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Erm, is this actually news? I remember a small book from my childhood where the early earth was described as covered with water. My memories are vague though be
by stewbrew 7y ago
Erm, is this actually news? I remember a small book from my childhood where the early earth was described as covered with water. My memories are vague though because I was more interested in the dinosaurs and sable tigers.
- rjkennedy98 7y agoI remember a big book from my childhood where the early earth was described as covered with water. I remember being more interested in the animals on the ark going in 2 by 2.
- gmt2027 7y agoSounds like My Book of Bible Stories. https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/bible-stories/ https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/bible-stories/
- gwd 7y agoBut even before that: > In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. ...And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. ... And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. So: First, Earth covered with water, clouds right up against the water, no sun Then, Earth covered with water, a clear visible area between the clouds and the water. Then Continents appear.
- umvi 7y agoWhere did all the water go? There aren't enough clouds to cover all the continents with water. I'm guessing a lot of it must be trapped in the mantle.
- rriepe 7y agoIt's not about mass but distribution. If all the land is flat, there won't be anything sticking out after the water is added.
- lurquer 7y agoWell, just to go along with the story... The Flood account specifically states that the water came not only from rain, but from the "fountains in the deep." Gen 7:11.
- nickpinkston 7y agoHot tub earth
- vixen99 7y agohttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-d...
- TheFiend7 7y agoI'm as atheist as they come, but I guess it's a little weird how many religions describe the earth as being completely covered in water initially. Maybe it's a coincidence and a natural progression in thought when thinking up a random story of earth's creation, but interesting nonetheless. Pfft everyone knows this is all just a simulation and "gods"/creation was just the init-script. Gotta do a bulk load into memory of all that water first before computing textures and other compute intensive shit....
- perl4ever 7y agoWhat about "snowball earth"? Did that happen before or after?
- brink 7y agoThe ice age was well after the continents.
- LocalH 7y agoThe universe itself is the simulation, there is no outside “observer” except consciousness itself. At least that’s my current general belief
- elwell 7y agoWhy is it a simulation? Isn't it reality?
- vermilingua 7y agoOh boy, you're one of today's lucky 10,000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlTKTTt47WE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlTKTTt47WE
- elwell 7y agoI'm aware of the theory, but I was specifically addressing the case of simulation with no outside observer. In that particular flavor of the theory, I feel the word 'simulation' is not as useful as simply calling this system 'reality'.
- mr_toad 7y ago> In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Kind of glosses over the ~9b years that the ‘heavens’ existed before the Earth formed, and the vast difference in scale. You’d have to wonder how any explanation that wasn’t obviously made up by a race that lived on the Earth and understood nothing about the wider universe could get the facts so wrong.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoIn a book written for people on Earth with a purpose other than explaining physics? Of course it glosses over a bunch of stuff before any of Earth as we know it existed. Really - if one doesn't believe in God, fine, but the number of arguments I hear where people say, "An omnipotent being must not exist because I obviously know better and would have done this differently" just astounds me. It's as illogical a train of thought as anything you hear from religious crazies.
- anthk 7y agoNo. The point is those omnipotent fairy tale believers must prove whatever they say. Nothing more. Also, why the Abrahamic God? Goku is more fun. Or Kami Sama.
- justanotherjoe 7y agoIt's not glossed over, it's just wrong. According to genesis There was water before there was light.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoThat's a valid point. The parent one is not. My beef is with atheists criticizing the irrationality of religion and then being as irrational as what they criticize.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoThat ruins it...otherwise this "let there be light" can be used to say it's the Big Bang. >>"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.
- tomrod 7y agoSomething like this, I reckon. https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/gre13.htm https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/gre13.htm
- dfee 7y agoQuestion I desperately want the answer to: if memories are encoded (nature not nurture), then how far back can we remember? And where is this intuition derived from? For example, we can almost imagine what memories are shared to us from 3-4 generations back, and assumably that pattern continues. Does it end 20k years ago (presumably not), are there intuitions that are wiped out over millennia, or do we have intuitions that date back to our first multicellular / higher order processing days?
- simonh 7y agoIs there any evidence for this? I suppose instincts are 'nature' driven evolved memories of a kind, but I'm not sure that's what you are referring to.
