It is a little known fact that scientists who argue that the paleontological record of life is hundreds of millions of years old, when confronted with astrophysical facts, must eventually rely heavily on the hypothesis of finely tuned, large scale global warming. The problem is known as the Faith Young Sun Paradox. A few claim they have solved the paradox, but many remain skeptical of the solutions. But one fact remains, it is an acknowledged scientific paradox. And beyond this paradox, the question of Solar System evolution on the whole has some theological implications.
Astrophysicists concluded that when the sun was young, it was not as bright as it is now. As the sun ages it creates more and more heat, eventually incinerating the Earth before the sun eventually burns out. This is due to the change in products and reactants in the nuclear fusion process that powers the sun. This nuclear evolution of the sun will drive the evolution of the solar system, unless Jesus returns…
As a brief aside, my favorite agnostic/atheist philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell, made this observation that mentioned the evolution of the solar system:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief…all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
Ironically Russell’s words inspired my re-acceptance of Christianity after I nearly left the faith in 2001-2003. There seemed little ultimate personal benefit over infinite timescales if there were no God. If I were to find personal benefit on infinite timescales, it would have to be something God himself provided, and thus from that time forward I sought to find evidence to support creation, Noah’s flood, and the historicity of the gospels.
To that end, any anomaly that challenges evolutionary theory caught my attention. One of them was the Faith Young Sun Paradox.
The faint young Sun paradox describes the apparent contradiction between observations of liquid water early in Earth’s history and the astrophysical expectation that the Sun’s output would be only 70 percent as intense during that epoch as it is during the modern epoch. The issue was raised by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Explanations of this paradox have taken into account greenhouse effects, astrophysical influences, or a combination of the two.
The unresolved question is how a climate suitable for life was maintained on Earth over the long timescale despite the variable solar output and wide range of terrestrial conditions.[2]
If the Earth were an ice ball, there would be no Cambrian explosion. If the Earth were an ice ball, the shiny white ice ball Earth would likely reflect sunlight back into space and keep it an ice ball to this day. To solve the problem of how the Earth did not remain frozen during the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian, advocates of the billion-year-old fossil record invoke global warming!
Not only are there serious empirical and theoretical problems to solve the Faint Young Sun Paradox, but even assuming there is a solution to the paradox through global warming, it would be nothing short of miraculous.
The sun’s heat output is constantly increasing over time, and the necessary greenhouse effect would have to be finely tuned to spontaneously diminish itself to keep the Earth from incinerating as the sun got hotter. So this glorious global warming must walk a tight rope of fine tuning with no intelligent direction to prevent the Earth from either turning into an ice ball or becoming an incinerator.
Emeritus professor of Astronomy, University North Carolina, Danny Faulkner:
For instance, the current makeup of Earth’s atmosphere is in a non-equilibrium state that is maintained by the widespread diversity of life. There is no evolutionary imperative that this be the case: it is just the way it is. Thus the incredibly unlikely origin and evolution of life had to be accompanied by the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere in concert with the Sun. One could call this the Goldilocks syndrome, an obvious comparison to the children’s tale of the three bears.
….
The physical principles that cause the early faint Sun paradox are well established, so astrophysicists are confident that the effect is real. Consequently, evolutionists have a choice of two explanations as to how Earth has maintained nearly constant temperature in spite of a steadily increasing influx of energy. In the first alternative, one can believe that through undirected change, the atmosphere has evolved to counteract heating. At best this means that the atmosphere has evolved through a series of states of unstable equilibrium or even non-equilibrium. Individual living organisms do something akin to this, driven by complex instructions encoded into DNA. Death is a process in which the complex chemical reactions of life ceases and cells rapidly approach chemical equilibrium. Short of some guiding intelligence or design, a similar process for the atmosphere seems incredibly improbable. Any sort of symbioses or true feedback with the Sun is entirely out of the question. On the other hand, one can believe that some sort of life force has directed the atmosphere’s evolution through this ordeal. Most find the teleological or spiritual implications of this unpalatable, though there is a trend in this direction in physics.Of course, there is a third possibility. Perhaps the Earth/Sun system is not billions of years old…
So even assuming the glories of global warming solve the Faint Young Sun Paradox, it would do so in a way that is indistinguishable from a miracle. Like so many things, the Faint Young Sun Paradox adds to the view that we live on a privileged planet in a privileged universe. At some point privileged observations are statistically indistinguishable from miracles.
