Lloyd wrote:Water in Earth's Mantle?: Charles, do you have an idea what they're detecting in the mantle?
Just because something has the wave suppression characteristics of water doesn't mean that it's water.
It could be lots of stuff.
Lloyd wrote:Heavy Elements in Planets?: Why would planets not have heavier elements within them, like stars do, if planets evolve from stars?
Planets
do have heavier elements -- I'm just saying that only in large stars would you see any appreciable collection of 6th period elements in their cores. The Sun's core, BTW, is only 2% of its total volume. The same percentage, of a much smaller object such as the Earth, would be a comparatively small amount of matter.
Maybe there's an osmium/platinum asteroid out there somewhere, which used to be the core of Ceres. If you find it, let me know -- we can sell it on eBay for the precious metal content.
Just remember that the asteroids are simply the debris from Ceres that didn't fall into the Sun, or impact another planet, or exit the solar system. What's left is only 4% of the mass of the Moon. The chance of the osmium/platinum core being in the surviving remnants is pretty slight.
Lloyd wrote:Circularized Orbits: In your Titius-Bode Law paper at
http://qdl.scs-inc.us/?top=15369, you concluded that electrical repulsion between planets causes them to attain the orbits they have, [...] Why would not the same repulsive forces cause Mercury (and other planets) to settle into circular orbit rather quickly?
I'm saying that irregularly spaced objects, on mildly elliptical orbits, will be coerced into the Titius-Bode spacing, in circularized orbits, by the electrostatic repulsion between the planets. But something on a highly elliptical orbit would be cutting through all of that, getting coerced first this way and next that way. To settle into a circularized orbit, it would have to be close enough to such that it wouldn't have the momentum to cross the boundaries between stable orbits.
Lloyd wrote:Can you determine the approximate driving forces involved [that are enforcing the Titius-Bode Law]?
That would take some work. The forces vary with the net charge of the bodies, and their atmospheres. I have the calculation engine for it -- I would just need accurate values to pump into it. That's an interesting prospect...
Lloyd wrote:Comets have been on highly elliptical orbits presumably for many centuries and maybe several millennia. Is it easier for small or large objects to remain longer in elliptical orbits? SL9 was on an elliptical orbit till 1992, when it encountered Jupiter and broke up into pieces, which then crashed into Jupiter single file in 1994.
Smaller objects are more subject to friction, and as you noted, gravitational perturbations. So a Mercury-sized object would be more likely to retain its original orbit.
Lloyd wrote:The Great Flood appears to have been accompanied by a later heavy bombardment, as Gordon has pointed out.
That would have been a later bombardment -- not the one that cratered the Moon and Mars.
Lloyd wrote:Are you locked in to the conventional dating of the Earth and solar system...
Very little of my work has specific date ranges in it yet. For example, my working numbers for the amount of time it took the dusty plasma to collapse into the Sun is 100 million years, and if it keeps releasing energy at its present rate, it can keep going for another 10 trillion years. But I don't know how to estimate how long ago the Sun formed. The planets "probably" formed at the same time, but the Earth seems to have been remelted during the Late Heavy Bombardment, and the radiocarbon dating was reset. That "seems" to be around 4 billion years ago, which matches the date of the mares on the Moon and on Mars. But is that number actually 4 billion years, or 4 million, or what? I don't think that it's 4 thousand, but I'm not familiar enough with the other dating methods to have my own opinion on the actual ranges.
Lloyd wrote:By the way, have you thought about how much atmosphere the Earth had initially? Do you think it may have had as much atmosphere as Uranus or Neptune? Or would Earth have been a dwarf star?
I think that the Earth was a dwarf star. Then its outer layers got stripped by a solar flare-up, perhaps during the Late Heavy Bombardment, when the bulk of the debris was falling into the Sun.
Lloyd wrote:...fireballs etc have been increasing a great deal in recent years, especially in the months of August to December. I don't suppose you know of any possible reason for that, do you?
No -- I figured that they're simply getting reported more, as the Earth's population grows, and with the proliferation of camera phones to document the sightings.
Lloyd wrote:And speaking of comets too, have you started any papers yet on comets?
I might expand my bolide paper to include comets, as I think that their comas are related -- it isn't material getting stripped from the object, or comets would have gotten worn down to nothing a long time ago. The comas are the lingering effects of the object on the medium through which it is passing, like a vapor trail from a high-flying airplane -- that stuff didn't come out of the airplane.
Lloyd wrote:By the way, the Avalon forum seems worth applying to for admission.
So many forums... so little time...