Edit:
Yep, a quick check of wikipedia indicates they are stored under nitrogen to keep away moisture.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock

but it may not apply when we’re talking about things like the big bang

But the argument is a direct reference to ID, not anything to do with the big bang.

ID claimed to be science. Pro-ID authors went to great lengths to claim that the designer does not have to be god (at one point, Dembski went so far as to suggest “the designer” could be “space aliens”). Thus, if ID is science, unmeasureable causation is not permitted and god is therefore ruled out as “the designer”. The central claim of ID is that complexity in biology is a signature of intentional design.

Putting this together brings you to an infinite recursion. Whatever intelligent agency “designed” life on Earth must itself have been designed. The only way out is to take the “goddidit” cop-out. And if you believe that god caused biological entities to be the way they are, and if you believe god to be both omniscient and omnipotent, then what business do you have trying (and expecting) to find his fingerprints all over biology?

– if time didn’t exist before the big bang, then causality becomes meaningless (I know this allows for the universe causing itself without God, but remember that Occam’s razor is only a good rule of thumb, not an inalienable rule of the universe

Actually, it is neither. It is a rule of logical thought. One should never assume the existence of something for which one has no evidence (my paraphrase). To do so is to be irrational.

However, applying Occam’s razor to reach a conclusion enforces the provisional nature of that conclusion, and forces one to change one’s conclusion if evidence later comes to light that shows the conclusion to be wrong or incomplete. But that’s OK.

We all need something beyond us to believe in – for most people here, it seems to be the explanatory power of science and skepticism. This need can indeed be suppressed, but not erased, as it appears to be fundamental to the human condition.

I disagree.

It is not necessary to believe in anything to accept the persuasive power of physical evidence. One needs merely to adopt the assumption that our sensory experience of the world correlates directly with a reality that is external to the self.

And if one does not adopt this assumption, one never gets beyond cogito ergo sum.

It is eminently possible for a rational human to eschew any need for irrational belief.

While the water in what was to become the moon would be vapourized on impact, it would not have anywhere – no atmosphere around it – to boil away into, and would coallesce back into the bodies of the moon and Earth.

On the contrary, the presence of an atmosphere decreases the propensity of water to boil. Atmospheric pressure increases the amount of energy needed to make water boil. Autoclaves in hospitals (used to sterilise instruments) boil water under pressure, which allows higher temperatures to be reached than would be possible at 1 atm.

THe absence of any atmosphere at all reduces the boiling point of water to below 0 °C. But the energy of the impact would have put a lot of heat into all of the components of nascent Earth that got blasted off into space (as well as leaving the surface of said nascent Earth molten).

Once water has vaporised, it would be free to dissipate into the vacuum of space, and would also be subject to bombardment of the solar wind (once it was outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, assuming Earth had one that early on).

At what point do you go from saying ‘This is the theory of how the moon formed, but we can’t explain XYZ with it yet.” to “There is no good theory of how the moon formed, we just don’t know right now.”

I’ll point out both sentences are followed by “We need to do more science to find out.”

It may be clear to you, but it’s far from clear to most of the world’s scientists, including many who are devout Christians.

“The sooner you scientists accept that, the sooner you can begin solving the really pressing problems facing us at the moment.”

Scientists will hopefully go where the evidence leads, not where their faith requires them to go.

No, the Moon wasn’t a single chunk struck off the Earth like a chip knocked off a rock by a hammer. It was *much* more than that.

The theory is that a Mars-sized planet struck the proto-Earth and blasted maybe a quarter of its mass into space. This wasn’t a single chunk. At these sorts of speeds and sizes, this material was mostly vaporised and scattered into space all around the Earth. Many chunks fell back to Earth, some chunks were probably hurled away from Earth permanently, and the rest coalesced into the Moon.

This early Moon wasn’t a solid chunk of rock. The energy of the impact was such that the early Moon would have been a ball of magma. And it was of such a size that its own gravity was enough to cause it to form the shape of a sphere.

Anyway, @The Tim Channel: Your hardline atheist polemical reaction/rant against Camping has some good points (based strictly on the evidence, we can only really be agnostic), but from my POV it may be incorrect to call someone “nonreligious”. We all need something beyond us to believe in – for most people here, it seems to be the explanatory power of science and skepticism. This need can indeed be suppressed, but not erased, as it appears to be fundamental to the human condition. And even if all religious people are deluded, then this is perhaps the only case where a delusion can be better than truth (independent of whatever the Hitchenses, Dawkinses and Harrises observe in there one-sided rants on religion’s evil) – but based on your dichotomy between the “honestly deluded” and the “dishonestly deluded” you seem to acknowledge this. And I do acknowledge how stupid religion can be in the US – in fact, such things may be a factor in your nation’s imminent decline.