Yes, in the same sense that if I find a dime on the sidewalk, that contributes to my financial solvency.
The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere
They aren’t thinking on a large enough scale. Life is not a planetary process, it’s a solar system process. It’s not just the earth that’s evolving, it’s the entire universe!
There is the chance the Earth could be dated correctly and the fossils incorrectly dated. Dating the fossils by the rocks they’re buried in is problematic.
The primary point is that the paleontological record, if old requires a miracle to have kept life around that long on the planet.
There are at least 3 “clocks” inside the fossils that suggest fossils are mis-dated:
DNA in fossils given DNA half life is 521 years give or take. Even if that half life is slowed by a factor of 100, this is problematic for fossils with DNA not considered contamination.
Amino acid racemization dates. The amino acids are too homochiral. Amino acid homochirality also has half lives, from hours to hundreds of years.
C14 traces in coal and marble from Carboniferous. Not consistent with in situ contamination because the C14 in contaminants also has a half life. A discussion worth its own.
Dating the rocks to date the buried fossils is like dating the time of death of someone buried in the ground by the age of the rocks in the cemetery. The more accurate upper bound for age are using the half-lives of relevant substances in the biological materials themselves.
I thought that the rocks are the fossils. Silly me.
Sure, why not, but that doesn’t solve the goldilocks problem. For all the climate change advocates out there, we know how fragile the temperature system is, isn’t it.
John Harshman,
No, not in that sense. The contribution is not required to be either massive or dismissably trivial, with nothing in between. I thought it was Creationists who were enamoured of the false dichotomy. People are happy to accept fraction-of-a-degree warmings due to AGW as significant. As I say, the contribution from numerous sources could readily reinforce, all, individually, equally readily trivialised.
I confess this is not my area. I’m not all that confident that I buy the young sun luminance argument in the first place, though I have no particular reason not to.
stcordova,
Making life uncomfortable for present ecosystems is a long way from a global prohibition on the very existence of life.
What happens to bacteria when you freeze them?
How many survivors do you need to restock after a bottleneck?
Life is resilient, because – like the internet – it is distributed. It survived the ‘goldilocks’ conditions of the Permian extinction, despite conditions that 97% of species found unsurvivable.
As far as another privileged observation regarding the age of various solar system phenomenon, the relative simultaneous recent events has not escaped notice and does cause consternation in some quarters:
This quote noteworthy: “philosophically comforting because you don’t have to assume you’re living in special times”. So why does specialness and privilege feel uncomfortable? Is it because it starts to hint of miraculous?
Beyond that, it does make some suspect the solar system could be young after all.
Thank you for your comment.
If Earth were not reflecting light back out to space in large amounts, but instead absorbing it, it would make the temperature at the Cambrian above freezing, but if the Earth is already frozen and reflects light to space, it’s a different story.
If the Earth is white snowball it reflects more sunlight into space. The formal term is higher Albedo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
Models that incorporate this model a run-away cold Earth.
To be fair some speculations are offered (which I omitted to mention, but which you can read in the link) that supposedly circumvent this problem. But if it does circumvent the problem, it’s still a goldilocks solution.
Mystery of the ‘faint young sun paradox’ may be solved
stcordova,
Who’s he speaking for? I definitely don’t think I’m living in an unchanging world, but neither do I greatly much care either way, ‘philosophically’. The evidence is on the side of massive change – sometimes steady, sometimes catastrophic – and other periods of relative quiet. That’s an observation, not a preference.
Resolving Faint Sun Paradoxes, Part 1
Resolving Faint Sun Paradoxes, Part 2
Resolving Faint Sun Paradoxes, Part 3
No, it doesn’t. The Faith Young Sun Paradox doesn’t tell us anything about the age of the solar system. It doesn’t tell us how “young” the sun is at all. Jiminy.
