They’re fake. And I’m tired of them.

I deleted 160 users this morning. I also turned off registration. I hoped there would be an option to allow registration with a captcha, but there wasn’t, so I guess that in the unlikely event that anyone wants to register, they need to email me.

You may respond that I don’t look Neanderthalish, but Warren doesn’t look Cherokee either, so I don’t see a problem there.

I also do not have a cultural connection with Neanderthals and don’t speak their language, but Warren doesn’t have a cultural connection with Cherokees and doesn’t speak their language either, so I don’t see a problem in this regard.

You may also respond that there are lots of people with an equal claim to status as Neanderthals, and this is true, but I don’t see why I can’t claim my minority status just because others unaccountably haven’t claimed theirs. After all, Warren wasn’t deterred by the fact that there are lots of people with an equal or greater quantum of Cherokee ancestry who haven’t claimed minority status; why should I be deterred?

I am quite certain that Harvard University has no Neanderthal professors, and that they would eagerly hire me under their diversity program. And if not, of course, I’ll sue for discrimination.

She enthusiastically consumed her hairball medicine and her vitamins, though, and is now exploring the bedcovers, so I’m hoping it’s a passing thing. If not, I’ve threatened to take her to the vet this evening. That threat is usually effective.

Update: Molly seems better this evening and she has been eating normally with, to put it delicately, no evidence of intestinal obstruction. So I will watch closely but not carry out the vet threat. Yet.

This began with the long history of older theories of the Moon’s origin, which Isaac Asimov memorably described as Daughter, Sister, and Girlfriend.

• Daughter: The Moon was spun off from the Earth, leaving a big hole which is the Pacific Ocean. The problem with this is that there isn’t enough angular momentum in the system to achieve this.
• Sister: The Moon and the Earth have always been neighbors, accreting simultaneously in the same neighborhood. The problem with this is that the Moon and the Earth have different composition, most obviously in that the Moon is considerably less dense and must have little or no nickel-iron core.
• Girlfriend: The Moon came into existence elsewhere in the system but wandered too near the Earth and was captured. The problem with this is that the orbital mechanics just don’t work. The probability that the Moon would be moving slowly enough to be captured is too low to be credible.

Asimov concluded his discussion by saying that, when we consider the theories of the Moon’s origin and the problems with them, the only reasonable conclusion is that the Moon isn’t out there.

Of course, the Moon is out there, and eventually a hypothesis* was put forward that covers the issues pretty well**: the Big Splat. Asimov described this hypothesis but not in anything like the detail in this book.

The Big Splat hypothesis is that there was once another planet, which some call Theia, which did accrete in the same orbit with the Earth, and which grew to approximately the size of Mars. And then, one fine day, it collided with the Earth, striking a glancing blow which destroyed it and flung huge amounts of debris — mostly Theia but some Earth — into orbit. The nickel-iron core of Theia mostly stayed on Earth, so the debris was largely mantle and crust, which are considerably lighter than the core.

Very quickly, about half the debris fell together to form the Moon which, because of the energy of impact, for a while had a magma ocean six hundred miles deep! (The evidence for this came from some unusual rocks that the astronauts on the Moon just happened to spot by pure luck.)

Did the Earth have a magma ocean too? (Personally I don’t see how it could not have had one, given the horrific impact, but that’s just me…) The objection is that there is evidence of liquid water about that time, but “about that time” is a pretty wide range when we’re talking about something 4.5 billion years ago, more or less. The book suggests that there was a magma ocean but, like the Moon, it cooled pretty quickly and formed at least a crust, and then, unlike the Moon, there was a torrential rain that went on for fifty million years after which, yes, there was liquid water and indeed oceans.

I like this hypothesis.

** Of course, there are always more refinements and disputes about the details.

Years ago, a friend lent me a DVD of the X-Files, which I was watching one stormy night. In the particular episode I was watching, an expendable character was trying to make her way through a blacked-out house during a thunderstorm. As she came around a corner, a lightning flash revealed the Mad Killer with a Big Knife waiting for her — and then the lights went out. My lights.

