Im not talking about the end of the sun, but it burns fuel at a near constant rate. Also, according to my "Handy Space Answer Book" the sun will eventually collapse into a dwarf star.

 

Yes it will collapse into a white dwarf, once Helium burning stops. When it becomes a White Dwarf our Sun will basically be dead and slowly cool down for eternity. The Sun is not dense enough to support the next thermonuclear reaction which is Carbon burning. Large stars can also go through Oxygen and Silicon burning. When they die, they end in a Supernova, the largest stars die and form Black Holes.

What I am saying is that it never was the size you are saying in the form we know it today, ie it did not have any thermonuclear reactions occurring at the time. It was a cloud of material, then through time, gathered and went through various stages (nebula to globule to protostar) and formed the Sun. When the "Sun" was large enough to be "near" the planets, it was in a less dense state and did not have the gravitational pull to change the paths of other objects. Through time, it got denser and denser, as this happened it's gravational pull increased (and the thremonuclear reations stated to happen). That is why the orbits would not have changed. BTW the planets probably didn't exist either.

 

I'm confused, when do you think the sun first expeiranced fusion?

 

A star is born once these reactions begin, so the Sun is 4.5 - 5 billion years old like you say, but it was about the same size as it is today. The Sun is burning Hydrogen, but creating Helium. When all the Hydrogen is depleted, the core will start to shrink under the Sun's weight. At a certain point in time the pressure around the core, where there still is Hydrogen will be enough to ignite it, this is called Shell Hydrogen burning. The Sun will actually start to expand very slowly now. But the core is still contracting. When Helium burning begins, the core will no longer contract and the Sun will expand very quickly to these double barreled thermonuclear reactions. As it expands the atoms at the leading edges will start to cool and the Sun will start to look red, this is where we get the name Red Giant.

Burning of Helium will produce Carbon and Oxygen, so the core it transformed from Helium to Carbon/Oxygen. But the Sun's mass is not enough to heat up the core to a point where this will ignite. Once all the Helium is used up the Sun's atmosphere will be expelled into space and the hot core will be left over...the Sun is now a White Dwarf.

Here is what our Sun will eventually look like.


Nice to look at, but we would have been toasted long ago.

My point is that your theory of the Sun being as large as the orbit of Mars and slowly burning through fuel and shrinking is not correct. This makes your theory of the orbits not changing because of a shrinking Sun gravitational pull also incorrect.

Interestingly enough, Black Holes have the largest gravitational pull and are extremely small. All the mass of a giant star is basically squeezed into a single point with infinite gravity. It is called a Black Hole because it's pull is so great that not even light can escape it.

Please don't take this the wrong way. I think that this is one best threads on this site (although it's non-s2k related!) and I am enjoying discussing this with you.

 

Wow, this is turning into a really great thread, despite my participation!

OK, a couple of things and I have to get on the road. I wasn't so much positing a criticism of some sort of evolutionary process so much as I was positing a criticism of spontaneous generation of living organisms - which happened to be the result, in my mind, of an unfathomably huge number of favorable conditions that had to be in place in order for the life to just "appear." As I said, I think it takes greater faith (something that which is unprovable by a scientific method) to believe that is how life came about than it does to believe that it was created by a creator. It's a numbers thing to me...and my example with the wrist watch, to me at least, demonstrates that...if the chances are remote, at best, for the watch coming back together, what are the chances that life, all this tremendous complexity and specialization of all that surrounds us also would just appear, then evolve and become what it is today...? Would that not seem to be even MORE remote? Me thinks so...

As for evolution, I didn't really get a good answer yet from my question about what is next on the evolutionary path for humans? Do we grow wings next? Do we evolve gills? I mean, since this process is unending, what happens to us next? Of course you can cite the so-called vestigial organs, like the tailbone or wisdom teeth...but it is hard to make the case, IMO, that we once had tails and that the tailbone is a leftover from that. If we did have tails (which is a preposterous notion to me), why did we evolve them off? And would this be considered an adaptation or a evolution? Because I think I know what the evolutionist will say in response to my question.

