Are Uniformitarian Assumptions Becoming Irrelevant?

Holding on to the uniformitarian philosophy causes complications when empirical evidence is discovered! It began with Copernicus who invented a theory which suggests that the Earth is nothing special, what has been going on in the Universe, has been going on for billions of years and will proceed to do the same for more eons to come!

A step by step evolutionary process of H2 forming a dust cloud with some of them having convoluted serpentine shapes, which in turn is a nursery for the formation of stars and then as the result of star formation, planets being shaped by gradual, ongoing processes!  At least in theory anyway, because star formations and the supposed evolution of planets have been a great mystery to researchers for many years.

Secular scientists decided to embrace Copernicus, so much so they began to hate the idea of change because that would mean we are living in a universe that has something special to it! But with new discoveries, some scientists are now abandoning Copernicus and are now saying we living in special times.

In nature…

“Observations of the distant reaches of the Solar System made in the past few years are challenging that concept. The most active bodies out there — Jupiter’s moon Io and Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan — may be putting on limited-run shows that humans are lucky to witness. Saturn’s brilliant rings, too, might have appeared relatively recently, and could grow dingy over time. Some such proposals make planetary researchers uncomfortable, because it is statistically unlikely that humans would catch any one object engaged in unusual activity — let alone several…”

Scientists are observing young phenomena (which the Bible advocates and has been confirmed by empirical science) that is contrary to old-age assumptions embraced by evolutionists, intelligent design proponents, and old-earth creationists about the universe.

Nature goes into great detail on why the phenomena is young…

1) Saturn rings are like a car, when you store a car outside with seasonal changes, the car is going to show wear especially after a long period of time! Likewise space is a harsh environment and Saturn’s rings are 90 percent water ice which should appear a lot dirtier as a consequence of being billions of years old. Of course, these scientists did not embrace a young universe rather they increased the complexity in the explanation by invoking the ad hoc solution which was an icy interloper that broke apart and became the rings within the last few million years. This creates another problem, because that is only a small portion of what the assumed age is.

So researchers are using Cassini in years to come in order to try and find where all of the billions of years of dirt went to and speculation has the dirt supposedly hiding somewhere in the B ring. If the Cassini cannot find it there and the results point to a low mass for the rings then it will increase the complexity of the old-age assumption which is not a good sign if you believe in the old-age.

2)  The geysers of Enceladus represent young phenomena! 16 gigawatts of power which is enormously greater than any internal radioactive heating and the reporter of nature admits that it is very difficult to keep the geysers going for 10 million years let alone for billions of years! Nearby Mimas they say should be producing more heat than Enceladus. So scientists are doing the unthinkable, and that is, they are treating it as a special event!

3) If you think 16 gigawatts of power is difficult to explain in the old-age assumption, try 90,000 gigawatts with its volcanoes! Referring to Saturn’s moon Io. The gigawatts is well above the predictions from models of tidal interactions which is also is well above man’s imagination because planetary scientists cannot not even come up with a scenario to explain it like it often times happens in other areas.

4) Then there is the grand daddy of them all, Saturn’s largest moon, Titan! Atmospheric methane is a known substance to be short-lived rather than something billions of years old. So trying to locate the sources of replenishment has been the focus as well as invoking another explanation! So something special may have happened, one researcher suggested, the sun was the source by being able to warm up to a tipping point for tens or even hundreds of millions of years ago, levitating the frozen nitrogen and methane into an atmosphere that “rained like hell” onto the surface! It will be interesting what else they come up with!

And it’s not only Saturn’s rings and its moons but also Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and its moons, Uranus and its moons and rings, Neptune and its moons and rings, Pluto and comets, asteroids, and dust. Basically the whole system!

Do you believe science is about honestly, following the evidence where it leads? Then these same scientists would have to conclude that the solar system is much younger than previously thought! You take away old-age assumptions, it clears up all the confusion! No need to invent a story to fill in the falsifying data.Your following the evidence where it leads which brings about clarity not confusion!

Titan Continues To Fascinate While Defying Speculation

How much is understood by scientists about Titan? There have been many instances where scientists never discover what they had predicted. The data defies long-age assumptions, thereby increasing the complexity within their framework rather than confirming it.

Saturn’s giant moon Titan keeps on revealing mysterious and fascinating discoveries. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finds a river on Titan comparable to that of the Nile river on earth. However, Titan is too cold (-179) to allow flowing water rather it’s ethane and methane which fill the lakes and streams on Titan.

New Scientist, explains…

“Coursing 400 kilometres towards a dark delta, a river found on Saturn’s moon Titan is the longest yet seen outside Earth. Bearing a striking resemblance to the Nile, the river hints at ongoing geological activity on the moon.”