And as for my comments regarding evolution and my “agnosticism” – evolution is true independent of how I feel about it, but be aware that because of my upbringing and psychology, part of me will ALWAYS remain a diehard Christian fundamentalist (and while I won’t do it on my own kids it wasn’t child abuse, thanku very much Dawkins fans). I can suppress this nature, but what I think about God usually depends on how I feel, especially during these adolescent years. As well, the “who designed the designer?” argument is always a valid question, but it may not apply when we’re talking about things like the big bang – if time didn’t exist before the big bang, then causality becomes meaningless (I know this allows for the universe causing itself without God, but remember that Occam’s razor is only a good rule of thumb, not an inalienable rule of the universe – much less one that can extend beyond and before the universe!) I actually see the cosmological/causality arguments of Aristotle, Kalaam and Aquinas as valid ones; I just always saw point 3 (God caused the universe) as a non sequitur.

We know that the majority of Earths water comes from volcanism. It makes sence that the moon is the same, I think its really the presence of an atmosphere that prevented Earths water from boiling away. The moon couldn’t hold on to an atmosphere so its water was lost to space.

mid infrared spectrophotometric observations of fragments b and c of wasserman

It must have hyperbolaed in, got caught in the gravity well and slowed, and on one of the cometary passes, actually skimmed the Earths atmo, sloshing off its mantle, atmosphere, and water. Then since it was lightend up and orbit perturbed, it settled in on the next pass for a long term stay.

Earth is a factor of 5 -50 too water rich, and the impactors theory of water deposition has been shown in recent studies to be a factor of 20-200 too low to leave us with the surface water we have now.

The isotope ratios do vary throughout the system, but since it has been shown that almost every planet has switched orbits, you will never be able to pin that to an AU distance.

If the debris disk theory even holds up.

EVERY single object in the system from interstellar dust, to carbonaceous chrondites , and the rest of the asteroids so far has shown partial melting, and there is NO way to square that with accreation disk theory.
There has been lots of computer modeling with eddys/vortexes etc, but there is no way that the interiors of all these dust particles, asteroids, and meteorites could have partially melted, been tumbled to scour off the rough edges, then reformed as “hydrous” materials (as in mixed in mud, instead of “atomic” water) in the vacuum and cold of space.

We are back to the asteroid belt being a collision of a couple bodies at the very minimum.

The other HUGE problem is that it appears the the TNO’s and the Oort cloud comet belt are made of the same materials. This is an even bigger problem, as the Oort bodies are so far out there they should have completely different composition as the stuff as close as Pluto.

Oort is so far out, that ALL the stars in the Milky Way galaxy can fit inside their orbit around the sun.

As to the Ceres comment about being rich in water, this could easily be a spectrographic artifact brought about by surface roughness. If it has a very rough surface (microscopically) it can actually trap the solar wind hydrogen and oxygen, and combine them to “atomic” water on fractal surfaces. this will give you a spectro reading of water, and you can do some gymnastics and hand waving to show that it is a “stretching” version of water, but with somewhere around 3,000 spectro signatures of water proposed, you can find water wherever you want to.

there is a lot of debate about whether this is what is happening with the comet researchers and professors right now, they have a lot invested, both in dollars, credibility, and computer time, in the idea that all the comets are made of ice, and asteroids are a totally different, rock and iron based body pool, that it is skewing the science and observations.

We may find out in 100 years if we keep voting the same bozo’s into office. Or in 10 years if we start mining out there.

Make a choice, and vote for it. Be able to justify it to the great grandkids why you left them in a polluted well, and maybe explain to them that we had a chance it intercept impactors if we had just done it.

We are running out of capital by giving it to the banks, and running out of resources for building the infrastructure to get there.

@20 MTU : “Or is it [the water] chemically bound up into the rocks?”
**** Appreciable water can be dissolved into many crystal structures while retaining it’s molecular identity. The higher the confining pressure, the better, but it can remain dissolved against vacuum (but not very much of it). A significant number of minerals can also contain appreciable water as hydroxyl ions substituting for oxygens (with linked substitution of metal ions to balance charges). Typical analytical techniques start off by drying the ground sample over a dessicant, or under vacuum, for many hours at temperatures in excess of 100degC. It’s chemically bound water, not stuff you could wring out.

