PV Gap

Renee Said:

UFO´s and Alien life on earth? Are we the only intelligent life form in our solar system?

We Answered:

I think UFOs are other phenomena, rather than alien spacecraft.
The other intelligent life in the Solar System all lives on Planet Earth, as far as we can tell. There might be microbial life on Mars, or simple aquatic life on Europa, but there is no real evidence for it, just conjecture.
Many large mammals have a high intelligence. Just because your dog or cat cannot speak to you in words, does not mean they don't have things they'd like to say to you!
What new technologies or discoveries about UFOs? There are no discoveries about real UFOs. No alien space vessel has ever been found.

Alien life in the rest of the Galaxy, and the other galaxies in the Universe, that is a different question. There is nothing so special about our planet that similar conditions couldn't have arisen dozens of times within our galaxy alone.

We'll need much more powerful technologies to be able to prove that life exists out there somewhere.

Maurice Said:

Does Our Earth and Solar System is inside a Super Massive Black Hole ?

We Answered:

No, it isn't possible. If we were inside a black hole, we would be compressed into the singularity. There is a black hole at the center of our galaxy, 26,000 light years away.

Shirley Said:

what is the diameter of solar system and that of orbit of the earth?

We Answered:

The diameter of the earth's orbit is about 2 AU, which is about equal to 186 million miles. The diameter of the solar system is a little trickier. If you include just the planets in the solar system, then the diameter would be 60.2 AU. (1 AU = 93 million miles). However, the solar system really extends out to what is referred to as the Oort Cloud. This is a vast region of space comprised of many particles such as comets and asteroids. The Oort Cloud has a diameter that is about 1000 times greater than the conventional universe. So it probably has a diameter close to 60,000 AU.

* AU = Astronomical Units.

Jack Said:

what keeps the earth in the solar system?

We Answered:

K the milky way spins around a black hole continually. It wasn't always that way, as the black hole sucked more and more planets and matter, as well as stars, it had a drainage effect. Thus became the spinning of our galaxy.
Now, what keeps us going around the sun is in fact gravity. Now our Earth is just sitting there, and becasue of that the strong pull of the sun just gradually pulls the Earth around it. Comets on the other hand, move at faster speeds than planets. Imagine, somebody throws a ball by you. If it's going slow you can grab it easily. If it's going fast, it's harder to catch. There are different physics involved of course, but it is a good way to explain it.

Raymond Said:

Why on EARTH do they put the "Planet-Earth Solar System-Sol" on the UN flag? What is the whole point of it?

We Answered:

That isn't on the UN flag.

http://www.moodle.munsw.org.uk/file.php/…
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~graceyor/…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the…

Trolling: you're doing it wrong.

Hilda Said:

In age dating, wat rocks led scientist ascribe to the earth and solar system 4.56 billion years?

We Answered:

Scientists have settled on the age of the earth of about 4.6 billion years as a result of research started almost 50 years ago. This conclusion was based upon carefully designed and conducted experiments that compared the ratios in rock samples of parent elements to daughter elements ( some of which would have been from radioactive decay of the parent, some of which may have been present in the sample at the time of formation). Since radioactive decay is known to occur at a constant rate, the age of a rock can be determined from the ratio of the parent element to the daughter element. The concerns about these dating methods were exactly the same that creationists continue to raise - presence of the daughter element at the time the rock was formed and possible loss / gain of either the parent or daughter element at some point in the history of the rock. For this reason, the tests were designed to account for those possibilities.

Initial daughter element can often be accounted for by either measuring the amount of an isotope of the daughter element (the ratio of isotopes are almost always constant). Another possibility is (as in the case of the potassium - argon - K-Ar method) that because the daughter element is gaseous, it would escape from the rock when the rock was molten. Once the rock cooled, the gaseous daughter would be trapped in the rocks crystal structure and could no longer escape. By experimentation, scientists have determined which rocks are suitable for various dating techniques. For K-Ar, for example, igneous rocks are good candidates for testing because they formed directly from molten magma and have a simple history. Metamorphic rocks do not work well because heating events in their history have allowed the escape of Argon (daughter element) and thus will indicate an age too young for the sample. Sedimentary rocks do not work because they are made up of a mixture of deposits of many other types of rocks, each of which would point to a different age. At any rate, scientists have devoted a great deal of effort to determining exactly which dating methods are appropriate for which types of rocks.