“The Nile’s relatively straight shape is partly controlled by fault lines, which on Earth mark the places where tectonic plates meet. Titan is probably too small to have plates, but the river may also be tracing a fault in the bedrock, says Farr. Pressure could build up on such faults, causing them to shift and form new chasms and lakes, he says.” 

It is interesting to note, even though scientists don’t believe Titan has plate tectonics, they do however believe the river tracks a fault line! Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? In another discovery found on Titan, the moon is icier than previous thought!

In Phys.org…

“Scientists have long suspected that a vast ocean of liquid water lies under the crust. The new study suggests that the internally generated heat that keeps that ocean from freezing solid depends far more on Titan’s interactions with Saturn and its other moons than had been suspected.”

“The picture of Titan that we get has an icy, rocky core with a radius of a little over 2,000 kilometers, an ocean somewhere in the range of 225 to 300 kilometers thick and an ice layer that is 200 kilometers thick,” he said.”

“Previous models of Titan’s structure estimated the icy crust to be approximately 100 kilometers thick. So if there is more ice, then there should be less heat from the core than had been estimated. One way to account for less heat being generated internally is for there to be less rock and more ice in the core than previous models had predicted.”

“From measurements of the observed gravitational field of Titan, one can compute what the shape of Titan ought to be. But the new data show that Titan’s shape is much more distorted than would be predicted by a simple gravitational model. That discrepancy means the internal structure of Titan isn’t quite so simple.”

Titan’s data conflicts with long-age assumptions, for example…Its lack of craters and the craters are shallow which is hard to believe using long-age assumptions considering the moon contains the most gravitational pull.  Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, is a comparable size to Titan, but yet its craters are hundreds of meters bigger!

Next, there are dramatic changes happening in Titan’s atmosphere! Using an amazing instrument called the “Composite InfraRed Spectrometer”, a research team from the University of Bristol discovered “an enormous increase in Titan’s exotic trace gases over the south pole within a relatively short time.”

These gases are formed by sunlight, which then are converted by Titan’s atmosphere into benzene and hydrogen cyanide. The researchers were very surprised by this discovery considering such a rapid change within just a few short months. Why wouldn’t a circulation model predict activity even being relatively close to that high level? Well, it goes back again to the long-age assumption which prevails in secular science that bases everything on how things evolved. This discovery causes a problem for that assumption because they will have to invent something on how this erosive process could have been sustained over Titan’s presumed billions of years!

Another long-age problem was also discovered but more in-depth although questioning the age wasn’t discussed in this paper, it was just presumed to be very old!  The rate of thermal escape of hydrogen from Titan’s upper atmosphere has been a dilemma. Researchers found that dissipation of hydrogen and methane is similar to Jeans escape, meaning that molecules escape the atmosphere based on their kinetic energy derived from temperature.  The paper did suggest, “A global and temporal description is required to model Titan’s upper atmosphere.”

Every so often, one finds new papers which modified old papers that have been falsified such as the prediction of a global ocean being on Titan.  A new model was invented and then presented in Icarus (which should be free) where they calculated (using only ratios, not bulk quantities) that surface liquids should be dominated by ethane (56%) over methane (32%), with much lower concentrations at the poles. This counters actual observations on Titan, where the only lakes found are at the poles!

Everyone can agree that observational raw data is vastly superior to invented speculation! We learn something about what is out there in space, we don’t really learn anything with speculative models other than they require fixing all the time to rescue the overall theory. But when you believe in a young universe, these amazing discoveries do not increase the complexity of that! One marvels on how Titan continues to confirm creationism, while defying secular speculation!

Space Exploration Concerning Empiricism and Speculation

Are we exploring space only because of curiosity of discovering ingredients which one can speculate about life being present sometime in the distance past or speculating about its origin?

There is still controversy brewing over a dry or wet Martian planet. Data from last year indicates that many of the lakes or gullies were likely caused by volcanoes. But on September 27th, Curiosity Rover had taken a stunning picture of conglomerate and gravel which appear like  flowing surface water from the planet’s past. NASA quickly rushed to publish this amazing photo, because of its significance which lead Science Magazine to declare: “Bingo!” 

“Billions of years ago, enough water flowed down from the rim of Gale crater to carry gravel to the middle of the crater floor—where the Curiosity rover found and imaged it 3 weeks ago, the NASA mission’s team members reported in a press conference today.”

“The broken face of a 15-centimeter-thick layer of rock—perhaps tilted into view by a nearby small impact—shows off bits of rock worn into pebbly roundness as they tumbled down a nearby slope in a torrent of water. Later, the gravel became encased in water-deposited minerals. Other rovers have found evidence of salty ground water or evanescent puddles of brine.”

