Meteoritic dust is accumulating on Earth so fast that, after 4 billion years (at today’s low and diminishing rate), the equivalent of more than 16 feet of this dust should have accumulated. Because this dust is high in nickel, Earth’s crust should have abundant nickel. No such concentration has been found on land or in the oceans. Therefore, Earth appears to be young (a).
a. Steveson, pp. 23-25.
You remind me a lot of a creationist, Paul Ekdahl, back in the day on CompuServe. Like you, he would just copy creationists verbatim,
including footnote references. Though in his case, since that was before public access to the Internet, he would type several pages out of creationist books and that was all he would post.
And, he copied them so slavishly that he would include the footnote references, but not the footnotes themselves. On a couple occasions, I was able to goad him into writing something himself, which was invariable an attempt to convert me to his own particular heresy, which he delusionally believed he could accomplish by having previously posted pages of crap claims.
My first question(s) to you is/are:
1. Who the hell is Steveson? Why should what he wrote (assuming that he had written what was presented; with creationists, one can never assume such things) be considered authoritative?
2. What did he write? Ie, what book or article or whatever is being quoted by that footnote? Do
you know?
3. What did he write? Ie, what actual statements did he make in that book/article/whatever?
A common creationist source of meteoric dust amounts, especially when nickel is mentioned, is a Feb 1960
Scientific American article, "Cosmic Spherules and Meteoritic Dust", by Hans Pettersson. That article reports his findings from an experiment in which he collected samples of dust raining down on a mountain top in Hawaii and, knowing the relative abundance of nickel in meteors, used those samples to try to estimate the amount of meteoric dust falling to earth. He describes his reason for picking Hawaii as being that he wanted to prevent contamination of the samples by industrial pollution. He decribes core samples taken from the Mediterranean sea floor and that they showed a very high amount of nickel spherules over the previous 150 years due to industrial pollution. He figured that Hawaii would be far enough from major industry to be affected. What he didn't know at the time was the extent to which high altitude winds blow dust and particles over global distances; much of the nickel that he detected was indeed pollution from the heavy industry in East Asia. Anyway, still not knowing that, he came up with a maximum value and a much lower reasonable value which he prefered. Of course, the creationists (eg, Henry Morris) grabbed that maximum value and went running with it.
Please also note that this and most other sources creationists use for their meteor dust and moon dust claims used indirect methods of measurement that predate our presence in space.
At a 1985 debate I attended, Morris' response to his opponent's criticism of using outdated sources was to mention a "1976" NASA document, "written well into the space age", which showed with direct measurements that the moon should be covered with a layer of dust 284 feet thick if it were really 4 billion years old.
My page detailing my research into this claim is at
No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/moondust.html. I wrote to Dr. Henry Morris at the ICR for details about that claim and Dr. Duane Gish, his partner at the debate, responded with a xerox'd copy of a letter written by Harold Slusher, the originator of the claim -- that letter is reprinted at
No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/slusher.html.
Then I found that "1976" NASA document,
Meteor Orbits and Dust, Smithsonian Contributions to Astrophysics. Volume II, in the university library. It was actually printed in
1967, the papers were presented at a conference in August
1965, it was Volume
Eleven (11, not II), and Slusher had misrepresented what it had said. Actually, the document had not made the 284-foot claim, but rather Slusher had constructed a formula for calculating the amount of dust that would have accumulated in a given amount of time and for converting that to a layer thickness, and then he took values from the document and plugged them into his formula. Now, the figures were for the earth, so he made that calculation and then converted it over for the moon. His formula contained two extraneous factors:
- a 10,000 "factor from observation and theory for gravitational enhancement of particles sink for the Earth". However, the document clearly states that that is a maximum value for particles much smaller than what he was working with; for that size particle, this factor was
unity (a mathematical and physics term meaning "one"; ie, it has no effect whatsoever -- multiplying by one is like adding zero)
- a factor of 100 that he through in thus: "the measured flux average frequently showed increase by a factor of 170 for extended periods of time (so this factor is used to estimate changes in the flux)". My response to this is on my page at
No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/moondust2.html:
quote:
On {the document page that Slusher cites}, it says: "The flux of small dust particles observed in the vicinity of the earth sometimes undergoes large systematic variations with time. On one occasion, the flux rose by a factor of 170 above the average value. The measured flux also shows variations by a factor of 10 within intervals of a few hours' duration."