But if evolution is basically an unguided process and these things that creatures evolve would then have to be random...as there, according to the "absolutist" scientist, is no oversight (no God or god or deity) to the processes to guide this evolutionary process. But I'm not criticizing evolution, I just have a hard time buying it...and moreover, believing in evolution as a valid process requires leaps of faith even if you don't realize or admit it. Carbon dating, a method often cited by science, is one of the most flawed means to determine how old something is that there is, just an example...

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE science and always did well in it in school. And my favorite category in Trivial Pursuit is green, Science and Nature. But I am very skeptical and I question everything there is...it may not hold up to one's hard core scientific scrutiny, but science isn't as absolute as many people think it is...at least in my world, it isn't.

But what a great discussion...everything from evolution to the stars. Cool...! I am an amateur astronomer and am a great admirer of the stars and planets and nebulae, etc.

Well, I gotta get on the road to Sacramento...

I don't think I'll have computer access this weekend, but we'll see...I'll be looking forward to see how this thread "evolves" (now THERE'S a valid occurence of evolution! )

 

Okay, I am going to take a visual crack at this. I am going to have to split this over two posts...

1 - We will start a the Earth. The Earth is about 13k km wide, place it in the centre of a cube. Your view would look like this:



2 - Take a step back and enlarge your cube by 100x. The width of the cube is now about 1.5M km. It would take light travelling at 300,000,000 m/s (about 186,300 miles per second...almost as fast as by Black S2000 when I get it ) about 5 seconds to cross. Your view would look like this:



3 - Step back again and enlarge your cube by 100x. The width of the cube is now 150M km or 1 astronomical unit (au). It would take light 8.5 minutes to travel across it. Your view would now include Mars and Mercury. It would look something like this:



4 - Step back, increase cube by 100x, size is now 100 au and it would take light about 14 hours to cross. You can now see our entire Solar System. It would look like this:



5 - Step back, increase cube by 100x. Your cube is now 10,000 au and it would take light about 58 days to cross. Our Solar System is now all alone in your box. Your view would be something like this:



6 - Step back again, increase cube by 100x. Your cube in now 1M au, it would take light 16 years to cross your cube so you can also say that your cube is 16 light years wide. Your view would just now start to include other stars, it would look something like this:



Continued next post...

 

...continued from previous post.

7 - Step back again, increase cube by 100x. Your cube is now 1,600 light years across. The volume of your cubic is a whoping 4 billion cubic light years! The estimated number of stars in your cube is 2 million. Only now do you start to see the arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Your view would look something like this (okay this is where my drawing skills end, so I am going to start cheating and using pics that I modify to show my meaning, they are by no means the correct star patterns, I am just adding major "landmarks" (if you can call it that) to assist in the illustration):




8 - Step back again, increase cube by 100x. Your cube is now 160,000 light years across, total volume 4,000 trillion cubic light years! Estimated number of stars - 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000). Only now would our entire galaxy come into view. It's estimated diameter is 100,000 light years! Your view would be something like this (again, I cheat, this is not the Milky Way just a similar galaxy):



9 - Step back, increase cube by 100x. Your cube is now 16M light years wide, only now do you start to see any other galaxies. It is estimated that there would be only 6 major galaxies and about 100 minor and dwarf galaxies in your cube. Estimated number of stars in your cube 10 Trillion. Your view would be something like this (cheating again):



10 - Step back, increase cube by 100x. Your cube is now 1.6B light years across. Estimated number of galaxies in your cube is several million, estimated number of stars is several thousand trillion (gulp). Your view would be something like this (cheating again):



11 - Take one final step back, the width of your cube is now greater than the size of the known universe. Estimated number of galaxies is 100 billion, number of stars at least 1 billion trillion. Each one of these stars could have planets, our star has 9, possibly 10 (Charon, new discovery). Your view would be something like this (turn off cheat mode):



I think I just showed that the universe is unfathomably large.

My whole point is with all these stars and planets, only 1 has life so far. Have we checked them all...we haven't even found them all! But if you believe in statistics...there has to be another planet like ours out there somewhere. Will it have life, I don't know but the conditions on this planet can support life. So why would the creator pick this particular planet and not a similar one out there somewhere?

