The Flood- one explanation

There's a lake, Titicaca - maybe you've heard of it? The highest big lake in the world? On the shores of which Tiahunacao is located?Is it possible, perhaps, that Tiahunacao has never been the harbor of any ocean, but rather for enormous Lake Titicaca?Just a thought. You grow what you can, where you live. I doubt their soil is any less fertile than most of Russia but they've had agriculture - and a civilization - there for a very long time. Maybe you need to quantify how much agriculture you think it takes, at the minimum, to support a civilization.(You did say it was a habor town. Maybe they shipped the food in?)

No - you're presenting physical impossibility. Physics doesn't work like this. Your hypothesis is lunacy.Here is a hint:Why is there no big whirlpool at the North Pole?The way you describe physics there would be.

Is this the new Velikovsky?

Awww Eta, you can do the real physics. Most of us know without any details that this is nonsense. Wouldn't it be a bit of fun to hit it at a more detailed level?Of course, on the other hand it really isn't wortht the trouble is it? It's not like this is going to have someone trying to get a government to introduce it to a science class. In fact, it would be interesting to watch even the relatively ignorant laught at it.

I think it may be borrowed from the old Velikovsky. Now that you've mentioned the name I would expect a thread on that any day now.

Yes, Eta, as Nosy said, we know it's nonsense, we just don't know the details. I've actually never heard this argument before. Put us out of our misery... please.

Keep your racism to yourself please, John Paul.

John Paul, i hope you are talking about a gobal flood that has nothing to do with the bible. As the bible says the flood is caused by 40 days of rain and not by any movement of the earth.
Anyway, what you said about the earth shifting in angle causing a global flood is not true, why not give another nonsense such as the earth jerked violently and caused a global flood?

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If we take an earth without a tilt and suddenly tilt it 18 degrees

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Define "suddenly". You're proposing that this happen from a near earth pass of some sort, correct? Then the water will be dragged along at the same speed as the earth - water is effected by gravity as well, you know.Now, the reason that we get tides is due to what are literally known as tidal forces, which make the water on earth lopsided due to the difference in distance from the gravitational source. You would consequently get an *intense tide* (lots of water receeding from part of the earth and flooding the coast on the opposite side) (I can calculate a rough maximum of how much it would be if you'll give me the size of your body and how close it passed; it will likely never be a force that "covers mountains" or anything like that, however, and it would be impossible for it to cover the entire earth; furthermore, because of the time it would take for the water to migrate from the far side of the globe, you undoubtedly wouldn't approach the maximum)Also, the atmosphere will similarly be affected by these tidal forces. While atmospheric tides are normally relatively insignificant, the sort of near impact that you're discussing would create a huge flow of air departing the far side of the planet and approaching the near side.Near misses can even be powerful enough to rip planets to pieces. Intense tidal forces are what cause the Roche limit for the orbits of bodies - the point at which they'll be torn apart by tidal forces. Even if this near miss wasn't powerful enough to rip the earth to shreds, the crust and mantle would be highly disturbed, and it would unleash a wave of intense volcanism, earthquakes, and possibly major local collapses. The atmosphere would likely still be lethal to date.For it to rotate the angle of earth's spin as you are proposing, it also could not be remotely in the plane that most bodies of this solar system orbit. Additionally, for it to have long enough for it to affect Earth's spin, it would have to be moving relatively slowly. Consequently, the odds of this ultra-massive body ramming the sun or just dissapearing on us off into the distance are almost nil. Likewise, it would horribly throw earth out of the plane that bodies in our solar system roughly tend to orbit in.There are also probably also some energy balance issues that I'd need to look into here.

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what do you think would happen?

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All multicellular life would be obliterated.Earth's orbit would be thrown way off, and the atmosphere would be toxic and smoke-filled to date. The oceans would be choked black with slow-settling sediment. And yet, the seas would not have covered the planet.

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Also climate changes would be brought on.

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That's an understatement, given that the atmosphere has been drawn to one side of the planet during the flyby, and much of it drawn off into space.

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That is what caused the ice age- not glaciers. Glaciers need gravity to move. What was the cause of the gravity if glaciation did occur?

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You see, there's this little thing called "Earth" underneath our feet.

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What is the evidence? Tiahuanaco- a port city that is now some 12,000 feet above sea level, about the same distance that the equatorial buldge in sea depth would be. It also just happens to be where the equator would be when there isn't any tilt.

