Global Warming & the Flood

about 18,000 mph (if we take "orbit" as being 62 miles up).

When something is propelled upwards, it stops momentarily at the peak before returning towards the earth. At this point ALL kinetic energy has been turned into potential energy (potential energy is related to mass and distance fromt the earth). If something can prevent gravity from turning the potential energy back into kinetic energy, then the object will stay motionless at the peak. There is no need to release heat or anything...the kinetic energy became potential energy.When the shuttle lands, it is converting potential energy into kinetic energy (this is called "falling" in everyday language). If there were no air molecules in the atmosphere, then the shuttle would never get hot. It is the air molecules brushing across the shuttle that cause SOME (not very much) of the kinetic energy to become heat. The air molecules doing this is called air resistance (not air pressure) -- the air molecules are resisting the downward motion of the shuttle -- it is a type of friction, which is a very common converter of kinetic energy to heat energy.To get hot during a fall, an object must have a high velocity through air molecules. But, these same air molecules prevent water drops from attaining very great downward velocities and, thus, prevent the water drops from generating much heat.--Jason

If there were no air molecules, you are right - the shuttle wouldn't get hot.It would simply continue to accellerate at 9.8 m/s^2 until smashing into the ground and releasing the exact same amount of kinetic energy all at once.The raindrops don't ever go faster than about 7 meters per second. This is called their terminal velocity - the speed at which air resistance balances the force of gravity. At that point, all of the additional kinetic energy is being converted to heat via friction and air pressure, just like the space shuttle.The calculatons I gave previously disregard that - I was looking for a lower limit, the absolute minimum energy we could expct to be released from such an event (which is why I used such a "small" amount of water, only enough to cover a flat-surface Earth with 100 meters of water - not nearly as much as required by the Flood story). The kinetic energy calculations that I made take into account only that amount of water impacting the surface at 7 m/s. That's it. It's a small fraction of the energy that is actually given off - again, I wanted a lower limit - but it's still enough to cause global devestation on a scale that we would easily see evidence of today.The number I gave, 5.89e24 megatons, is the amount of energy released by all of that water falling exactly as normal rain. Spread it out over 40 days, and you get 1.47e23 megatons released each and every day. That converts to 7.47e14 megatons of energy per square mile every day. That's millions upon millions of nuclear weapons detonating on every square mile of the planet every day for 40 days. All from the simple added effect of normal everyday raindrops impacting the Earth at the speed they normally do. There's just a freaking lot of themAnd you're right - the purpose of the Flood WAS to destroy all life on Earth. Your scenraio certainly accomplishes that. But it would have produced other effects that we would easily be able to see. The global temperature would have risen to ungodly levels, not dropped (only so much energy would beed off into space while the water was in orbit, but it's irrelevant - the kinetic energy of the falling rain would still cause the surface temperature to be hotter than the sun for 40 days straight). The entire crust of the Earth would have been melted. Tghere wouldn't have even been a flood, because the water would be flash-evaporated into steam after even a fraction fell to the surface.We would see evidence of these things, like a massive global igneous rock level dated at just a few thousand years. The Earth's temperature would STILL be uninhabitable by any life (there would likely be no liquid water on the planet, and it would be hotter than Mercury - very little energy escapes into space each year).I'm afraid that the effects this scenario would produce are simply not seen today.

This is where you make your mistake, if we are talking about objects in orbit.An object in orbit, such as the space shuttle, is not just thrown "upward". It must have a "forward" velocity of around 18,000 mph to stay in orbit - i.e. it still has kinetic energy. It is that kinetic energy which must be dissipated as heat to reduce the "forward" speed from 18,000 mph to 0.