I’m at a loss to understand what you refer to here if it isn’t reworking. But that would make the fossil older than the rock, not younger. No, I see below that you are proposing massive numbers of intrusive burials. The mind boggles. You imagine difficulties where none exist. No, there is no chance that the rocks could be dated correctly and the fossils incorrectly.
No, it requires an explanation for a puzzling phenomenon. And given the overwhelming preponderance of data, explaining by recent creation is not a credible explanation.
That half-life certainly depends on the environment. But what fossils are you thinking of? There’s nothing very old from which DNA has been recovered.
Not enough information here to know what you’re talking about.
I have no explanation for this phenomenon, if it actually exists. But from that you conclude a 6000 year old earth? Again, you must reject almost all the data and focus on a tiny anomaly, which only one pre-committed to creationism would be capable of.
Sorry, but intrusive burials are not a conceivable explanation for fossil ages. If you thought about what you needed to explain by this means — every single fossil in every deposit worldwide — then Satan would have to have been really really busy with his shovel. Not to mention that intrusive burials leave evidence. If you want to seriously propose this notion we can consider it, but it won’t go well for you.
Mung,
If Hugh Ross is touting the ‘mass loss’ explanation, I’m afraid I must abandon it … 🙂
Agreed. But dismissably trivial is exactly what it seems to be based on everything I’ve found so far, including the paper you yourself linked to: only negligible loss of mass after the first 0.2 billion years of the sun’s existence, capable of changing the earth’s orbit by orders of magnitude less than its current eccentricity, and with no significant effect on solar luminosity.
John Harshman,
I’ve found papers that consider 5% mass loss and more as plausible. I’m not in a position to call it one way or the other, since I can’t even follow the math of Faint Young Sun in the 1st place (!), but 5% would (ISTM) have an effect not just on luminance but on orbital effects, comparable at least to Milankovich’s differences in orbital eccentricity and tilt.
Allan Miller,
5% mass loss at what time? If that rate ended before about 4 billion years ago (again, as stated in the paper you cited) it’s irrelevant.
Just curious Sal – how many more idiotic YEC PRATTs are you going to C&P from AIG and ICR? You could save time if you just gave us the number, make our pointing and laughing go much quicker.
Here is a power point attempting to solve the paradox with mass loss. It shows that the requisite mass loss does not seem feasible based on measurements.
http://hea-www.cfa.harvard.edu/lifeandthecosmos/wkshop/sep2012/present/faint-young-sun-smithsonian-sep12.pdf
I would ask you to explain why this supposed problem somehow negates the millions of other pieces of evidence life has been on the planet for at least 3.5 billion years. But that would require you give an honest answer, something beyond your demonstrated capability.
That’s obvious. Try a little harder and think.
Gedanken experiment: take a dog born in 2016, bury it in rocks dated 65 million years ago. Radiometrically date the rocks and declare the dog that just died is a 65 million year old fossil.
Who said they had to be intrusive! Something can be covered with old rocks in a cataclysm. It’s not that hard.
Besides, lots of rock strata are dated with index fossils! Circular reasoning.
Finally, the long term radiometric isotopes may have yet-to-be discovered origins. Stellar nucleosynthesis has issues. It should be pointed out in certain rare electrical contexts, there can be nuclear change.
I actually did a little personal research as an applied physics MS student on the topic of nuclear transmutation via chemical and electrical means.
This video explains my sympathies:
https://youtu.be/iFDPKD1KbdM
LOL! Sal does love himself some YEC stupidity.
Try another experiment. Take the permineralized fossil of an extinct animal (not the biological remains of a buried extant animal) which is an integral part of the undisturbed rock strata. Date the strata to 65 MYA. Be honest and agree the evidence indicates the animal lived 65 MYA.
Too much honesty for you to deal with Sal?
Wally “hydropants” Brown is Sal’s hero!
Condescension ill becomes a person in your position, i.e. one spouting ill-considered nonsense.
What do you mean by “bury it in rocks”? I don’t think you’ve thought about what that means, or the difference in the two meanings of “rock” that your scenario depends on. Your dog is apparently covered by chunks, i.e. “rocks”. Fossils, on the other hand are embedded in rock strata, lithified sediments, in situ. Your gedankenexperiment is pointless.