The other problem to avoid when dating rocks is the possibility that changes to the rock have caused loss or gain of either the parent or daughter element - this would lead to a false date (too old if parent element were lost, too young if daughter element were lost). I know of two methods that have been designed that can account for this possibility - isochron dating and the uranium-thorium-lead discordia / concordia method (actually three independent age calculations for one sample). Both of these methods have internal checks for the possible loss / gain of elements to the rock.

Creationists want the world to think that geologists just grab a rock and throw any old radiometric test at it and poof - there's the age of the rock. Reality is far more complex. If you examine the extensive research in the field of geochronology, you will see that one of the most important criteria in dating a sample lies in choosing an appropriate dating method for the sample. From G. Brent Dalrymple (see below):

One of the principal tasks of the geochronologist is to select the type of the material used for a dating analysis. A great deal of effort goes into the sample selection, and the choices are made before the analysis, not on the basis of the results. Mistakes are sometimes made but are usually caught by the various checks employed in the well-designed experiment.

The most compelling argument for an age of the earth of 4.5 billion years are the large number of independent tests that have been used to confirm this date. These tests have been performed on what are thought to be the earth's oldest surviving rocks, meteorites, and moon rocks. These tests have consistently given the same ages for each of these objects.
Examples include:

The Earths Oldest Rock's
Description Technique Age (in billions of years)

Amitsoq gneisses (western Greenland) Rb-Sr isochron 3.70 +- 0.12
Amitsoq gneisses (western Greenland) 207Pb-206Pb isochron 3.80 +- 0.12
Amitsoq gneisses (western Greenland) (zircons) U-Pb discordia 3.65 +- 0.05
Amitsoq gneisses (western Greenland) (zircons) Th-Pb discordia 3.65 +- 0.08
Amitsoq gneisses (western Greenland) (zircons) Lu-Hf isochron 3.55 +- 0.22
Sand River gneisses (South Africa) Rb-Sr isochron 3.79 +- 0.06

These are the oldest of the rocks dated on the earth so far (as of 1997). These are metamorphic rocks and thus have had some of their "history" lost - metamorphosis fully or partially resets the radiometric ages of rocks pointing to younger ages than the true age of the original rock. Older rocks may have been lost due to erosion or have not yet been discovered.

For many more examples of the consistancy of dating the same rocks with multiple methods, see Consistent Radiometric Dates by Joe Meert, a Geologist at the University of Florida. Dr. Meert's examples not only show that multiple radiometric methods come up with consistent dates for samples from the same locations, but that these results are also consistant with the paleomagnetic signature of the rocks, the position where the rocks would be expected to be (due to continental drift) at the time they were formed, and the cooling curves for the rocks. (Cooling curves deal with the fact that the different radiometric isotopes become "frozen" in the rocks at different temperatures. The higher the closure temperature for an isotope, the older the rock will be as dated by that isotope.) All of this consistancy rules out all of the arguments creationists attempt to make against radiometric dating techniques.
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/AgeEarth.html

Scientists also use geological principals to give relative dates to gelogical strata. http://homepage.usask.ca/~mjr347/prog/ge…
http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/…

Last but not least, scientists also use the Paleomagnetism studies of the ocean floor, which chronicles many polar shifts during the changing history of the ocean floor, to determine the age of the earth.

All of these methods, used independently, give the same approximate age of the earth; 4.56 billion years..

Claude Said:

Are there ANY planets other than Earth in the solar system that have the following elements?

We Answered:

Hydrogen and oxygen are very common elements in the solar system. With them and other elements, all sorts of chemical compounds are made. The more important elements are Nitrogen and Carbon - from which you have the CHON group (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen), which from the backbone of organic chemistry and without it, life as we know it, would not exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHON

Read about Fredrick Pohl's food factory in his "Beyond the Blue Event Horizon" -
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.as…