Need Help Tracking Down Creationist Claim

I am researching a claim for my page on it. Both instances of the claim that I have found are really two claims: 1) the sun is shrinking and 2) it is losing mass at a very high rate which is part of the reason why it's shrinking. The "shrinking sun" has been addressed extensively and is not what I am researching. Instead, I am researching the second part which deals with the sun losing mass and what effect that would have had over 5 billion years.Here is the claim as it currently exists:

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The shrinking sun limits the earth-sun relationship to fewer than billions of years. The sun is losing both mass and diameter. Changing the mass would upset the fine gravitational balance that keeps the earth at just the right distance for life to survive.

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(Kent Hovind, Evidence from Space of a Young Earth on drdino.com, not attributed, formerly Universe Is Not "Billions of Years" Old which was attributed)

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and

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All you got to do is step outside and look up. Obviously the sun is burning. It's losing 5 million tons every second. You can't just keep losing 5 million tons a second, pretty soon you start to lose weight. And so the sun is losing this mass -- 5 million tons every second -- which means it used to be larger. And it used to be more massive. If you increase the mass of the sun, going backwards in time for several billion years, you start to create a problem with the gravitational balance between the earth and the sun. It's going to suck the earth in and destroy everything.

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(Hovind in his seminar tape video downloaded from his site circa 2003. From my transcription taken from video #7, "Questions and Answers", from 37 minutes 40 seconds to 39 minutes 54 seconds)

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Kent Hovind is the only source that I've been able to find for that claim. While many creationist sites repeat the first claim above, they only copy-and-pasted from either Hovind or from someone else how had copy-and-pasted from Hovind; Google gave me 847 hits.However, I found one other form of the claim which appears to be much older at the questionevolution.com site that went up in Summer 2003 and consists of lists of PRATTs that come from the owner's notes from a creation science class he had taken roughly 20 years prior, circa 1983. Here is the version of that claim on his site:

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The sun looses 4 million tons of mass through fusion per second, and is shrinking by about 1% each century (5 feet per hour). This shrinking is responsible for a large amount of the energy that the sun gives off.

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This is the claim that I'm trying to track down, to find its source. Has anyone come across that claim before? Does anyone have information about that older claim?You have to admit that this claim is very remarkable. It's just about the only creationist PRATT that I've ever seen die out completely, such that Hovind and the Hovindites are the only ones to use it at present.My page on the claim is at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/solar_mass_loss/index.html. It is still incomplete, but I should be completing it this weekend.Also, even though questionevolution.com falsely claims of its PRATTs, "The questions found on this site remain unanswered by the evolutionist.", several of us responded immediately to every single PRATT. The owner had offered to post our responses (and still does), but could never get around to it, so one of us created another website with the same look-and-feel and the owner linked to that answer site. For a time, but then a year or two later he abruptly removed that link and any and all mention that anyone had ever responded to his PRATTs; yes, he still makes that same false claim. The answers site went away for a time, but now it's back up at http://www.geocities.ws/...y403/questionevolution/index.html

Thread copied here from the Need Help Tracking Down Creationist Claim thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

As a possible starting point, there is discussion of this claim on an AiG web page. Aig gives an origin an a history for the claim as well as a somewhat qualified debunking of the claim.http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v11/n2/sun

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You have to admit that this claim is very remarkable. It's just about the only creationist PRATT that I've ever seen die out completely, such that Hovind and the Hovindites are the only ones to use it at present.

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In my mind, the remarkable thing is that the claim ever gained any traction.

I'm sorry, but whatever does that link have to do with my question? I am not asking about the shrinking sun claim, which has been done to death and, even though it has been repeatedly and soundly refuted since almost as soon as it had surfaced in April 1980, it still remains a staple and continues to enjoy wide distribution within the creationist community.Rather, I am asking about the solar mass loss claim. It is that claim which apparently existed in the early 80's but which then disappeared and for which Hovind and his hoard of Hovindites are the only known current vector.I am trying to track down the early 80's version of the solar mass loss claim. I am hoping that someone may remember having encountered it in their studies. Mass loss, not shrinking sun. Mass loss, not shrinking sun.Edited by dwise1, : title