Only someone with a complete ignorance of geology could say such a thing. Someone who has never seen a fossil in place.
Isn’t that one of the creationist tropes even AiG says you shouldn’t use? If it isn’t, it should be. No, rocks are correlated using index fossils. They’re dated radiometrically, or correlated with dated rocks.
You will have to explain what, if anything, you are talking about.
I actually did a little personal research as an applied physics MS student on the topic of nuclear transmutation via chemical and electrical means.
This video explains my sympathies:
https://youtu.be/iFDPKD1KbdM
Are you serious?
John Harshman,
Sure, but that’s not the only paper on the subject. I’m not trying to persuade you one way or the other, but the argument is not settled by the conclusion of whichever author I happen to post, because there will be others.
“The primary point is that the paleontological record, if old requires a miracle to have kept life around that long on the planet.”
there’s a classic cartoon along these lines.
“Only someone with a complete ignorance of geology could say such a thing.”
Stick around, there’s more where that came from.
stcordova,
And so, right there, you hole your entire thesis below the waterline. The FYSP is based upon analysis of expectations from stellar nucleosynthesis. It’s an expectation as fuel is consumed and mass redistributes in the star, which is all about nuclear fusion. If it has ‘issues’, one should take these up with the stellar evolution people – those on whose graphs you are basing your contention.
Yeah to my memory, a nucleus zapped with a 100 trillion watt laser for a billionth of a second will have a highly increased rate of decay.
And as we all know, 100 trillion watt lasers are common in the rock record. Never mind that, if if the rocks had been subjected to this much energy, it would have literally vaporized. Just ignore that. Somewhere, somehow, in some obscure physics experiment, at astronomical energies, nuclear decay can be tampered with. Therefore the Earth must be young.
Right.
Allan Miller:
Not for elements heavier than iron. Your comment is erroneous. This discussion could start to be a lot of fun. 🙂
More later.
John Harshman,
I don’t really see why nuclear fusion’s effect on luminance would be linear, but mass loss follow a spike-then-background curve. Mass loss must correlate to some degree with the star’s change in luminance, since the same process – fusion – affects both.
One might expect that a star with little in the way of heavier elements would be more diffuse, and so most mass loss in solar wind might occur early on. But at that stage, the star is less energetic according to the luminance argument, so there is less impetus.
There must be a continuing contribution, from solar wind and from fusion mass-energy, since the processes that lead to increase in luminance cause mass loss, as well as simultaneously acting to slow it down.
I think this is too dynamical a system to make sweeping statements about.
stcordova,
Since I didn’t even mention iron, it isn’t.
The reason I’ve paid attention to UD & ID creationists for the last 15 years? The comedy. They’re intellectual doofuses, and they say amazing things.
stcordova,
Gedanken experiment: take a kilometer thick, 50 km square bed of shelly fauna, collected in 2016, bury it in rocks dated 320 million years ago. Radiometrically date the rocks and declare the shells you just collected are 320 million year old fossils.
What does the sun have to do with elements heavier than iron?
Other than a slight amount of the s-process likely occurring in the sun, elements heavier than iron hardly matter for solar nucleosynthesis. You’re doing about as well with this are you are with geology.
And there’s not really much problem with nucleosynthesis of the heavy isotopes anyway, because binary neutron star coalescence apparently produces the heavy isotopes quite well via the r-process–huge amounts of neutrons are available in those collisions. But binary neutron star collisions are rare? Well, so are the heavy isotopes.
Glen Davidson
DNA in what fossils? How much of it? What is it’s state?
Materialists ranking on YECs is too funny to watch. Which position is the lamer of the two- materialism or young earth creationism? Materialism is a non-starter and makes ridiculous and untestable claims. YEC can at least get started but they seem to have a slight time issue.
It’s like watching midget wrestling seeing materialists take on YECs
Hi Sal,
Thanks for this post. You might find the following two articles interesting:
How ‘Snowball Earth’ volcanoes altered oceans to help kickstart animal life by Thomas Gernon, Lecturer in Earth Science, University of Southampton. (Article in The Conversation, January 9, 2016.)
