NASA Goes Loony: Moon Formed in Mere Hours?

Is it clickbait? NASA is claiming the moon
formed within hours after a collision

— Any sufficiently enhanced evolutionary story is indistinguishable from magic —

Collision May Have Formed the Moon in Mere Hours, Simulations Reveal (NASA Ames Research Center, 4 Oct 2022). Mere hours? What happened to the billions of years? Oh, they are still there. It went like this: Billions of yearssszzzz…Poof!…Billions of yearssszzzz. In this latest version of the Poof Spoof, NASA claims that the moon essentially popped into existence within hours after an incoming asteroid hit the Earth. Well, at least it works in a computer game played by materialists called “Computational Cosmology” (like Sim-Moon).

Billions of years ago, a version of our Earth that looks very different than the one we live on today was hit by an object about the size of Mars, called Theia – and out of that collision the Moon was formed. How exactly that formation occurred is a scientific puzzle researchers have studied for decades, without a conclusive answer.

Most theories claim the Moon formed out of the debris of this collision, coalescing in orbit over months or years. A new simulation puts forth a different theory – the Moon may have formed immediately, in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact.

Theia is an imaginary object required by the storytellers to get their materialist just-so story to work. It had to be there, because we’re here, aren’t we? There wasn’t a Creator to make the moon to rule the night. Science has ruled that idea out of court. So it had to happen somehow. The materialists reach for the general-purpose tool in their toolkit that hammers any nail, opens any jar and solves any puzzle: collisions.

The cosmos is filled with collisions – impacts are an essential part of how planetary bodies form and evolve. On Earth, we know that the impact with Theia and other changes throughout its history are part of how it was able to gather the materials necessary for life.

Corona with chromosphere during 1991 solar eclipse, by David Coppedge. Spectral analysis of the chromosphere led to the discovery of helium and the composition of distant stars.

Lucky for us, an asteroid just the right size hit the lifeless Earth at just the right speed at just the right angle with just the right materials necessary for life so that one day, billions of years later, poets and lovers could one day swoon under the moon, and scientists could learn about the chemistry of stars during a perfect solar eclipse. Isn’t it exciting to be able to use the Stuff Happens Law for everything, even beyond Darwinian evolution?

“This opens up a whole new range of possible starting places for the Moon’s evolution,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and lead author of the paper on these results published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We went into this project not knowing exactly what the outcomes of these high-resolution simulations would be. So, on top of the big eye-opener that standard resolutions can give you misleading answers, it was extra exciting that the new results could include a tantalisingly Moon-like satellite in orbit.”

The materialists have to look busy and get some use out of the supercomputers taxpayers paid for. Stories about magic moons fill the bill. They also titillate materialists with some extra excitement, tantalizing them with enticing suggestions. Using simulations, they can dress up their scenarios in elegant dance wear on their computer screens. Theia, the goddess of sight (as in gunsight) targets Gaia, the goddess of earth, to smash into her, fling off a moon, and deposit ingredients for life – if, that is, later comet impacts deliver enough water for oceans. Visualizing the scenario on a screen relieves stress caused by observational facts.

There have been other theories proposed to explain these similarities in composition, such as the synestia model – where the Moon is formed inside a swirl of vaporized rock from the collision – but these arguably struggle to explain the Moon’s current orbit.

This faster, single-stage formation theory offers a cleaner and more elegant explanation for both these outstanding issues. It could also give new ways to find answers for other unsolved mysteries. This scenario can put the Moon into a wide orbit with an interior that isn’t fully molten, potentially explaining properties like the Moon’s tilted orbit and thin crust – making it one of the most enticing explanations for the Moon’s origins yet.

Some day, running these divination exercises on supercomputers may approach the materialist’s nirvana: understanding. But like asymptotic curves, the lines never quite touch. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature. It yields job security for storytellers.

Beyond simply learning more about the Moon, these studies can bring us closer to understanding how our own Earth became the life-harboring world it is today.

“The more we learn about how the Moon came to be, the more we discover about the evolution of our own Earth,” said Vincent Eke, a researcher at Durham University and a co-author on the paper. “Their histories are intertwined – and could be echoed in the stories of other planets changed by similar or very different collisions.”

…. The better scientists can simulate and analyze what’s at play in these collisions, the more prepared we are to understand how a planet could evolve to be habitable like our own Earth.