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

Ok, but that's absolutely irrelevant, since you've already proposed that nothing is preventing gravity from turning the potential energy back into kinetic energy, remember? The water comes back down in your model. None of us, including you, are talking about a model where the water never comes back down - obviously, because there's no water up there. Until it vaporized Florida upon impact at Cape Canaveral. The kinetic energy of the shuttles velocity gets turned into heat no matter what. Either a manageable level of heat all along the way down (slowing the shuttle in the process) or all that heat all at once if it hit Cape Canaveral at Mach 60.The shuttles kinetic energy is always turned into heat. Always. It's pressure, actually (again) but yes, the shuttle is using the atmosphere to turn its incredible orbital velocity into heat, slowing it in the process. We agree on this point, so there's no need to repeat it a second time. No, it must merely have any velocity. The amount of heat generated is proportional to the velocity and the coefficient of drag, so you don't detect measureable heat at low velocities or low friction - but it's there. There's no such thing as heatless drag. Um, no, they already have the very great downward velocity, because they were in orbit. As the atmosphere slows the water that kinetic energy becomes heat. Enough heat to sterilize the Earth, as we've shown.It isn't possible for the air to slow the water without the generation of heat. There's no heatless friction, there's no heatless braking as you propose. It's 100% contrary to the laws of physics. Either your water stays up forever, or it parboils the whole earth with the heat of its return. Since neither one of these things has occured, we know your model is completely false and impossible.

Rahvin (and Crash), you guys are dealing with HALF the picture...and reaching incorrect conclusions. No. SOME (not nearly all) would be CONVERTED TO (not released as) heat. The majority of the kinetic energy is TRANSFERRED to the earth, which will react. First of all, the earth will transfer SOME of the kinetic energy right back into the shuttle. And the shuttle will transfer it back again (the shuttle and debris will "bounce"...bouncing is the earth returning kinetic energy back to an object, which had transferred the kinetic energy to the earth in the first place (simply put: it fell, landed, and then bounced). The earth will also bend, break, eject, and the earth as a whole will move in the direction the shuttle was falling (but since the earth is so massive, the earth's movement will barely be noticeable).A good example is two billiard balls. One billiard ball hits another. If the hit is dead on, almost all the kinetic energy of the first ball will be transferred to the second. The first will stop and the second will go in the direction the first had been travelling. A very, teensy-weensy bit of the energy will get converted to heat due to friction -- the force that resists motion.When a raindrop hits the earth, the kinetic energy is also transferred to the earth (and the earth transfers it right back). Since water drops are fluid, the water drop responds by SPLASHING (which is similar to bouncing...sort of). Very small bits of earth (grains of sand) will react to the kinetic energy of the raindrop contacting the earth. Believe it or not, each raindrop that hits the earth MOVES the earth (not by too much, mind you). But since things are hitting the earth on nearly all sides pretty much all the time, and since none of these things hitting the earth have nearly the mass of the earth...the forces fairly balance out...if it doesn't balance out perfectly, well it's such a small force that the earth is in no danger of moving out of its path. If you drop an apple on the ground...the earth moves (just a very, very little bit...it takes a lot of zeros after the decimal to describe the fractional amount of distance the earth moves in response to an apple falling or a raindrop falling...I imagine a micron would be HUGE compared to this distance.)In the case of the rain in Noah's Flood, the rain is hitting all over the globe, the kinetic energies transfered during each individual rain drop's impact will pretty much cancel out.You are welcome to use as much water as you wish...the megatons of kinetic energy do not equal an explosion of heat upon impact (raindrops do not explode upon contact with the earth...they splash). It's rain...just like all rain...the only difference is it continues for 40 days and nights, which is disasterous in other ways, of course.It is friction that usually (if not always) turns SOME of an object's kinetic energy into heat...if it turns ALL the kinetic energy into heat, the object cannot continue moving. However, just because and object with kinetic energy stops moving (i.e., by collision with another object), doesn't mean that all kinetic energy turns to heat at that point, either. No, instead, the kinetic energy gets transferred to the other object. If the other object can move freely it will return very little of the kinetic energy back to the orginal object. If the object (for all practical purposes) cannot move at all, it will return all the kinetic energy back to the original object (a basket ball bouncing on the court). Friction is usually like a pest...eating up SOME of our desired kinetic energy by resisting the motion and converts the kinetic energy into heat.The ground, were the shuttle to impact the earth, WOULD heat up. This would likely be due (I could be wrong, but I think I am right) to the shuttle trying to travel THROUGH the earth: the frictional force to this movement would be tremendous, and thus the heat would be tremendous, too (probably not like a nuclear bomb or anything, though). However, rain drop impacts do not have this problem.--Jason

You can't just "cancel out" energy. Where do you get this stuff? Have you even heard of the laws of thermodynamics?Do you know what heat is, even? Do you understand that heat itself is kinetic energy? Of course the kinetic energy is transferred to the Earth; it becomes heat when it does so.

