How to Keep the Solar System Old: Struggle and Hope

Keeping the consensus age of the solar system is vital
to evolution, but observations keep getting in the way.

 

Evolution is dead without its billions of years. Darwin needed exorbitant and reckless withdrawals from the bank of time for his Stuff Happens Law to make humans from bacteria. If the solar system is far younger than the current consensus age of 4.5 billion years, it would imply the Earth is young. And if the Earth is young, Big Science would shudder with horror. The thought of young-Earth creationists saying “I told you so!” is too distasteful for academia to imagine or permit. Darwinism would be gone, theism would be in style again, and the whole world order that needs materialism to justify its anti-Christian policies and libertine sexuality would lose its foundation.

Too much is invested in evolution’s billions of years to let it crash like the FTX fiasco and embarrass two centuries of old-Earth thinking into a historic detour. It’s important to realize that scientists would not have to shorten their timeline all the way down to the Biblical creationist’s age calculation of 6,000 to 7,000 years for their empire to collapse. If the upper limit came down to 1 million years, or 10 million, or 100 million or even a billion, that would suffice to rattle the entire Darwinian superstructure.

We have reported on bodies in the solar system that look “younger than thought” for two decades now. Here are more reports in the science news. As is our custom, we look only at the secular materialistic sources and scientific papers. Take off the billions-of-years glasses and see how these objects look with an open mind.

Mercury

Present Day Endogenic and Exogenic Activity on Mercury (American Geophysical Union Geophysical Science Letters, 14 Aug 2022).

This paper revealed surprising evidence of current activity on Mercury, the innermost rocky planet. As a small body not much larger than our moon, Mercury should be dead and cold despite its proximity to the sun (which only heats Mercury’s surface). An occasional meteor strike might change things, but earthquakes? (or Mercuryquakes?) How could such a small sphere keep its core liquid long enough to produce endogenic (interior-generated) changes that continue to the present day?

We use before and after (temporal) image pairs collected by the Mercury Dual Imaging System to identify 20 surface changes on Mercury that formed between 2011 and 2015. We identified at least one change likely resulting from a newly formed impact crater with bright rays that extend away from the site. If all the changes result from impact events, then the present-day rate of impactors striking the innermost planet is 1,000 times higher than models predict. Therefore, we investigate other sources for these detected changes. We located several changes on steep slopes near tectonic landforms, consistent with ongoing tectonic activity. Additionally, we identified several changes in areas adjacent to hollow formations, consistent with present-day activity.

Venus

Geologically Recent Areas as One Key Target for Identifying Active Volcanism on Venus (AGU Geophysical Research Letters, 23 Nov 2022).

Planetary scientists have known since the Magellan mission in the 1980s that Venus’s surface looks young, as if the whole planet was resurfaced in a very short period of time. This new paper considers whether volcanoes are still active on Venus and acknowledges the presence of “extremely young surface ages” from various missions.

Combining this new work with previous studies by Brossier et al. (2020, 2021), this demonstrates that the Magellan data set is able to provide important clues about the materials on the surface, which can be used as a potential chronometer for the surface age of Venus. The results of this manuscript are extremely relevant to our understanding of how volcanic processes are currently acting on Venus. Further, these models can be tested with the upcoming fleet of missions expected to arrive at Venus in the next decade.

For more quotes, see bottom of this article.

Asteroids

Small asteroids are probably young (University of Bern, 30 Nov 2022).

Japan’s Hayabusa-2 mission collected samples from asteroid Ryugu two years ago and returned them to Earth. Scientists at the University of Bern studied images of the landing site: “The crater made by the impact was far larger than expected.” This led to conclusions about the surface material: “the asteroid probably has a very loose internal structure and is only held together by very small cohesive forces and gravitational interactions.” Planetary scientists refer to these as “rubble pile” asteroids. Since it becomes hard to imagine them surviving like that for billions of years, they conclude that “small asteroids are probably young” – not just young, but very young.

The relationships between the characteristics of the projectiles and the size of the crater derived from the results indicate that the surfaces of small asteroids must be very young. “Our results also show that low cohesion can have a significant impact on crater formation. On Ryugu, there are various geological surface units that have different ages. This may be attributable to the influence of cohesion,” adds Jutzi.

The paper about this study in Nature Communications (30 Nov 2022) puts some numbers on this assessment: 1 to 10 million years. Those numbers are 3 and 2 orders of magnitude less than the previous estimate of a billion years for the asteroid’s surface age. To visualize these young ages in terms of the assumed age of the solar system, picture a 45-foot rope as a timeline of 4.5 billion years (see graph below). These new estimates would be like 1 inch to a 10th of an inch at the end of the rope representing the present time. What about those “various geological surface units that have different ages”? How old are they?

Assuming asteroid Ryugu’s cohesion is negligible and crater formation is controlled by the gravity, showed that the absolute model ages of asteroid Ryugu’s geologic units are in about 2–30 Myrs range.

Dramatic sampling shows asteroid Bennu is nothing like scientists expected (Space.com, 14 Nov 2022).