That word “histories” points to a difference between simulations and real science. Creationists and evolutionists have the same evidence, and can analyze the same observations. Where they differ is in their accounts of history (see film Dismantled that explains this distinction). Obviously one cannot recreate a historical event like an asteroid impact. Computer games allow the materialist to spin scenarios and tweak parameters until a plausible moon emerges, so that they can sing “it evolved!”

The Darwin in the tale / The Darwin in the tale / Hi, Ho, Scenario / The Darwin in the tale.

Moonrock, by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean, depicts John Young and Charlie Duke collecting lunar samples on the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972. Bean’s personal experience on the moon added exceptional realism and accuracy to his paintings. Used by permission from Alan Bean.

Other forms of divination can supplement the quest for understanding other mysteries.

Lunar glass shows Moon asteroid impacts mirrored on Earth (Curtin University, 29 Sept 2022). Materialists at Curtin University in Australia looked at tiny crystals brought back from the moon by the Chang’E 5 mission launched by China in 2020. In these crystals, the materialists saw dinosaurs dying on a burning planet. As horrifying as the vision was, it brought them a feeling of that coveted goal, understanding.

Lead author Professor Alexander Nemchin, from Curtin University’s Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the findings imply that the timing and frequency of asteroid impacts on the Moon may have been mirrored on Earth, telling us more about the history of evolution of our own planet….

“We found that some of the age groups of the lunar glass beads coincide precisely with the ages of some of the largest terrestrial impact crater events, including the Chicxulub impact crater responsible for the dinosaur extinction event.

The dating methods leave enough wiggle room to keep the materialists busy for awhile trying to get their scenarios worked out.

“The next step would be to compare the data gleaned from these Chang’e-5 samples with other lunar soils and crater ages to be able to uncover other significant Moon-wide impact events which might in turn reveal new evidence about what impacts may have affected life on Earth,” Associate Professor Miljkovic said.

In his coverage at Space.com on Sept 28, Robert Lea explains that the microscopic crystal beads did not come from Earth. They are not beads from the impact that allegedly killed the dinosaurs. Instead, they were beads made on the moon itself, supposedly created by some of the impacts that formed thousands of lunar craters. The story hinges on dating some of those impacts to correspond with the Chicxulub impact or other impacts that caused mass extinctions in the evolutionary timeline. Those impacts, further, require assuming that the incoming bodies were not loners, but gangs of terrorists.

The new research from SSTC joins other work suggesting that this monster dinosaur-killing space rock may have been joined by other, smaller asteroids that also struck Earth and that could be revealed by studying the moon’s history of asteroid impacts.

“The study also found that large impact events on Earth, such as the Chicxulub crater 66 million years ago, could have been accompanied by a number of smaller impacts,” Nemchin said. “If this is correct, it suggests that the age-frequency distributions of impacts on the moon might provide valuable information about the impacts on the Earth or inner solar system.”

So what is it? Are impactors bringers of life, or bringers or death? Both. That’s the excitement of appealing to chance for scientific explanations. Stuff happens in strange ways!

If a miracle can create a perfect moon in hours, who needs the billions of years?

This is another demonstration of the fact that everyone believes in miracles. Some believe in miracles of chance. Others believe in miracles that were intelligently designed. But let’s have none of the nonsense that excuses materialists from faith in miracles. Not all miracles are equally probable, and not every appeal to miracles can point to sufficient and necessary causes. The belief that sheer dumb luck produces scientist brains from asteroid collisions through a long series of unplanned fortuitous events should be rejected on logical and mathematical grounds. Theistic miracles rely on universal human experience with intelligence as a cause.

Intelligence implies foresight, goal setting, purposeful arrangement of parts and engineering skill to bring them together. Our moon is not a chance object. It serves many vital functions for life on Earth: stabilization of Earth’s tilt, control of the tides, a night light for plants and animals, the marking of signs, seasons, days and years (Genesis 1:14-19), and something beautiful for humans to marvel at. And then there is the uncanny coincidence of the moon’s apparent size that allows for total solar eclipses—unique in the solar system—occurring on the one body that has observers to appreciate them and learn from them. The documentary The Privileged Planet by Illustra Media makes the case that without our moon, there would be no life. And if no life, there would be no materialist scientists speculating about lucky collisions giving us a perfect moon.

The anonymous human author of Psalm 104 viewed the harmony of nature as evidence of such a Being: “the Lord my God.” Speaking of the heavenly bodies, he wrote, “He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting” (v 19). The Psalmist David, who spent many nights under the moon as a shepherd boy, wrote the famous lines, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8). And to the Bible believer, everything in the heavens declares the glory of God (Psalm 19).