Hi bloggerets,
A while back I asked wrote on my blog with the question "Did Adam and Eve have Navels?". As always, I, in my completely annoying way, have a purpose in mind.
OK - so let us understand the question. The Navel is the connection between a fetus and it's mother through the umbilical cord. If Adam and Eve were not born of women (Adam was kind of a spontaneous thing and Eve was, well, kind of a rib thing...). So did God (which coincidentally is Dog spelled backward - no connection whatsoever - but maybe we should call him Yahweh, just to avoid confusion), so did Yahweh construct Adam and Eve with Navels? No need for it and they would then be unique among Humans as the only members of our species without Navels. Way cool. So let's assume that Adam and Eve don't have Navels. Again no reason for them to do so.
So, let's jump on over to the subject of the band Queen. Great band! I've seen them in concert several times. Now their Guitarist, Brian May, is also an astrophysicist and wrote his PhD thesis on dust in the solar system. We know a fair bit about this, we know how much dust there is now. We can project how much dust and debris there use to be as well. The cool thing is that when comes to big debris, there is less of it in the inner solar system now than there was before. How do we know this, well, lets look at moon craters - there are not a lot of new ones being created. Some, but not a huge number. Same with meteorite impacts on earth, or Mars or Jupiter's moons. Since we know there are not a lot being created now, there had to be either a lot of time for craters to form or they formed a long time ago and have been incrementally added to as time goes on.
Which brings me back to Adam and Eve and the entirely new subject of asteroids. If you are a creationist and believe the earth to be in the range of 10,000 years old, then you also believe that Adam and Eve were likely born without Navels. In which case, given what we know about debris in the solar system and the rate of crater deployment we can project that the following asteroid was created with navels (or at least craters) for which there is no explanation whatsoever.
Yesterday, the ESA Comet Probe Rosetta visited an asteroid as part of its ongoing mission:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2010-07/12/c_13395419.htm
We have never seen this thing before but, it is pretty heavily cratered and has been in a stable orbit in the most debris ridden part of the solar system. If it is 10,000 years old - it has Navels. Or, surprise, surprise, something measurable and predictable - it is far older than 10,000 years old.
Everywhere we look, everything we look at, adds pebbles to the vast, unequivocal body of knowledge which is our weapon against superstition. Including the creation MYTH.
Have a nice day.
Paul
