Creationism, Myth and Catastrophism

[Aardwolf]

When I said last time, "And if Earth were smaller, gravity could have been the same as it is now, because the surface would have been closer to Earth's core or center", Aardwolf asked, "Why would gravity at the surface be the same if the Earth were smaller? That's not true for all the other smaller planets & moons we observe."

NEUTRONIUM. I think I got that idea from my memory of Charles Cagle's Expanding Earth theory, which was based on the idea that the Earth's core is neutronium, or a neutron star, which causes the expansion, I think by neutrons on the surface turning into hydrogen atoms. That's similar to Michael Mozina's and Oliver Manuel's theory about the Iron Sun, except I don't think they include expansion. I thought Cagle said if the surface of the Earth were closer to the core, that gravity would have remained the same because of the closeness. I guess he figured that most of the mass was in the neutronium core, so by being closer the gravity force would compensate. I used to have a better opinion of Expanding Earth theory. I guess other models don't rely on a neutronium core, but now I don't see any evidence that planetoids expand except from impacts. And Mike Fischer's NewGeology.US has the most plausible explanation of how impacts caused the breakup of Pangaea.

So it's just a special case for Earth. All the other solid planets, moons, satellites etc. just rock, but Earths a neutron star. Ok.

[nick c]

Not to disrupt the flow of this conversation, but this is a TB project website, and I feel that a statement needs to be posted on the EU position (or at least my interpretation of such) on these matters.

In order to accomodate an entirely different gravitational environment in various eras of the geological past, in this thread, it seems that everyone is assuming that the total matter that composes the Earth must have changed. Obviously, the total matter that makes up the Earth has not remained constant over time, certainly the Earth is acquiring matter in the form of meteoric material and from other possible means. But the question is...have the changes been enough to account for a biosphere which could not exist under the gravitational conditions of today? This question has more gravitas (see what I did there?) if one has to abandon the current geological time scales. Did the dinosaurs really become extinct 60 mya? Considering on how these geological time scales are arrived at; via the uniformitarian assumption of (1) slow evolution and (2) radiometric dating... then if we discard those yardsticks, what are we left with? And those yard sticks have been attacked by catastrophists and been discarded with good reason, the extent of which goes well beyond the scope of this thread. (1) the fossil record does not support slow evolution. The stage is occupied by a cast of actors and then the period ends in a catastrophe, and the new stage has different props with a cast of entirely different actors. And (2) all is not well with radiometric clocks contrary to the opinion presented to the public, there are some serious problems:
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/dat ... 20chambers.

In private discussions with various EU figures an expansion or contraction of the Earth was considered a probable result of planetary catastrophism; a situation where participating celestial bodies may lose or gain significant material depending on the circumstances.

The Expanding Earth theory as typically put forth, presents it in a uniformitarian context, which is not acceptable to most in the EU. Uniformitarian processes do take place, but they only can be effective if they are allowed to have extremely long periods of a non catastrophic existence. And as far as the Earth's history is concerned the evidence (according to proponents) of prolonged periods of peace and tranquility, is simply not there.

One must consider the possibility that mass is variable (Thornhill) and therefore the felt effect of gravity may have radically changed from one time period to another. In this way of looking at things "mass" and "matter" are not interchangeable terms. Matter is the amount of protons and electrons in a considered sample, while Mass is a variable function of Matter, presumably resulting from the electrical/plasma ambiance of the celestial body.

[Lloyd]

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NEUTRONIUM

Aardwolf said: So it's just a special case for Earth. All the other solid planets, moons, satellites etc. just rock, but Earths a neutron star. Ok.

The neutronium core idea was Cagle's, not mine. If he thought other bodies also expanded, then he probably assumed that they also have neutronium cores. But I doubt if neutronium exists. I did see some evidence for the existence of neutronium within the last few years, but I don't know what the source was now. I don't rule it out, but I'm still doubtful.

WEAKER GRAVITY
In my paper at https://cataclysmicearthhistory.substac ... er-gravity I quoted a 2005 TPOD.

The Electric Universe offers a different point of view. Gravity is not a constant. It's a variable that depends on the plasma environment. So Earth in the Mesozoic Era may have had less gravity than it has today. Holden calculates that in order for the largest dinosaurs to function, gravity must have been at least 1/3 (and possibly as low as 1/4) what it is today. He also postulates that gravity increased suddenly at the close of the age of dinosaurs but not to the present value. Lower-than-present gravity continued into the following ages of giant mammals and possibly even to the days when early humans were building giant monuments like Stonehenge.