Re DNA in fossils, see this article in The Guardian (June 9, 2015):
75-million-year-old dinosaur blood and collagen discovered in fossil fragments:
Cheers.
Speaking of comic relief I hope Sal starts trying to defend some of the Wally Brown’s “hydropants” nonsense. I hope I hope I hope!
One thing is certain- we will never see anyone here support the claims of evolutionism. That is why I love evolutionist run blogs and forums- they never even try to support the claims of their position but they will attack starwmen versions of their opponents and pat each other on the back for a job well done.
Pathetic really
Excellent criticism and opposing viewpoint! Thank you.
If I may venture to ask, do you have thoughts about the Privileged Planet hypothesis? Even supposing these mechanisms are the solution (which I personally don’t believe, but in the interest of transparency and fair reporting must be acknowledged), it would seem awfully providential.
The issue is the Sun is evolving, and the earth must co-evolve to maintain a habitable temperature. There is no a priori reason this should be the expected outcome.
I will post more on some of the points raised in this discussion. Thank you very very much for reading.
PS
I hope you liked the Bertrand Russell passage. Even though he’s an agnostic/atheist, I feel God used his writings to change my heart back to the faith. God bless you.
Unfortunately the SOBs vote based on their nonsensical beliefs. That’s not funny. I look forward to the day when we have to pay no more attention to the creationists, including the intelligent design variant, than we do to the flat earthers. It can’t come soon enough.
Yes. It depends on the earth being far older than 6000 years. IOW, it’s a problem for YEC’s.
Here Ya Go:
Thank you! Excellent criticism. It was worth the price of admission.
I like then that Uranium doesn’t come from supernova directly, it must go through a neutron star. How does uranium from a neutron star end up in a star system like ours? Doesn’t gravity sort of keep the uranium in the neutron star from floating around in space and mixing in some random nebula?
In order for that to happen you are going to have to step up and find supporting evidence for your position. Right now you can’t even figure out how to test its claims. So, more likely than not, ID is going to be around long after you are not. And hopefully before you are gone ID will have taken over as the paradigm of choice.
Still, if you wish to make a claim, you need to support that claim using a publication that at the very least doesn’t contradict that claim and presumably should support that claim. Can you find a publication that answers the objections to the mass-loss theory that were in the publication you did cite?
You should know by now that Sal is never willing to defend anything he says. He’s a chronic drive-by poster.
Why don’t you know these things, when you’re declaiming about nucleosynthesis of elements heavier than iron in the sun?
If you were anything like a serious mind, you’d be entirely different than the blithering YEC that you constantly demonstrate that you are here. Everything you write is questionable for the very reason that you write it, as your knowledge about these matters only equals your open-mindedness.
Glen Davidson
N. R. Tanvir, A. J. Levan, A. S. Fruchter, J. Hjorth, R. A. Hounsell, K. Wiersema, R. Tunnicliffe
(Submitted on 20 Jun 2013 (v1), last revised 3 Aug 2013 (this version, v2))
Short-duration gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) are intense flashes of cosmic gamma-rays, lasting less than ~2 s, whose origin is one of the great unsolved questions of astrophysics today. While the favoured hypothesis for their production, a relativistic jet created by the merger of two compact stellar objects (specifically, two neutron stars, NS-NS, or a neutron star and a black hole, NS-BH), is supported by indirect evidence such as their host galaxy properties, unambiguous confirmation of the model is still lacking. Mergers of this kind are also expected to create significant quantities of neutron-rich radioactive species, whose decay should result in a faint transient in the days following the burst, a so-called “kilonova”. Indeed, it is speculated that this mechanism may be the predominant source of stable r-process elements in the Universe. Recent calculations suggest much of the kilonova energy should appear in the near-infrared (nIR) due to the high optical opacity created by these heavy r-process elements. Here we report strong evidence for such an event accompanying SGRB 130603B. If this simplest interpretation of the data is correct, it provides (i) support for the compact object merger hypothesis of SGRBs, (ii) confirmation that such mergers are likely sites of significant r-process production and (iii) quite possibly an alternative, un-beamed electromagnetic signature of the most promising sources for direct detection of gravitational waves.