It seams like the amount of energy necessary to force one part of cust up over anouther defies the balance of energy." There is a fair amount of energy expected from nuclear radiation, that must dissipate somehow. All calculations of that and residual heat from the Earth's formation that I know of seem sufficient to explain the convections of the mantle, which seems enough to explain the lighter continents getting squeezed into taller configurations at time. > "It looks to me like the earth had its crust ripped away by a passing star. The crust did not make it away from the earth and became the moon. The crust folded in onitself leving the heavy metals that came away with it on the earth side creating the large mares and the lopsided mass that surprised the early orbits calculators. If we just return to the moon and drill a core sample we could prove this theory. And we could also teach pigs to fly if they had hands to hold onto hang gliders. Anyway the plate theory doesn't satisfy all the current problems but the "Birth of the Moon" theory proposed by Lewis Manson does. It also satisfies the petroleum problem, explains sands and gravels, petrified wood and alot of other enigmas. Keep an open mind current science does not have it all wrapped up." How does one explain the paleomagnetic record without plate tectonics? The sharing of formations between continents and their general match-up in shape? Any theory needs such explanations to be worth much in the betting odds. I understand that I do not understand much about the theory you are espousing. But it had better not contradict too many observed facts if it is to deserve credence. How did the moon come to be so deficient in volatiles, and so different in Fe/Mg ratio if it came entirely from earth? (See the July 94 Scientific American). How is it the "passing star" got close enough to rip off part of the Earth but did not take some of the other planets out of the ecliptic plane and the relative regularity of their orbits (by definition, a star is more massive than Jupiter – how about an impacting Mars-sized planetesimal instead)? How did the maria come to often have such circular shapes? (that and the mascons are easy if they are impact basins, but those shapes seem not so easy if they are just denser patches of earth's former crust) I would love to see deep drill cores from the Moon taken and analyzed, regardless of what theory is in fashion! They may trash all these theories, just as the Apollo samples made trouble for all the older Moon-formation theories and let a dark horse theory (the Mars-sized impact on Earth) take the field as the new leading contender – which could only have happened among fairly open minds. –Doug