ELECTRIC TORNADOES. That seems to be approximately what Nick is saying. And I agree that electrical forces seem likely to explain Earth's apparently formerly weaker gravity. I forgot to mention in my paper that Charles Chandler had a couple ways to possibly help explain weaker gravity. In his electric tornado paper he mentioned the fact that large objects are sometimes observed levitating. He showed a picture of a truck that had landed on top of a car during a tornado. He speculated that strong winds can remove enough electrons from an object, or even from people, to cause it or them to levitate. At least I think that's what he was getting at. I posted his paper and part 2 is at https://electricastrophysics.substack.c ... nadoes-67c . Section 33 is called Tornadic Levitation. I'll quote from that now, so you can hear it from the horse's mouth.

These vehicles were picked up after the winds had begun to subside, and once picked up, they hovered for a while before "settling back down." Lateral winds are not capable of such effects. ... In the EMHD model, the tornadic inflow is positively charged, and the surface of the Earth has an induced negative charge. This means that particulate matter from the surface that is getting blown in the wind will be negatively charged. Objects exposed to the tornadic inflow (such as people, cars, etc.) will be sandblasted with this particulate matter, and will therefore develop a net negative charge. The objects will then be attracted by the electric force to the positively charged air around them. Since there is more air above them than below them, the net force will be upward. And if the strongest positive charge in the storm is in the RFD (rear flank downdraft), objects will be subjected to the most powerful uplifting force after the tornado passes.

Earth's surface normally has a negative charge, which extends to any creature or human grounded to the Earth. This helps maintain negative charges on blood, which flows freely when blood cells and blood vessel walls have the same negative charge which repel each other. Positive charge causes blood to stop flowing or to clump. Perhaps the surface charge was stronger before the Younger Dryas and before the Great Flood and perhaps the negative charge on creatures was enough to reduce their weights, so they could grow larger and move more easily.
TITIUS BODE LAW. Charles also explained the Titius-Bode Law that describes the distances between the planets as a result of like charge on the planets. I think he figured they have negative charge. So the same charge repels, while gravity attracts. So the planets are closer together near the Sun where the gravity is strongest and increasingly farther apart with distance from the Sun. He also explained the Tidal Force as an electrical effect.

[allynh]

Are you making fun of them too?

No, of course not. I'm open to all models, as long as you look at the full implications of each.

It's fascinating. So many people respond the same way when I mention the Omphalos hypothesis. I'm working on the basic concept that:

- Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from nature.

Everything comes together when I do that, and those models that are missing obvious key elements fall away.

For variable gravity: Both nick and Lloyd,

Years ago I talked about the obvious problem with that.

- Change the gravity, up or down, and you kill all life on the planet.

The oceans are in balance with the dissolved gases. Those gases are stable under pressure. That pressure is based on the column height of the water and (g) gravity.

You reduce gravity, and those dissolved gases come boiling out of the water. Fish would be killed by the bubbles of dissolved gas in their bloodstream.

On land, the same thing would happen. If you reduce gravity the column of air would expand, reducing the atmospheric pressure.

I live at 7,000 feet elevation. If you reduce gravity by half, I am suddenly at 14,000 feet elevation. Reduce it to a fourth and I am suddenly at 28,000 feet, in the Death Zone.

Be sure to look at the implications of any model.

[nick c]

But Allynh, your example is a case of a sudden or near instantaneous decrease in the felt effect of gravity. But, we are not talking about gravity decreasing, the situation demands that the felt effect of gravity increased over several different eras.
Perhaps (the increase) took days, months, or even years. Looking back from our perspective a change that occurred over the course of a few years or decades would look to be geologically instantaneous.
Anyway, since the change in the felt effect of gravity occurred under planet wide catastrophic conditions it would be expected to be associated with mass extinctions.

[Lloyd]

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WEAKER ANCIENT GRAVITY

AllynH: - Change the gravity, up or down, and you kill all life on the planet.