My mistake, then. I did not mean that the water drops must actually orbit the earth (although, that is exactly what I said), I guess I was trying to give an idea of how high I was thinking of the rain drops going. For my idea about the Ice Age to work, the water needs to go high enough to bring the heat out of the earth system so it can dissapate out into space -- however high that is...somebody might know.Thanks for helping me see how I worded that part poorly.--Jason

@ 320km (off the top of my head) but if has enough speed to reach distance - it's not stopping it's all off into space.(not that it could actually get that far - the speed required would turn all of the water into steam and so on and so on).

How does water travel at 18,000mph without turning to steam?What is the mechanism?At one atmosphere pressure, water turns to steam at 100 degrees Centigrade.I'm not a science wonk but I'm sure the following also is a cause for concern:

quote:

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In physical chemistry and in engineering, steam refers to vaporized water. It is a pure, invisible gas (for mist see below), which at standard atmospheric pressure often has a temperature of around 100 degrees celsius, and occupies about sixteen hundred times the volume of liquid water (steam can of course be much hotter than the boiling point of water; such steam is usually called superheated steam).

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This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 30-Jul-2005 09:08 AM

I get this stuff, btw, from studying physics voraciously in high school. I still really have only an introductory level. The problem here is not that this is hard to explain without diagrams to show the force vectors.However, a simple example might do the trick.Imagine three billiard balls in a row. The two outer ones (first and third billiard balls) are hit gently -- with the same amount of force (but in opposite directions) toward the center one. What happens? The first billiard ball transfers its kinetic energy to the center one in the direction OPPOSITE of the third billiard ball. The third billiard ball transfer its kinetic energy to the center one in the direction OPPOSITE of the first one. When the two balls collide with the center ball, the forces, being in opposite directions, cancel each other out...and the center ball will just stay right where it was (depending on how good the pool players are, of course...heh).Forces are vectors...they have MAGNITUDE and DIRECTION. You cannot remove the DIRECTION aspect from the force...it is no longer a force if you do. Two forces of equal magnitude but with opposite directions can cancel each other out.Now consider two men. One is standing on the north pole. The other is standing on the south pole. When the man on the north pole drops his apple, the earth will move ever so slightly southwards (the direction the apple was moving). When the man on the south pole drops his apple, the earth will move ever so slightly northward, undoing the effects of the first apple-drop.Rain drops, especially in a world-wide flood, would be hitting the earth from all directions. The effects of a rain drop impact on one side of the earth will be canceled out by the effets of a rain drop impact on the opposite side of the earth. Overall, the net effect of the raining will be zero (if you don't include the devastation that a world-wide flood can do, of course).No megatron bomb blasts of heat, no need to compare rain drop impacts to giant meterorite impacts, or whatever.I reiterate that kinetic energy, during collisions, stays kinetic energy...it transfers among the involved objects (a BIT is converted to heat due to friction).--Jason

What cancels out the impact the tonnes of earth that your "idea" chucks up?

Nope.How would the heat produced by one rain drop cancel the heat produced by the second rain drop.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Heat is the kinetic energy of MOLECULES in an object. This is very different from the kinetic energy OF the object itself. No. This is the crux of YOUR misunderstanding. Earth is not a wizard among objects with the magical ability to turn kinetic energy into heat when other objects with kinetic energy collide with it.When one object collides with another object it transfers its KINETIC energy to the other object. This is true of all objects...the earth is no exception.The game of pool would be impossible if objects turned the kinetic energy of a colliding object into heat. See?--Jason

Has no one been reading my posts...kinetic energy doesn't equal heat energy and collisions do not convert kinetic energy into heat energy. Friction does that.The water drops transfer KINETIC energy to the earth -- i.e., the rain drop impact actually MOVES the earth a teensy-weensy bit. A raindrop impact on the opposite side of the earth cancels that movement out by moving the earth back.Forces are vectors...they have magnitude and direction...the directions cancel out. When and how does the kinetic energy of the rain drop turn into heat? Explain that, please. I'm sure SOME little bit of the kinetic energy DOES convert to heat, but it wouldn't be ALL the kinetic energy of the rain...not nearly all.--Jason