- twic 7y agoNot what you're asking about, but there's an idea that some Australian Aboriginal legends record historical events that happened thirteen thousand years ago: https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010 https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...
- simonh 7y agoThe Earth wasn't first covered with water though, the article says the earliest continental material is even older at 4bn years. It may have been covered with water at some point 3bn years ago, but if we're talking about when it 'in the beginning', there's no reason to choose to start the clock then and not earlier.
- skc 7y agoI'm not religious at all though I grew up in the church as a child and this part of Genesis has always been the one piece of the bible that I've marveled at ever since. It's not just beautiful but coincides almost too perfectly with the science.
- scotty79 7y agoWhen I first heard about 'water above' I was chuckling. It's just more than 2000 years old explanation why the sky dome is blue. What's blue? Water. Sky blue? There must be water above it. Why it doesn't fall? God keeps it up. No concept of Rayleigh scattering, atmosphere or outer space. Just: Blue? Water! And yet I heard it read to the crowd of people in a communal building and they listened to it as if it made sense more than 2000 years later, in the age of science, when we already learned how to properly know things.
- gwd 7y ago> Water. Sky blue? There must be water above it. Why it doesn't fall? God keeps it up. Is there a variation on "straw man" that's more like "shadow boxing", where someone grossly misunderstands what someone's saying and then argues against their own misunderstanding? I've never heard any reference to the sky being blue because there's water there. People 4000 years ago weren't stupid. Everyone knows rain comes from clouds, not from a blue sky. If you read one sentence in isolation and it seems stupid or perverse, you should first check to see if you're understanding it correctly, before writing it off, particularly if it's from a different language, culture, or time. My interpretation of this I've given above already: The "waters above" were the clouds. This makes sense of the paradox that the creation story describes light as being created before the sun. Everyone knows that light comes from the sun; so why would anyone make up a story where day and night happen for three days before the sun shows up? But suppose instead, what was described was from an observer on a particular point above the earth's surface: 1. Sun ignites; you can see light in general but you can't see the sun because all you can see is fog on a water. 2. The "fog" lifts above the water and become clouds, so now there's visible space between the water and the clouds, but you still can't see the sun. 3. The clouds part, and now you can see the sun, moon, and stars.
- otabdeveloper4 7y agoYou're misreading this simple text. It's talking about primal elements and how something formed out of formlessness and emptiness. At the point where an actual "earth" (e.g., a planet) is formed there is no mention of it being covered with water; more like the opposite.
- mac_was 7y ago> Spirit of God was hovering over the waters Looks pretty clear to me?
- otabdeveloper4 7y agoTo the writers and readers of this text "the waters" would have meant, first and foremost, the primal element. Not the literal stuff floating in puddles. The correct analogy for a person from 2020 would be "chemical elements", or even "atoms and molecules".
- mcv 7y agoInteresting perspective. It's certainly worth keeping in mind that words from ancient texts may have had meanings that we currently don't recognise anymore. This sounds quite plausible.
- mannykannot 7y agoNew evidence for a hypothesis is still news, even if that hypothesis is the most favored one.
- ArlenBales 7y agoDitto, though a SNES video game called E.V.O. for me as a child. In the earliest stage/era of Earth in that game it's a water world (and you're a fish).
- adventured 7y agoYour comment made me think of SimEarth for the SNES (I never played it on the PC).
- dntbnmpls 7y ago> sable tigers. Did you mean to say saber-toothed tigers?
- stewbrew 7y agoThanks. I was sleep writing.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoHave since learned they were not tigers and called cats these days. Source: La Brea tarpits museum
- klingonopera 7y agoI remember a bunch of science books for kids in the 90s, that more or less all uniformly declared that planets were only "native" to our solar system. Like, they couldn't even allow the possibility "We don't know" and instead decided to push lies to our feeble minds. And then, when they were being discovered around the turn of the millenium, everyone treated extra-solar planets like something amazing. No, they're totally expected! Not finding any at all, that would've been surprising.
- Balgair 7y agoPBS Eons on YT is a great channel for this kind of stuff: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzR-rom72PHN9Zg7RML9EbA/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzR-rom72PHN9Zg7RML9EbA/vid... Earth has gone through a few Iceball stages, purple eras, red ones, and blue ones too. Our days have been much shorter and the moon caused massive tides too. Like life, she constantly evolves and will continue to do so.