Please provide references.
Ted Holden's findings seem to be facts. I.e., no land animal over 24,000 pounds can live under present gravity, because muscle can only lift so much weight and blood vessels can only contain so much pressure. Since the large dinosaurs and the largest mammals would have been well over 24,000 pounds if gravity were the same when those animals lived as it is now, it's surely not possible that net effective gravity was the same then as now.
Do you have contradictory info?
And weren't you claiming initially here that gravity actually was weaker, because Earth was smaller? Aren't you contradicting yourself?

DEGASSING & LITHIFICATION
Mike Fischer's NewGeology.US site says Earth's atmosphere was 2 or 3 times denser before the Great Flood and that as it lost pressure during the Flood CO2 in the oceans combined with calcium and oxygen to form much of the limestone and lime cement that lithified many rock strata.

[galaxy12]

295854

WEAKER ANCIENT GRAVITY

AllynH: - Change the gravity, up or down, and you kill all life on the planet.

Please provide references.
Ted Holden's findings seem to be facts. I.e., no land animal over 24,000 pounds can live under present gravity, because muscle can only lift so much weight and blood vessels can only contain so much pressure. Since the large dinosaurs and the largest mammals would have been well over 24,000 pounds if gravity were the same when those animals lived as it is now, it's surely not possible that net effective gravity was the same then as now.
Do you have contradictory info?
And weren't you claiming initially here that gravity actually was weaker, because Earth was smaller? Aren't you contradicting yourself?

DEGASSING & LITHIFICATION
Mike Fischer's NewGeology.US site says Earth's atmosphere was 2 or 3 times denser before the Great Flood and that as it lost pressure during the Flood CO2 in the oceans combined with calcium and oxygen to form much of the limestone and lime cement that lithified many rock strata.

There seem to be 4 possible explanations that people often propose to explain the inability of dinosaurs to live under our current gravity:

1. The earth was much smaller in the past with less gravitational attraction, allowing large animals with relatively smaller skeletons to survive. This is the "expanding earth" theory.
2. The earth's atmosphere was much larger and therefore denser near the surface, providing buoyancy to large animals and helping to support their weight, similar to being in water or other liquid.
3. The gravitational "constant" was much lower in the past in our galaxy, allowing large animals to survive.
4. An incorrect model of gravity exists and some or all of "gravitational attraction" is due to the magnetic or electrostatic force which has varied due to electrical changes in our planet or galaxy.

This is not my area of expertise. Does anyone have evidence that points us to the correct model?

[allynh]

There is an entire thread that discusses all this stuff, that has existed for over a decade

Are the planets growing?
https://thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/php ... c.php?t=12

Everything that you guys need to know is there.

Thanks for playing.

[Lloyd]

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DINOSAURS & TENSEGRITY V. GRAVITY

Galaxy12 said: There seem to be 4 possible explanations that people often propose to explain the inability of dinosaurs to live under our current gravity: ...

I was curious how much of our first forum 1.0 was recovered after it had been hacked and taken down in early 2008. I did a search on "Recovered", because the threads that were recovered had that word in the titles. I found that there are a little over 100 pages of them with 15 posts per page, so quite a bit was recovered. A few of our members worked a couple weeks or so recovering those threads. I sampled a few posts from the first few pages that were recovered. I happened to see a post by Junglelord who discussed Tensegrity in which he stated that tensegrity is what made it possible for large dinosaurs to get so large and to reach their heads so high. I think Junglelord's real name was Dean Ward. He was one of our first members to die and there was a thread about him. He was well-liked and missed. That was in 2010, when the forum was just over 2 years old.

I did a little digging into tensegrity already now, but I need to do some more. It does seem that tensegrity might explain the dinosaurs etc, but I haven't found math proof yet. But there is at least one logical doubt. Why are there no longer any land animals larger than 24,000 pounds? Is there too little vegetation? Elephants require a lot of it, along with a lot of water, to survive. What about hippos? They're pretty big. Looks like the biggest is about 10,000 pounds, only half the size of the biggest elephants. They need 150 pounds of vegetation each day. Elephants need 300 pounds a day. Most dinosaurs were apparently killed off during the Great Flood of c. 3,300 BC. Most large land mammals were killed off by the Ice Age and the Younger Dryas impacts a few centuries later. Before those cataclysms, it appears that there was ideal climate everywhere on land and there was abundant vegetation for large creatures as well as small ones. The atmosphere was likely thicker and that may have helped buoyancy a little, but the main reason land animals seldom get over 10,000 pounds now seems to be climate and maybe human domination of the biosphere. And there's still a good chance that electrical buoyancy may have been significant in ancient times too.