@31. mike burkhart : “I was just thinking,could some of this water come from comets collideing with the moon? If Earth has been hit by comets then chances are the moon has been hit to.”
**** That’s why they’re looking in grains of volcanic glass ; the water must have been present in the melt which then sprayed up above the surface, froze, and became a glass. So the water was present in the rock which melted in the sub-surface. (It may have been concentrated somewhat by the melting process. That’s common in the terrestrial mantle.)
**** It’s a racing certainty the the Moon has been hit by comets. There is an observational programme (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/program_overview.html) looking at meteor impacts in the dark part of the gibbous Moon surface ; eventually this will spot a comet impacting. (I use the geologist’s “eventually” ; it may be a long wait! Bring packed lunch(-es).)

@39. Craig : “Let’s assume the Mars-sized impact theory is correct and that we have the Earth – Moon pair of today. What if that object had missed? The mass of the moon would not have been shed from the early Earth. There would have been no tidal forces. What would that have meant for the development of life as we know it?”
**** Solar tides would have continued – about a quarter to a third of the magnitude of the lunar tides (local sea-floor shape resonance effects are considerable complicating factors).
**** The Moon is a little over 1% of the Earth’s mass ; the gravitational difference would have been small.
**** Of course, how much these differences might have compounded … requires much better understanding of the origin of life than we have at this time.

I think I see it: god is an orange Teletubby?

While the water in what was to become the moon would be vapourized on impact, it would not have anywhere – no atmosphere around it – to boil away into, and would coallesce back into the bodies of the moon and Earth.

The only proper philosophy for ‘belief’ IMHO: MILITANT AGNOSTIC

“I don’t know and neither the hell does anybody else!”

Even Dawkins posits a five percent chance of a ‘creator’ (though he’d be loathe to consider it as approximating any of the past or current day descriptions thereof)

From my perch in the cosmos, I’ve not seen any phenomenon, nor have I witnessed or read about any experiment that supports the religious conclusions theists come to. By embracing the honesty and truth (IMHO) of the “I don’t-neither do you” viewpoint, one can easily identify religious frauds and hucksters with the precision and deftness of even as grizzled a veteran skeptic as James Randi.

Most religious people aren’t hucksters, though they’re easy prey for fraud, given their predilection for irrational belief. I sort the religious crowd into two camps. The honestly deluded and those set on dishonestly defrauding the deluded.

Talking to God is not sufficient evidence of mental instability. That’s just wishful thinking. It’s believing that God is talking back that illustrates the horrible extent of your mental deterioration. What’s really hard to watch is when the mental deterioration and the physical deterioration overlap. Such is the case with Harold Camping. FWIW, I’m inclined to pity the guy (and his ilk) as deluded believers honestly defrauding themselves, unlike e.g. the Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker variety. For a guy who is supposedly worth even more than Sarah Palin, his house looked amazingly middle class compared to Sarah’s old Alaskan abode, to say nothing of the 1.7 million dollar McMansion she just bought in AZ!!!

At the end of the day there’s a lot of crazy people. I hope I’ve made the job of identifying them a bit easier. It’s something I have a lot more experience with, than moon and planetary formation, (not to mention how the effects of a few extra ppm of H20 might complicate the matter).

The real work comes in sorting out the dangerously crazy from the harmlessly crazy. Your task will be easier if you’ve had the experience of living is almost any major US population center. If so, then you’ve likely a lot of first-hand experience with mentally challenged individuals, because in the interest of humanity, our government decided twenty or so odd years ago that it would be in everybody’s best interest if they were free to walk the streets. Suffice it to say that if you have a knack for identifying the adorable street lunatics from the truly deranged and dangerous, you’re already ahead of the game.

For those with less experience, an example:

The guy waving the sign about the coming/imminent Rapture that you see everyday on the way to work?: Ignore him as always.

The guy waving the sign about killing all the abortion doctors?: Danger Will Robinson Danger !!

Enjoy.

The sooner you scientists accept that, the sooner you can begin solving the really pressing problems facing us at the moment.

What if that object had missed? The mass of the moon would not have been shed from the early Earth. There would have been no tidal forces. What would that have meant for the development of life as we know it?