I do, however, feel certain that your calculation is oversimplified.
Of course they are. Just not in the ways you think they are.
I dismissed a number of issues with your scenario to give you the benefit of the doubt. I made every possible concession I could think of when determining the assumptions for my calculations. This is what we do when we want to establish a "lower limit." In other words, my calculations were designed to show you the effects of even the barest
fraction of the events you propose.
Please don't make me dig out my calculator and do the
real math. It would turn the Flood into the freaking Death Star.
What I have repeatedly said is that NOT NEARLY ALL the raindrops' kinetic energy would be converted to heat.
And that's where you are wrong.
Well, I am not proposing that the rain drops fall from orbit. I have already stated earlier that "orbit" was a poor choice of word on my part (I need the raindrops to go high enough to transfer geothermal energy to space...however high that is...if that's orbit...that's orbit, but it might not be).
Because of your uncertainty and because I really didn't feel like calculating the
real energy that would be converted as heat during the fall of the drops themselves, I purposely used the terminal velocity of raindrops for my calculations. It's far slower than they would actually impact at - but it helps for that "lower limit" thing, and lets me concentrate on the parts that I can easily calculate.
This would be just above whichever layer of the atmosphere traps energy, wouldn't it?
That
would be orbit. Every bit of the atmosphere traps heat. And just sending the water into space wouldn't release as much energy as you are hoping, either. The energy would be released from the subterranean "fountains of the deep" - burt the events that put the water up there and bring it back down would simply move even
more of that energy to the
surface of the Earth in the form of heat through friction and impact. Again, I ignored this for you because I didnt want to do the math, and because it helps establish a lower limit that is the barest hint of the true consequences of these events.
However, whether the water droplets go to orbit or not, is not the main thing concerning from how high the raindrops fall. Raindrops don't even exist until they condense into raindrops. I have no reason to believe (right now) that the water that went so high condensed into raindrops at that height. I, so far, imagine the raindrops condensing right where they do today...a few thousand feet up.
The reason Crash keeps yelling at you about this is because if the water were atomized or otherwise broken into smaller bits than raindrops, they would occupy a far larger amount of space (in other words, they would be converted to steam by the explosion that sent them up). Because it takes up more space, the water would have a far larger drag force, would slow down faster (needing even more energy to get where it's going), and would wreck havok on global air pressure. Not to mention the heat generated by the friction with air.
After having studied on the internet some more about the apple-moving-the-earth (a common physics discussion...but I took physics about 15 years ago), I am a bit wrong about "moving the earth." The physics discussions were about the apple's gravity pullin the earth toward the apple an imperceptible distance (but it does move the earth...so would a raindrop). Does this mean that the apple's impact would also move the earth? I am no longer as sure as I once was.
Like I said before, we aren't talking about moving the Earth in any way, shape, or form. Any motion would be undetectably small, and cancelled out by the impacts on the other side of the planet. We
are talking about massive energy release in the form of heat.
However, it matters not. Deformations DO use up kinetic energy. Heat is produced during a deformation, but only a small percentage (depends, I imagine on the materials being deformed) of the energy used to deform is converted to heat.
Wrong. Blatantly wrong. Every scrap of that energy is eventually converted to heat. The "deformed" mass stops moving eventually, right? Why do you think this is? It's becuase of friction converting the kinetic energy to heat. The hammer and anvil example given earlier was right on the money. The deformation of the material doesnt "use up" the kinetic energy - it's just the continuation of the kinetic energy until it is all convertet to heat. If we were to use your model, where only some is converted to heat, objects would continue to move almost forever. The metal struck by the hammer would be weak and easily malleable even without the hammer. Every Joule of energy carried by those raindrops would be converted to heat.
you keep using the term "released as heat"...I'm not sure that is appropriate (it might be, but I am not sure). I prefer to say the energy is "transferred", "used up", or "converted"...how appropriate those terms are...I am not sure, either.
Semantics are irrelevant. I'm trying to make this easily understandable. The fact is that the kinetic energy of the raindrop impacts is
all converted to heat at impact.
If you mean the idea that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, I am trying to keep that in mind.
That's the most important part. Even the energy transferred to other matter by "deforming" it is eventually (in less than a second, of course) transformed into heat via friction - otherwise it would continue to deform forever. The energy doesn't just go away because it did work.
I might be wrong (despite all the confidence I have or had). I have only briefly studied up on deformations...it could be that ultimately all deformations cause all kinetic energy to convert to heat.
This is eaxactly what happens, and what we've been trying to tell you for several pages now.
For one thing, you are treating it like a single event. It is not. It is gazillions of impacts over the entire surface of the earth over forty days and forty nights. The heat energy, whether it be all or only a small percentage of the kinetic energy would be distributed throughout all the surface of the earth, much of the volume of the lower atmosphere, and, after awhile, throughout the flood waters themselves.
My calculations simply add up the energy released by each and every one of those impacts. Every drop of water hits at 7 m/s. Add up the total mass of the water and you can calculate the total energy release. The fact that it's spread over "gazillions" of raindrop impacts is irrelevant. The same energy is released. As for the distribution of energy through the atmosphere and water itself - it's STILL converted to heat. It doesn't go away. Thermodynamics. The sound energy of the individual raindrops, the wind from the air pressure changing, every scrap of energy is converted to heat via friction. It's not dissipated. It's not lessened. All of it becomes heat.
If my "model" is correct, how does the geothermal energy released compare to the heat generated by the rainfall? I say this, because the earth would probably have a net loss of "heat" and would be one giant heat sink, wouldn't it?
Even assuming it did (and it wouldn't lose much), the energy loss would be from the water itself, lowering the temperature of wherever the "fountains of the deep" are fed from. The
surface of the Earth would feel the full force of the impact energy, and the temperature of the
surface would be raised to....oh, hotter than the freaking
SUN. As far as you and I or the Ark are concerned, the surface is really all that matters. And it would be melted into slag.
How does the energy transfers during condensation of raindrops affect your calculations, if at all?
It doesn't. My calculations take into account two things and two things only - the speed of raindrops, and their total mass for this event. Well...okay, I also use the surface area of the Earth and the length of time involved. But the formation of the raindrops, the energy released as they undergo re-entry into the atmosphere - all ignored. I am giving you massive concessions by assuming that the water hits at the speed of your everyday raindrop and ignoring any other energy involved. It would just make your scenario
worse.
Water evaporates. The flood waters would experience evaporation, too, throughout the 40 days and nights and beyond. Doesn't this cause a reduction in heat? How much? How does this affect your calculations, if at all?
The heat just moves around, that's all. Since it stays inside the Earth's atmosphere, it really doesn't matter. Remembr, energy cannot be destroyed, it just changes forms and moves around. In this case, the net effect is still the Earth being burnt to a cinder.
Finally, Charles Knight has offered up a "problem" that might become a (at least a partial) solution -- namely, the "nuclear winter" the intial "fountains of the deep" might cause.
A nuclear winter would help lower the temperature
after the fact, yes. Buit the suface of the Earth would still have been melted to magma, and the oceans would still have boiled off in their entirety.
If somebody turns on the AC after the rest of the building has already burned down and everything is dead, it deosn't really matter, does it.
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