Bennu is a small rubble-pile asteroid that that was targeted for a landing in October 2020 by the OSIRIS-REx mission for sample collection. The little object turned out to be totally different from expectations.

“We expected the surface to be pretty rigid, kind of like if you touch down on a gravel pile: a little bit of dust flying away and a few particles jumping up,” Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx, mission told Space.com.

“But as we were bringing back the images after the event, we were stunned,” he continued. “We saw a giant wall of debris flying away from the sample side. For spacecraft operators, it was really frightening.“

The surprise was echoed by Phys.org, Live Science, and the Southwest Research Institute. Although these articles did not focus on Bennu’s age, it is hard to visualize how a “fluffy” little asteroid could remain intact for billions of years if such a tiny impact results in a “giant wall of debris” flying away from it. When SWRI says the following, are they knowing about billions of years, or just assuming them?

Rocks are scattered across its heavily cratered surface, indicating that it has had a rough-and-tumble existence since being liberated from its much larger parent asteroid some millions or billions of years ago.

Millions or billions; what does a few orders of magnitude matter when you are accustomed to reckless drafts on the bank of time? Two papers in Science Magazine (here, here) didn’t question delicate Bennu’s assumed venerable age, either.

Saturn and Its Rings

Saturn’s atmospheric response to the large influx of ring material inferred from Cassini INMS measurements (Icarus, Feb 2023 issue).

This open-access paper describes how observations are squeezing old-Earthers (and old-Saturners) to distraction. The Cassini spacecraft measured ring material falling into Saturn “at a surprisingly large rate,” meaning that the innermost ring is decaying more rapidly than thought. How much material hits Saturn? 10,000 kilograms per second! Do the math: could that continue for billions of years? Watch the authors of the paper struggle to maintain long ages in spite of the evidence they could not deny:

Cassini dives through the gap between the D Ring and Saturn during its Grand Finale before burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere on September 15, 2017.

During the Grand Finale stage of the Cassini mission, organic-rich ring material was discovered to be flowing into Saturn’s equatorial upper atmosphere at a surprisingly large rate. Through a series of photochemical models, we have examined the consequences of this ring material on the chemistry of Saturn’s neutral and ionized atmosphere. We find that if a substantial fraction of this material enters the atmosphere as vapor or becomes vaporized as the solid ring particles ablate upon atmospheric entry, then the ring-derived vapor would strongly affect the composition of Saturn’s ionosphere and neutral stratosphere. Our surveys of Cassini infrared and ultraviolet remote-sensing data from the final few years of the mission, however, reveal none of these predicted chemical consequences. We therefore conclude that either (1) the inferred ring influx represents an anomalous, transient situation that was triggered by some recent dynamical event in the ring system that occurred a few months to a few tens of years before the 2017 end of the Cassini mission, or (2) a large fraction of the incoming material must have been entering the atmosphere as small dust particles less than 100 nm in radius, rather than as vapor or as large particles that are likely to ablate. Future observations or upper limits for stratospheric neutral species such as HCN, HCN, and CO at infrared wavelengths could shed light on the origin, timing, magnitude, and nature of a possible vapor-rich ring-inflow event.

Scientists usually wish to avoid the first option (a recent anomalous transient situation), because it implies human beings live in a special time. In evolutionary thinking, humans happened along the scene without plan or purpose. To have some special event occur recently in a short time, such that humans just happened to be around to observe it, is a distasteful notion in the long-age evolutionary worldview.

For a different way to look at the evidence, consider my articles at Evolution News about how fine-timing gives evidence of intelligent design: 17 Oct, especially 18 Oct, and 19 Oct 2022.

The authors did us the favor of extrapolating the effects of the measured influx on the age of the rings. Answer: “the rings would be completely eroded within 50 Myr (or 5000 years for the D ring alone).” 50 million years sounds like a lot, but that is far, far too little time for evolution. The bulk of the paper struggles to find explanations that could keep the rings old, but the lack of atmospheric signatures of vapor left them only two options indicated in the quote above. In the concluding Discussion and Conclusion sections, they left the matter unresolved and could only hope that the James Webb Space Telescope might offer additional data to help. That hope, incidentally, has begun today: the JWST released images of clouds on Saturn, reported New Scientist on 1 Dec 2022.

Pluto and Charon

A new explanation for the reddish north pole of Pluto’s moon Charon (Phys.org, 7 Sept 2022).

One surprise observed by the New Horizons flyby of the Pluto-Charon system in 2015 was the reddish zone on Charon’s north pole. What causes it? Bob Yirka at Phys.org relayed new hypotheses that Charon (the large moon of Pluto) could have had a liquid ocean that erupted material onto the surface in cracks, which was subsequently darkened by the solar wind. How much material? The paper in Nature Communications (9 Aug 2022) estimates that over a quadrillion kilograms of methane were erupted onto its surface. The paper speculates that the eruptions took place 2-4 billion years ago, but that “reddening occurs over kyr to Myr timescales.” This is the “endogenic” theory of Charon’s red north pole.