Why do I use the example of space...because I believe that space and life are tied very closely together. In my previous posts, I spoke about how stars die. When we are born, a creator does not create us from nothing, we are concieved and we grow in the womb etc, etc...well how do we grow? We grow by eating things that grow on the Earth or by eating other things that eat things that grow on the Earth. So if the Earth is made up of cosmic material and we eat (directly or indirectly) things that grow from the Earth, we are made up of star dust. After all we are 90% water (Hydrogen and Oxygen) and Carbon based. All three of these are definitely produced in stars.

I believe in both, but do not know the mix. I believe in the big bang...but what started it, the creator? I don't know. But if we look at all the faiths on only our planet and the differences in them, how could 1 creator have done this. Imagine if we find life on another planet and it was intelligent, what would they say is the creator?
I lean more towards the big bang/evolution path, but I have no idea what started it...again a creator? I don't know. On the last diagram the red circle is when the big bang happen or creation. We are in the middle and are looking into space. As we look further into space we are also looking back in time. The yellow box is recent space. At the very edges are things called Quasars, these are things that are very, very, very far away, thus are very, very, very old (when the light they produce hit our eyes, that light has been travelling for billions of years) so they give us the closest glimpse at what the universe was like just before the big bang, creation. Now if only someone could figure out what/who flicked the switch to get everything started.

As for your wrist watch example, if we knew how many parts where in the watch, someone with a math background could probably come back and say that there is a 1 in something chance of you shaking the jar and the watch being re-assembled correctly. But statistically it could happen...I think someone already mentioned that on this thread.

I don't think anyone would know the answer to this, but my guess would be that we would just adapt to something in our environment. For example, maybe we would become "immune" to the effects of the Sun's radition pouring in through the freaking hole in the ozone we created. I seem to remember something about cockroaches developing immunity to the chemicals we were using on them to kill them...that could be an example of evolution.

Sorry for the long post.

 

I'm enjoying this thread alot but don't have time to formulate a proper response to Matrix right now. However, just a nit to pick, you say we might evolve a defense mechanism against solar radiation. I believe both Greg Stevens and I would call that adaptation. For instance (recalling this off the top of my head) in England there were a group of moth's who were a white-ish hue which helped them blend in with the white trees of the area. However after soot producing factories were put in the area the tree's were stained black and the moths got eaten by birds wholesale. Soon only the darker moths were surviving and now many of the moths in the area are dark black. Some scientists claimed this was an example of evolution when really the moth's just adapted to the enviroment. They were still moths, just changing to adjust to the enviroment, but at the heart of things still moths. Earlier Krazik claimed that different breeds of dogs were a result of evolution and cross-breeding. To me this is a silly idea, all dog's are just that, dogs. That's like suggesting that black people are a different species than chinese people because they have darker skin and are in general taller and have a different kind of hair. Humans are humans, dogs are dogs, moths are moths.

 

Timid: Yup

And Chickens are Birds. So the first black moth came from the eggs of a white one.

 

Timid, I'm not really up on the technicalities of what is adaption vs. what is evolution but I can certainly describe to you what I considered occurred in the instance of the moths.

Most species will "throw" an occasional variation to the norm - in the case of humans we occasionally see albino births, for example. This occurs as a result of one or more parents passing on a "mutant" recessive gene which can skip generations and appear in only a small percentage of all offspring.

Basically the same occurs with the moths. A white moth lays a whole pile of eggs (don't ask me how many eggs a moth can lay - I have no idea) and a small percentage are black.

Now interestingly enough, the black ones are not only more likely to lay other black eggs (i.e. a higher percentage of the black moths will carry the black gene in their reproductive organs) but also, because they are more likely to survive, they are more likely to mate with another black moth (than with a white moth). So now we have two black parents and the chance of them producing black moths is increased even further.

This goes on for a couple of generations and lo and behold you now have a predominantly black population.

At the end of the day I would describe this as a fairly simple example of evolution as the moths evolved over a fairly short time to become a predominantly black subspecies. I can understand your point though when you describe this as adapation as the moths did not change into butterflies for example. However, over a much greater period of time these sort of changes could occur where mutant 2 wing moths were able to survive better in a particular environment.

Does that help?