[SFW] Does matter matter? See detais.

TLDR. Yes, it matters. OK.

@trailsillustrated Click over to the NSFW version here. It’s lot too long and not too short. It’s just right.

What always gives me pause is that we are made of dust from supernovae.

“All go to one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.”
Just sayin. :)

@Rarebear Being stardust jazzes me no end.

@nofurbelowsbatgirl It is interesting that a primitive tribe of desert nomads with no understanding of the actual origins got that much right. It would be utterly astounding if it were not for the fact that many other creation myths got the same part right, and all of them got nearly everything else wildly wrong.

@ETpro As my favorite Curator of Meteorites at the Vatican Observatory, Brother Guy Consolmagno puts it:

“My particular interest is actually the physical fabric of the meteorite. Our understanding of the origin of the solar system involves the solar nebula, condensation of a lot of, essentially, dust. And we can picture how you go from tiny grains of dust to maybe kilometer-sized balls of dust. But that’s not what we see in our museums. What we see are rocks. Well-compressed, well-lithified rocks. When and where did that happen? How did that happen?”

That’s an excellent question and one we are still working to fully understand. Bear in mind that our best current knowledge shows that protosolar nebula form as very, very hot, energetic collections of molecular hydrogen and other elements in GMCs (giant molecular clouds) of highly energized particles. In their early phase much of the material of these are so energized that they exist as plasmas. Bear in mind that the “we are star dust” statement isn’t merely poetry. Our solar system and all that is in it is formed from the ejecta of massive stars that supernovaed. The energy released by a supernova is is set free over a very brief space of time, and yet equals the energy our sun will emit in its 12 billion years of shining. Large supernovas eject most of the material of the star, and that material travels outward at a speed of 30,000 km/s.

So the dust we are talking about is nothing remotely like the dust bunnies that collect under our furniture when we slack off on household chores. It is seething hot plasma and in the cooling regions molecules then crystals. These collide due to their mass attraction and increasingly clump. The bigger a clump, the greater its mass, and they gravity. And the more material it pulls into itself.

When the nucleus of Earth first formed, it was magma from its core to its surface. What water there was here was gaseous and contained in its atmosphere. Objects from the size of busses to freight trains routinely collided with the nucleus at speeds of 20,000 to 40,000 MPH or more. That is an enormous addition of kinetic energy which adds heat.

The early and late bombardments brought much more water, and the heat of vaporization turning those icy objects into steam helped cool the molten surface till eventually water could exist on the earth’s surface in liquid form. Read more here.

The outer gas giant planets form under a somewhat different process, and that accounts for how they differ so substantially from the inner planets having rocky or nickel iron cores. Anyway, fascinating stuff, and we have so much more to learn.

This is personally why I like Vatican Astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno I find the message he gives captivating

@nofurbelowsbatgirl Fascinating link. Thanks.

I hope I can say this without sounding overly contentious. One thing the article says early on highlights why I find it so difficult to mix science and religion. The interviewer states, “Brother Consolmagno is steeped in scientific theory, but uses God to account for what can’t be accounted for through science, as a glue that holds together the equations of the universe.”

That is exactly what not only Abrahamic religions have been doing since Abraham himself was around 3,800 years ago. Religion back then had God responsible for holding up the bowl that the flat dish of earth floated in, keeping the vast oceans that were the multiple domes of heaven in place, moving the Sun, moon and planets through those domes, causing lightning, wind, rain. Basically, everything those primitive wandering desert tribes could not explain, they dismissed as the providence of God.

The same is true of all the other religions of the world. There have been at least 3,000 creator gods worshiped by humans throughout known history, and likely many, many more if we were able to look into beliefs before the development of writing back in prehistoric times. Every one of them we have studied used God to explain those things they could not explain. All that differs is which God they claimed was responsible, Odin, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, Mbombo, Atun, Coatlicue, Marduk… Nobody any longer believes these deities are responsible for the things we can’t explain. But those dedicated to belief in Yahweh, Brahma, and a few scattered other creator deities in vogue in remote corners of the world still seek to answer that which they can’t explain by assigning it all to a deity which they would find even harder to explain, and saying they have thus explained it.

@ETpro I understand what you are getting at and Brother Guy actually gives a good answer on another site…this is the question and the answer:

Q: How do you deal with scientists who say that trying to build a bridge between science and God is pointless because there is no experiment that can prove or disprove God — or the existence of any purpose to the universe?
A: In one sense, they’re absolutely right. Science does not prove or disprove God, and the whole scientific enterprise is a game where one of the rules is you can’t invoke a miracle to explain something you don’t understand — that’s cheating.
The reason God enters into our science is not because we’re invoking God to explain the things we don’t explain — that’s a very bad idea of God. Nor is it that we’re trying to use science to prove or disprove a God because that would make science bigger and stronger and more powerful than God.
It’s much more subtle than that. The very reason we’re interested in doing the science in the first place comes out of our human nature a curiosity to know, a curiosity to know the truth.
But even deeper than that, it comes out of a belief that this physical universe has laws that can be discovered and is fundamentally good and it’s fundamentally worth spending our lives.
It’s trying to understand — not to get rich, not to make better Teflon — but for us to just have the pleasure of knowing how the universe works.

Does that make sense to you @ETpro? It makes sense to me. I suppose that is the catch 22 because we have to see the miracle of God first before science could even attempt to then try to grasp and understand the laws and physics of such a happening.

@nofurbelowsbatgirl That’s a much more satisfying statement of principle, however it does not square with that he said in the beginning of the previously linked article, or with what religion actually does.

Back when the wandering desert nomads first concocted the religion, God (or demons fighting him) explained sickness, natural disasters, crop failures. God explained absolutely everything they couldn’t explain—which was pretty close to everything. One by one, as we came to understand gravity, germ theory, climatology, tectonic plate movement and so forth, God was no longer needed to explain those things.

Christians, Jews and Muslims still assign things they cannot yet understand to the action of Yahweh, or El. They cannot understand what caused the big bang, so God did it. Likewise, abiogenesis confounds many, so God is said to be responsible for that. In the same way, ancient Greeks said Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo, etc. were responsible for the while host of things their understanding of nature had not yet explained. Who still believes Poseidon is the cause of tidal waves? We’re pretty much all atheists when it comes to a legion of gods once thought to control all things not understood by man.

It is just as rational to say ”[W]e have to see the miracle of Zeus, Odin, Marduk or Baal first before science could even attempt to then try to grasp and understand the laws and physics of such a happening.” as it is to make that same claim about El.

@ETpro I understand what you are getting at and well thats the point I suppose. Whether believing in God or the big bang we all need something to hold onto regardless of truth or rationality. It is why we have science. Maybe God is science. In today’s time God is whomever He chooses to be or He can be whomever you choose. Maybe there is more to it than what we think there is or could possibly ever imagine there is, just like the universe. It’s a big universe out there and ironically if the big bang happened happened we were to be the only ones out here to get a planet that is perfect for habitation which still sounds just as irrational to me and we are the only ones who will and do screw it up. There is nothing weird about that.

Hold that thought till you can spare 48 minutes to watch this fascinating video. It gets right at the heart of what we’re talking about. It is indeed fascinating that we have minds capable, seemingly driven, to formulate such interesting and difficult to answer questions.

@ETpro Thanks. :)