An “exogenic” theory was published earlier in Science Advances 17 June 2022: “Charon’s Refractory Factory.” Those authors claim that sufficient methane is swept up from Pluto to account for the reddish zone. The methane is incorporated into complex hydrocarbon molecules that “hop” into cold traps on the surface such as the north pole (a similar process is thought to occur on Saturn’s moon Iapetus). They estimate 10 quintillion molecules of complex hydrocarbons per square meter land on Charon each Pluto winter (248 Earth years). Whether the hydrocarbons arrive by endogenic or exogenic processes, both hypotheses depend on cryovolcanism – a dynamic geological process requiring fluid interiors. Small bodies so far from the sun and far from the gravitational influence of other bodies were expected to be long cold and dead. One of the great surprises of the New Horizons mission was how young Pluto and Charon both looked (17 Sept 2015, 25 Sept 2015).

To illustrate the extreme difference in assumed ages of solar system objects, we reproduce our graph below. Pay attention to the right end, representing the present. That’s where we are; that’s where scientists can observe present realities. Even 10 million years represents a tiny fraction of the “reckless drafts on the bank of time” that evolutionary biologists and planetary scientists need and assume. Look how far off the consensus has been! But 1 million years is 1/10th of the purple line at top right. Proceeding, 100,000 years, or 10,000 years, would vanish into lines so thin they could hardly be seen. And yet all of human history fits into less than 10,000 years! Scientists have never witnessed any of those vast stretches of time. How do they know they even existed, apart from philosophy? Their dating methods are riddled with unproveable assumptions chosen to guarantee long ages.

The surprising youth of the Solar System is not restricted to Mercury, Venus, asteroids, Saturn and Pluto. Virtually every body visited by spacecraft has similar stories to tell: vast differences between what the billions-of-years believers expected to find, and what they actually witnessed. For details, search on specific planet names at this site, or look through our Dating Methods category.

The realities of scientific observation, whether in planetary science, geology, biology, microbiology or astronomy, followed by the wholesale rejection of creation by Big Science, give every indication that Paul was exactly right when he said that the ungodly “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” Truth suppression has been so embedded into academia’s philosophy of science, they don’t even realize any longer that they are doing it. Science since Darwin has been defined as naturalism. This allows them to reject from the outset any hint of creation! Such thinking was never on the minds of the founders of modern science, like Robert Boyle.

Materialist scientists can look at young features, as shown here, and twist their minds into pretzels trying to keep them old. It’s as if they feel obligated to deny any other possibility. We have observations and evidence—eyewitness evidence—that God created the world and life very long ago. Considering the creation worldview, however, would require giving up selfishness and pride, and humbly listening to the words of their Creator. And so they suppress it. After 176 years of Darwinian materialism, truth suppression has been inscribed onto the stony heart of Big Science with an iron stylus.

The reactions of scientists also give every indication that hostile beings are steering scientists away from the truth. The plan of Satan and his angels is to prevent, mock, and censor any thoughts of how the world really came into existence by an intelligent designer. He has succeeded marvelously—perhaps beyond even his dreams—by capturing education, the media, science, entertainment, politics and philosophy. The “god of this world” has turned truth suppression into a fine art, and established it as the whole purpose of fallen mankind. Now he has moved on into sexual perversion (as we will see in tomorrow’s article). This mastermind of the coming Antichrist knows his time is short, because his defeat was guaranteed by the resurrection of Christ (a historical, verifiable event).

In spite of all this bad news, there is good news. Any individual can repent and believe in what the Maker of All Things has provided: the free gift of salvation, because Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, with all the love and mercy of God, paid for our sins. To get off the broad way that leads to destruction, and to start on the narrow way that leads to life, see our Site Map for trail markers.

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More from the Venus paper:

Brossier et al. (2022) analyze the radar emissivity excursions of seven different sites at Ganis Chasma, four of which already studied by Shalygin et al. (2015) using Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) data of the Venus Express, while other three sites were selected separately for comparison (Figure 1). Their results show that for a given (range of) altitude and temperature, the emissivity excursions do not occur uniformly over all the analyzed surface materials (Figure 2). This implies that, in the study area, the observed emissivity excursions are mainly controlled by the presence (or absence) of distinct ferroelectric minerals with high dielectric constant. Based on the magnitude of the observed radar emissivity excursions of the seven different sites, the authors conclude that sites 1, 3, and 4 may be characterized by unweathered and thus extremely young surface materials where high dielectric minerals have not yet been formed.

Other recent studies have combined laboratory results, geologic interpretation, and Venus Express VIRTIS 1 micron surface emissivity data to provide additional lines of evidence for recently or possibly ongoing volcano-tectonic activity at Idunn Mons, the major volcanic structure of Imdr Regio on Venus (Cutler et al., 2020; D’Incecco et al., 2017, 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c; Filiberto et al., 2020, 2021; López et al., 2022). Combining this new work with previous studies by Brossier et al. (2020, 2021), this demonstrates that the Magellan data set is able to provide important clues about the materials on the surface, which can be used as a potential chronometer for the surface age of Venus. The results of this manuscript are extremely relevant to our understanding of how volcanic processes are currently acting on Venus. Further, these models can be tested with the upcoming fleet of missions expected to arrive at Venus in the next decade.