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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
Makes you wonder what they saw. The ancients believed that the sky was made of stone and that now and then a piece of it fell to earth (meteorites); and that the planets hung in their own spheres, some closer some farther away; and that Saturn was the sphere of the 7th heaven, the highest; and yes, ancient cultures do talk about the waters above; even the Bible refers to the waters above and the waters below the firmament. Wonder what they saw, to think there was so much water in the sky? And don't tell me it was just the clouds.  |
Or was it that they knew nothing of the cycling of water? And, without the evidence of big buckets rising to the heavens or the appearance of a large sprinkling can or garden hose, they just figured that all of the water must have already been up there, and periodically God or the gods opened windows and let it pour though. Not much more mysterious than that.
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No explanation is given for placing the event at 4 billion years in the past. I wonder if it's to keep the basic uniformitarian structure in place in spite of the evidence? And I wonder if that's because they want to keep up the illusion of safety from catastrophe in our own time?
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I've asked this question a few times in different ways to
JPL's online computerized scientist, but he was clueless (next I'm going to ask him about Balrog's wings...
) regarding the age of the impact. Probably programmed with the uniformitarian code already. My uneducated guess is that it has to do with the togography and spin of the planet. More recent craters are more 'jaggy - rough,' and spew a bunch of particulate matter into the atmosphere. The Mars impact is smooth. Also, an impact with an object the size of the planet (or planetoid) Pluto surely would make Mars wobble on its axis, which it no longer does. Guess that 3.9 billion years lets you recover from such violence.
That and there is evidence of volcanoes forming after the impact.