Hopefully, I'll find some tensegrity calculations to help prove whether the largest dinosaurs would be able to live in today's gravity.

[Aardwolf]

Hopefully, I'll find some tensegrity calculations to help prove whether the largest dinosaurs would be able to live in today's gravity.

Even if you could, it wouldn't solve the problems regarding Quetzalcoatlus, Meganeura, Argentavis etc. Only reduced gravity can solve those (and all other mega sized animal) problems.

[Lloyd]

Aardwolf, you're sounding kind of omniscient.

[nick c]

Lloyd,
Aardwolf is correct, it goes well beyond just the inability of sauropods (and their footprints indicate they were land animals) to walk on the Earth today.

Muscle strength depends on the cross section of the muscle. if muscle size is doubled, strength is squared but weight increases by the cube. Thus the animal's size is limited by diminishing returns to scale. The biggest sauropod was about 70 tons and today it is the elephant and the maximum weight is around 12 tons.

The reason that there are no land animals of that size today is that they could not function and would collapse under their own weight. If that were not so, then there would be creatures filling the ecological niches of sauropods, pterosaurs, and so on. Certainly there are large creatures in the ocean, whales, whose body weight is supported by water. A large beached whale dies as it is crushed by its own weight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okMOfYcbdI8

[nick c]

I did a little digging into tensegrity already now, but I need to do some more. It does seem that tensegrity might explain the dinosaurs etc, but I haven't found math proof yet.

The large animals of the past were made of bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. Other than the scale, the anatomical make up, was not very much different than the animals of today.
When applied to animals, tensegrity (biotensegrity) is shown to be a factor in the structure of animals of today....see Wiki entry for "Tensegrity":

Donald E. Ingber has developed a theory of tensegrity to describe numerous phenomena observed in molecular biology.[15] For instance, the expressed shapes of cells, whether it be their reactions to applied pressure, interactions with substrates, etc., all can be mathematically modelled by representing the cell's cytoskeleton as a tensegrity. Furthermore, geometric patterns found throughout nature (the helix of DNA, the geodesic dome of a volvox, Buckminsterfullerene, and more) may also be understood based on applying the principles of tensegrity to the spontaneous self-assembly of compounds, proteins,[16] and even organs. This view is supported by how the tension-compression interactions of tensegrity minimize material needed to maintain stability and achieve structural resiliency, although the comparison with inert materials within a biological framework has no widely accepted premise within physiological science.[17] Therefore, natural selection pressures would likely favor biological systems organized in a tensegrity manner.

So, all of the above demonstrates the relevance of tensegrity to the biosphere of today. Therefore, tensegrity cannot be used as an explanation for anomalous sizes of extinct animals, since the animals of today display tensegrity in their structures. So why was the tensegrity of the past so different than that of today? JL's argument answers nothing and we are back to square one. The tensegrity argument is flawed and leaves the question of the size anomaly unanswered.

[Lloyd]

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I'm questioning Ted Holden's conclusion that the heaviest land animal possible would be 20,000 or 24,000 pounds. He may be right, but I'm allowed to question such claims anyway. I think he said the largest dinosaur would have weighed 180,000 pounds, but online somewhere it said the largest weighed about 70,000 or 80,000 pounds, if I remember right. - - Ted's explanation of the giraffe's blood pressure danger doesn't seem to have taken tensegrity into account. I'm not ignoring Ted's claims, or yours, but I also don't want to ignore tensegrity. Some sites I quoted above claim that tensegrity explains how dinosaurs could have gotten so large, so I'd like to see if they have proof of that, or if they're just making assumptions.

PS, Nick, this thread is said to have gotten almost 2800 views since July 18. Do you have info on whether that includes bots? It would be great to get that many views from people who are interested in the topic, but it would just be annoying if many of the views are by bots or anything like that.

[nick c]

PS, Nick, this thread is said to have gotten almost 2800 views since July 18. Do you have info on whether that includes bots? It would be great to get that many views from people who are interested in the topic, but it would just be annoying if many of the views are by bots or anything like that.

I don't know how the forum software arrives at that figure, but I would assume that it has no way of distinguishing whether a view is from a bot or from a human interested in reading the thread. So those numbers are good, but still need to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.