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This is so absurd it's not even worth ripping apart Produce a theory, make an absurd estimate for how high waters would be, then pick a port city at that height! And what is your reason for *every other city on the planet* being where they are?------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

No offence Rei but all of you guys are screwing up basic physics here.The only way to tilt the Earth would be a direct collision by something pretty massive. I might calculate this tonight for fun but my guesstimate right now is the colliding object would have to be at least as massive as Mars.

And where the hell did "18 degrees" come from anyway? Have we tilted an additional 5.5 degrees since that big Flud??? What caused that, JP?

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The only way to tilt the Earth would be a direct collision by something pretty massive.

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I don't think that's true. You could rotate it via tidal forces, although they'd have to be quite intense. It's the only method that I could think of that would fit the initial post's description of how to throw the planet's rotation off, so it's the one I used. In a flyby of two perfect, non-plastic spheres you may be correct (I'd have to look into it - I'm not positive about that case), but that isn't what we're talking about here.Planets deform; Earth alone is already a bit wider at the equator due to its rotation, and the potential flyby body could be even worse. Then, when you have intense gravitational fields tugging on the planets along a given axis proportional to distance, you're going to stretch the planet along that axis. As the bodies fly past each other, the closest points are going to be tugged along more than the furthest points.In an extreme case (as a demonstration), picture throwing a point mass past the end of a line segment in two dimensions. Assuming that the point mass is infinitely larger in mass than the line, it will continue to fly in a roughly straight vector, making it easy to picture.Will the line segment not be imparted a rotation? The segment will of course begin to head toward the point mass. However, the near top of the segment will pull toward the point mass much faster than the far segment due to the quadratic decay of the force of gravity; consequently, you will have an initial rotation toward where the point mass is coming from, and an ending rotation in the direction that the point mass flies off to.There are other possibilities for changing the rotation, such as mass exchange (especially, of gasses) and magnetic fields (probably too small), but I wasn't considering those in my post.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 12-16-2003]

Quote: "The only way to tilt the Earth would be a direct collision by something pretty massive. I might calculate this tonight for fun but my guesstimate right now is the colliding object would have to be at least as massive as Mars."Comment: I wondered when someone would finally catch on. Congratulations, Eta, you "guesstimate" regarding Mars is very nearly right on the money!What actually happened is that Venus was originally in an oblique orbit that took it inside of and outside of our solar system kind of like a comet. On one of it's trips through our system, it came a little too close to Jupiter and had all of its water sucked out of it's frozen atmosphere. This huge mass of carooming ice collided with Mars, instantly melted on account of the heat created by the collision, combined with the water then existent on Mars, but because of the diminutive size of Mars, and due to Mars's relatively low gravitational pull, this huge mass of water continued right on its erratic path through space. Next stop Earth!Well, as this huge mass of intersolarsystemic water approached Earth, it collided with the Moon which just happened to be about the same mass as this water cloud. The Moon was pushed toward and collided with Earth in advance of the water cloud. The Moon veered off back into space much as a billiard ball would, and miraculously (due to some divine English spin applied by old Genesis Fats himself) came to rest back in its previous orbit. The lunar collision created a huge indentation on one side of the Earth that the water cloud immediately filled and over-topped. The over-topping wave action caused Noah's Flood, and subsequent erosion and sedimentation filled in the indentation left by the Moon.Venus came to rest in its present position between Mecury and Earth, and after a year or so of flooding, the excess alien space water evaporated from Earth and back into space due to its anti-gravitational isotopes.[This message has been edited by Abshalom, 12-16-2003]

Are you serious????This was a Velikovsky idea wasn't it?

1) I agree you could have a net torque causing a tilt due to the already present equatorial bulge.But for this to happen the interloping object would have to be so close/massive that two things would happen first.i) The Moon would already have been either lost completely or in a very eccentric orbit.ii) The Earth itself would be totally rearranged due to the tidal disruption, making any tilt meaningless comapared.2) Any object that was big enough to do this would still be observable. If it collided with the Earth then the Earth would have been a little more damaged than a flood.Remember if you want to roughly calculate this stuff yourself, a good rule of thumb is that an object or system becomes disrupted tidally when the mean density of the system/object is exceeded by the mean density of the system/object plus the 'new' interloping object.
Basically because the tidal force goes as 1/r^3.