I don't know exactly where they got this from, but it's true. Did that not occur to you? According to NASA, who ought to know, the Sun loses 4.3 million tons/second in fusion. So as to where the creationists got it from, they could have asked any astronomer.What is not true is that this is a "very high rate". 4.3 million tons a second? Bah! A bagatelle! Extrapolated over 4.5 billion years, that would mean that the sun had lost a mere ~0.03% of its mass over that period.If, on the other hand, if you take the creationist figure for the rate of change of diameter, assume the Sun to be homogeneous (which is a conservative assumption, since fusion takes place in the core where the Sun is densest) and plug that in to the appropriate formula you get 1.7 quadrillion tons per second, which is markedly discrepant from the real value.This may explain why the figure for mass loss is no longer a standard creationist claim. It's not a PRATT. It's true. And consequently it is of no use to them.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Did you not look at my page, http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/solar_mass_loss/index.html? If you'd like, I could even take you through the calculation of that rate, show you exactly where it comes from.The rate itself is not in question. It is the application of that rate to bolster the shrinking sun claim (which is wrong on two different counts) and to come up with a "it would have sucked the earth in" second claim.Now, Hovind's version is blatant and it is also relatively recent, 2002 or earlier. The form of the 1980's claim is not as blatant, takes more of an approach of mentioning the rate of mass loss in order to imply that it has something to do with the "shrinking sun". Not high? Isn't that relative? 4.3 million tons per second ain't no peanuts. Take that over 5 billion years and you get something to the order of 10²⁴ tons. The only way to label such a figure is "astronomical".That is the main strength of Hovind's claim, that he throws an astronomical figure at his credulous audience. OK, actually he only gives the rate per second and the number of years (he said "5 billion", so that is what I tailored my analysis to) and left the to their fevered and zealous imaginations. But no number, even an astronomical one, has any meaning until it's placed in context. The context for this order of 10²⁴ tons is the mass of the sun itself, which is to the order of 10²⁷ tons. Which, after we have supplied the mantissae, amounts to a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's mass being lost in 5 billion years. Which means that the sun's gravity back then would have been greater by a few hundredths of one percent. Which means that it would have "sucked the earth in" by a whopping 60,000 miles or so.It is still a high rate and results in the loss of a lot of mass. Which is still inconsequential. I'd be curious to see the calculations. I played with it myself several years ago. Are you taking into account that we're talking about volume instead of diameter -- the uniform rate cited by creationists is the diameter, but the diameter lost due to mass loss would need to figured in terms of volume. Also, I used the density of the photosphere rather than assuming a homogenous density. The figure for mass loss was never in question. What is in question is the use of that rate, as I've already explained.No, it is not a PRATT. Because it died out in the early 80's. OK, since Hovind revived it circa 2002 and 874 web sites spammed it, it might be becoming a PRATT. Except I'm the only one I know of who has written anything on it (again, http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/solar_mass_loss/index.html).And the actual rate of mass loss is not of no use to creationists. It's the real consequences of that rate of mass loss which is useless for them. But for them and their victims to know that, they would have to have done the math. Which they never do. Especially not Hovind, the self-proclaimed (over and over again) "expert on math and science."So have you encountered references to use of the sun's rate of mass loss dating back to the 1980's?

Well, I don't know which creationist made first use of it, no. I thought you wanted to know where the figure came from.---Re my calculations for the shrinking sun, I used the formulakM((r+d)³ - r³)/r³... where r is the radius of the sun, d is the (supposed) shrinkage per hour, M is the mass of the sun, and k is 3600^-1 (to get a figure per second).As I say, it's the density of the core that would really count, but I was happy with a conservative estimate, which allowed me to be lazy and just stick M in my formula.---As to whether 4 million tons is small, as you point out this is relative. Relative to the size of the sun, which is ... big. To show what sort of figures of magnitude we're talking about, taking that much mass out of the sun is like taking a pint of water out of the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, it is quite hard to grasp just how sodding big the Atlantic Ocean is, so I'm not sure that that helps.

Sorry about that. As I re-read your original post it is clear that you want info about the mass claim.And I can't offer much help. My guess is that the claim has been recreated any number of times by creationists upon learning that the sun is losing mass at a mind boggling number of tons per second.