“And orbital imaging has shown that the nearby slope in Gale was surely a so-called alluvial fan; the cone-shaped feature formed when sediment-laden water spilled down the crater wall. But Curiosity’s discovery will let researchers infer a great deal more about this particular ancient water on Mars.”

“Unfortunately, gravel laid down in torrential flows is about the worst sort of deposit to search for traces of ancient life. As demonstrated on Earth, the organic remains of long-ago life are far better preserved in the muddy deposits of a quiescent lake bottom. “

So there you have it, one picture of the surface of Mars discovered by Curiosity convinced science magazine that there was water present supposedly billions of years ago. On the next day, Science Daily published an article saying Mars is drier than expected…

“Preliminary data from the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory, presented at the European Planetary Science Conference on 28 September, indicate that the Gale Crater landing site might be drier than expected.”

“The prediction based on previous measurements using the Mars Odyssey orbiter was that the soil in Gale Crater would be around 6% water. But the preliminary results from Curiosity show only a fraction of this,” said Maxim Mokrousov (Russian Space Research Institute), the lead designer of the instrument.”

The problem with water on Mars is, the substance cannot exist on the surface at this present moment because of  the low atmospheric pressure, one hundredth that on Earth. Phys.org reports that the water wouldn’t last because of atomic-level erosion from the solar wind called sputtering…“In this process, atoms are knocked away from the atmosphere due to impacts from energetic particles” concluding that the planet was never wet or warm.  

In other space exploration news,  researchers have obtained enough data that discovers what happens during Titan’s year. They can now observe seasonal changes occurring on the moon. Researchers are finding these changing are having more of an impact on Titan than previously thought.

In  science daily…

“Explains Dr Coustenis, “As with Earth, conditions on Titan change with its seasons. We can see differences in atmospheric temperatures, chemical composition and circulation patterns, especially at the poles. For example, hydrocarbon lakes form around the north polar region during winter due to colder temperatures and condensation.”

Interesting enough, The article mentioned the continuous ethane production from solar radiation but did not get into the time problem this creates. Over the course of 4.5 billion years, an accumulation of half a kilometer or more of liquid ethane was expected by scientists in a global ocean.  Even the Huygens probe was designed to float on that ocean which was falsified by direct observations. The lakes on Titan are appearing and disappearing  which can only mean that the lakes are shallow and the liquid hydrocarbons in them are moving around! This is hardly an indication of the moon being billions of years old, which is why the prediction of a global ocean consisting of ethane failed to meet expectations rather it confirms more of a youthful moon!

Another indication is the fact that Titan, the largest moon which contains the greatest gravitational attraction, has very few craters (three to five) after all that time. One has to ask whether it is credible that these processes have been going on for billions of years.

Creationists can still enjoy space exploration which has been a valuable tool in learning about our solar system confirming a Creator but one has to keep mind the difference of keep in mind the difference between between empiricism and speculation, between discovery and explanation!

A Mature Galaxy Cluster Is Not Acting Its Age?

There is one thing concerning various stages of stars, a bright blue star which burns its fuel rapidly could not last more than a few million years! So what is this, a galaxy cluster SPT-CLJ2344-4243 (also known as the Phoenix Cluster), was discovered by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope is believed to be producing two stars a day!

The name “Phoenix Cluster” came from its location in the constellation of the Phoenix which is about 5.7 billion light years away from earth. This discovery of course is way out of the norm for a blue star especially for those who believe the universe is 13.7 billion years old.  MIT’s Michael McDonald in nature also commented that a galaxy at this age, doesn’t do anything.

What about reports of rapid formations of stars by the galaxy? Here is the thing, nobody has actually witness the evolution of star formations. The reason why there such a claim is because they just assume without any real-time data that stars nearby are part of that formation, but there is no real confirmation if it is or not especially at these distances (5.7 billion light years) where the individual stars are not even visible!

This new discovery is believed to lead astronomers to answer a basic question which has alluded them for many years, how do stars form? There is a belief that swirling hydrogen gas is required to cool and condense until there is enough density to possess enough gravity that will supposedly prevent re-expansion.  However, gases tend to expand, not contract.

And a couple of more things, lets say for the sake of argument a swirling mass of gas did contract, but in order to conserve angular momentum it would have to spin much faster, and that would increase in angular velocity which would go against any continued contraction.

What about its magnetic field? If such a collapse of a nebula would occur the results would greatly magnify its magnetic field, which goes against the shrinkage required to form a star. The hypothesis of formations concerning stars by evolutionary standards is contrary to the laws of physics, given the conditions that exist in space!

So did this mature Galaxy somehow reversed itself to form new stars at an incredible rate? No it didn’t, only evolutionary expectations would require such an assumption, there is no certainty that unseen stars are being formed but there is certainty contained in this newly discovered galaxy cluster concerning evidence for a young universe written about in the book of Genesis!