I live out in the country, so there is no sky-glow to speak of and on a stormy night it is pitch dark except of course for the lightning flashes. I didn’t have a flashlight except in the bedroom, so I had to feel my way through the pitch-dark house with the image of the Mad Killer with a Big Knife in my mind. Of course, intellectually I knew there was no problem, but it was still pretty frightening.

The next day I went to Home Depot and got my emergency lights which plug into the wall and turn on when the power goes off.

My wi-fi is, of course, dead, but the phone system is still up and so I can surf the Internet despite the outage.

I am reminded of the time when I was in grad school and was printing a term paper when the power went off. I was in some ways less prepared — I didn’t have a flashlight and had to use candles to see — and in some ways more prepared — my computer and printer were on a UPS. So I sat around and watched my paper continue to print … by candle-light.

I love modern technology.

It seems there is some dispute about the climate of the Hadean Era, not surprisingly since there are no rocks at all left from it and reconstruction is necessarily theoretical.

The view I favored is that there was no standing water because (a) water and other volatiles were driven off by the collision between the Earth and the proto-Moon, and it would take hundreds of millions of years to restore the water via volcanic eruptions and comets; and (b) again thanks to the collision, the Earth’s surface would be very hot, maybe not molten, but so hot as to evaporate any water that did arrive. This is the Hot Earth view.

I find, however, that others argue the Cool Earth view that there were indeed oceans at this time; that even though the Earth was too hot for liquid water at present atmospheric pressures, the atmosphere was so dense that water could remain liquid far above the current surface boiling point (“Cool” is a relative term, obviously). I’m not clear on how such a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere could have disappeared, though. Did it become carbonate rocks? Or what? Or was this prior to the collision?

Obviously, I am not a geologist or a paleontologist, just looking longingly from the sidelines…

Anyway, I then found that as part of the Hot Earth view, once the Earth cooled down some, the water vapor from volcanoes and comets rained down, a constant torrential rain for a hundred million years that formed the oceans … wait. The oceans average less than three miles deep. Three miles is 190,080 inches. 190,080/100,000,000 is, um, 0.0019 inches per year. This is not a downpour. This is not a drizzle. This is not even *detectable*.

Okay, so there could still be a constant torrential rain for a hundred million years if we assume that the atmosphere cooled enough to allow water vapor to condense, but most of the Earth — particularly, I guess, the lower areas — was still hot enough to evaporate it. So rain falls on the high areas and low areas alike, evaporates immediately off the low areas (maybe even before it reaches the surface) and flows down off the high areas in great waterfalls that also evaporate … That’s a cool image, I think, if I can figure out how to create it.

There’s not going to be a lot of high ground left after this, though, is there? Erosion on steroids! About the only high ground will be freshly formed volcanoes and recent lava flows. Fortunately there will be lots of those. I also read about some cool craters in Idaho that formed by basalt lava trying to erupt through surface water, which sounds very like what you’d see on the early Earth as I imagine it. Not that such craters would last long because of the rain.

No wonder there are no rocks left from the Hadean.

First off, there is no water. The ground and air are so hot that any water would immediately evaporate, so I figure there would be dense clouds from all the water vapor.

There would be frequent meteorite strikes, including really big ones, but “frequent” is a relative term, given that this went on for tens of millions of years. A given area might not see a large meteorite for millennia.

There was a lot of vulcanism. The Earth was still very hot from its formation, and it was internally heated by radioactivity — most of the radioactive materials that were incorporated into the early Earth broke down a long, long time ago.

Both meteorite strikes and vulcanism would produce dust, and what would happen to that dust? There are no plants to anchor the soil, no water for it to fall into, so it seems to me that it would just blow around, endlessly, eroding the mountains built up by the volcanoes and thus producing more dust, until it either fell on something hot enough to fuse it in place or piled up enough that the dust on the bottom started to lithify. The Dust Bowl times a million, I think.

Hence this picture.

Return to the Hadean Era