[meteorite-list] Global Warming and METEORITES

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:42:23 -0500
Message-ID: <052401c7acb4$73de7cc0$c3e08c46_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, Dave, List

    Too late, Dave; it's already dead and gone.
There's an occasional snip or comment popping
up like flotsam after a shipwreck, but the boat
has sunk. It's long over with. I wrote the most
and if I never look at another graph, it'll be
too soon.

    I promised a post on Global Warming AND
Meteorites, and here it is. Back at the turn of the
last century, one of the great mysteries of science
was: What kept the Sun hot? We knew then that
the Earth was quite old (the daring guessed a billion
years or more!). If the Sun was just a ball of hot
gas radiating its heat away, why wasn't it cold by
now? How long would it last? There were lots of
theories, most of them pretty whacky.

    Lord Kelvin gave a speech in which he said that
"modern physics" was a theory that explained almost
everything. He excluded the ultraviolet problem and the
solar heat problem (which would be quantum theory
and nuclear reactions)) We tackled the problem of the
Sun, though. It turned out that a ball of hot gas that
heavy would cool to black in only 25 million years,
and we knew that was too short a time, so there had
to be something heating up the Sun all the time.
What could it be?

    METEORITES!

    An astronomer named H. A. Newton (who was obviously
no relation to Sir Isaac!) calculted how many meteors, falling
in from intergalactic space, it would take to keep the Sun
from cooling off. All of the kinetic energy of the meteors
would be dumped into the Sun as heat energy, so he calculated
back to figure out how many meteors it would take to keep
the Sun hot. It was a truly gigantic number, millions per day,
but it was just barely conceivable.
 
    In the 1902 edition of his text on celestrial dynamics, the
great Forest Ray Moulton wasted two pages gutting Newton's
theory. He pointed out that some of those meteors would
strike the Earth as they fell toward the Sun, that you calculate
how many, and then figure out how much heat they delivered
to the Earth. If there were as many meteors as Newton thought,
the ones that hit the Earth would be enough to more than DOUBLE
the temperature of the Earth, so obviously Newton's meteors
didn't exist and couldn't keep the Sun hot.

    There you have it, METEORITES as a cause of Global
Warming! The idea of heating by meteorite was not new;
it had been suggested for the Sun earlier in the 1800's by
Mayer. But you don't have to feel guilty for your meteorites.
Don't send the guilty ones to Al Gore! Using Dr. Moulton's
mathematical analysis I calculate that each kilogram of
meteorite falling to Earth releases 194,134 calories of heat.
That's what they used in 1902 -- calories; forget your joules.
You convert it.

    Whatever causes Global Warming, I'm pretty sure it isn't
Meteorites...


Sterling K. Webb
----------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Carothers" <david.carothers at verizon.net>
To: <Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2007 9:17 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Global Warming


I'd like to suggest that this entire thread be taken to a more appropriate
list:

 alt.global-warming

Dave

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Received on Tue 12 Jun 2007 01:42:23 AM PDT