First, as you can see, Slusher did not accurately quote his source. One occasion hardly qualifies as "frequently". Nor, when you are talking about billions of years, would a few hours qualify as "extended periods of time". Also, his factor of 100 is an entire order of magnitude greater than the factor of increase experienced in the "extended periods of time" that he cites. But this is not the main problem I have with this factor.
Second, Slusher's formula applies the AVERAGE flux over an extended period of time, 4.5 billion years. Certainly we could expect the flux to increase at times, but we would also expect a proportionate DECREASE balancing out the increase, otherwise the average would be higher. When one uses an average rate over an extended period of time to obtain an overall value, one does not normally use excursions from the average. Excursions would be of more interest in statistical analysis and in constructing best-case and worst-case studies, none of which Slusher was attempting to do. Therefore, I consider this additional factor of 100 not to be applicable and to have inflated his results by that amount.
Thus Slusher inflated his results for the earth by one million and for moon by 10,000. When corrected, the layer of meteoric dust we should expect for the moon would be about 1/3 inch thick.
Now, if we look at where Dr. Morris had used that claim in his book,
Scientific Creationism, he cites the NASA document as his source, even though it is obvious that he had never seen that document (since just looking at the front cover would be enough to indicate that it was from a conference in 1965 -- duh? -- and that it was Volume 11, not II). It is also rather obvious that Slusher hadn't even researched from that document, but rather had apparently relied on another unidentified creationist source -- Slusher is infamous for ignoring questions about his claims. This problem of creationists citing sources while actually researching from other creationists is typical.
And we see such things all the time in PRATTs ("Points Refuted a Thousand Times"). Even though they were created decades ago and first refuted decades ago, they continue to surface with each new batch of creationist suckers. From that my same page give above (
No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/moondust2.html):
quote:
I haven't gotten around yet to writing the epilogue on this affair. A few years later, a fundamentalist friend became curious about all this, so he wrote to the ICR asking about meteor dust on the moon. A graduate student answered the letter, saying that the ICR had long since dropped that claim, because there are too many unknowns to come up with anything definite, and quoted out of H. Morris' book/attack on Davis Young, "Science, Scripture, and the Young Earth" (1989, 95 pp.), that the moon-dust claims are unreliable and are no longer used because of the difficulty in getting a consistent value for the rate of meteoric dust infall. Okay, it looks like the ICR does occasionally correct itself, after all.
But now, a decade after the ICR said that they had washed their hands of the moon-dust claim, their books still propagage it. Morris' "Scientific Creationism" is still sold in bookstores and directly from the ICR with the admittedly bogus moon-dust claims still in it, as are several other creationist books (eg, Ackermann's "It's a Young Earth After All", which bases an entire chapter solely on Slusher's bogus NASA claim). You can walk into just about any Christian bookstore that sells ICR books, pick one up, and read in their ubiquitous age-of-the-earth "evidences" list that the accumulation of moon dust shows the earth to be about 10,000 years old and references Morris' "Scientific Creationism."
I can't really say whether the ICR is deliberately continuing to make claims that it has admitted to be false, or it is just being sloppy. Either way, the effect is the same.
The moon-dust argument is still very popular among creationists. Even though the ICR has gone through the motions of trying to distance themselves from it after Slusher's claim blew up in their faces, their publications still carry that claim and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they continue to use it in their debates. A search through web-space shows that the moon dust claim continues to circulate widely among creationists and the literature presents it to newly arrived creationists as if it were still the current doctrine.
This illustrates the principal strength of creation science: even though its claims have been refuted, every few years there comes along a new generation of creationists who are not aware of what had gone before them and who accept without question the same old false claims that have already been refuted many times before -- verily, a sucker is born every minute.
Edited by dwise1, : epilogue
{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber,
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)
Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.(Sherlock Holmes in
The Hound of the Baskervilles)
Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield,
Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)
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