Short-Period Comets and the Age of the Solar System
By Jon Covey, BA, MT(ASCP)
Edited by Anita K. Millen, MD, MPH, MA
Evolutionists, like King Midas, have a magical touch, but their touch turns inanimate things to infinite or nearly infinite age. This is because they believe evolution is true and it would have taken much time to evolve nonliving matter to highly diverse, living organisms. For this reason, they want to bring all canons to bear on the issue of age. Anything that will give them an old age for the earth in particular is preferred over everything to the contrary. For them, the earth and meteorites must be at least 4.5 billion years old, so must the sun and the rest of the solar system. The universe must be 10-20 billion years old and most galaxies 10- 1 3 billion years old, although astronomers swear the white dwarf stars are at least 15 billion years old based on theoretical considerations of stellar evolution. This is not necessarily a contradiction, because Hubble’s constant, by which the age of the universe is calculated, is constantly being reevaluated and changed.
According to evolutionists, everything in our solar system is billions of years old, and because short-period comets have life spans of only thousands to millions of years, there must be a source of comets somewhere beyond our observational limits that continually replenishes our solar system’s supply of short-period comets. Ms source of comets is called the Oort Cloud, named after Jan H. Oort. No one has actually seen the Oort Cloud. It is simply assumed because the solar system is thought to have formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Since the life span of comets is so short, they reason, there has to be a source which replenishes the solar system’s population of comets. This is an example of evolutionary myopia shows that evolutionists are effectively blinded to alternate explanations.
In his book, Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Cornets, Tom Van Flandern writes,
"The Oort Cloud is the accepted model for the origin of comets. According to the interpretation of comet observations, this cloud of comets is located at about 1000 times the distance of Pluto from the Sun within a volume large enough to hold all stars in all visible galaxies in the universe without touching-, passing galactic stars plunge through this ‘cloud’ from time to time-, it requires about 10,000,000 years for an average comet within the cloud to orbit the Sun-, the cloud gets wiped out occasionally by passing giant molecular clouds and must then be replenished-, yet it currently contains about 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) comets a kilometer or larger in diameter, each with an average separation of about 1,000,000,000 (one billion) kilometers from its nearest neighbor comet; and has an average space density for the whole cloud of about 0.001 hydrogen atom per cubic meter."
Dr. Van Flandern went on to say that events in his life caused him to question his goals and what he had been taught. He says,
"I came to discover that reality differed seriously from what I had been taught.... I particularly noted a regular practice of not reexamining the fundamental assumptions underlying a theory once it gained .accepted’ status, almost no matter how incompatible some new observation or experiment might be .... Few scientists consider themselves qualified very far outside their own areas of expertise. Since each expert can account for only a small portion of the data dealing with a model, he defers to the other experts to support the model in other areas. Few, if any, scientists have the breadth of knowledge to see the full picture for a given model. So the model remains supported because many individual authorities support it, none of whom have the expertise to criticize the model overall, and all of who have the utmost confidence in the others collectively. Authorities can continue to multiply indefinitely, with no one taking responsibility for integrating all their combined knowledge. As a result, the existing model get perpetuated regardless of merit or the extent of counter-evidence because ‘so many experts can’t all be wrong.’ Thus each expert is persuaded to force-fit his own data into the accepted model."
I wholeheartedly sympathize with Van Flandern. I have heard "so-many-experts can’t-all-be-wrong-so-something-must-be-wrong-with-you" more than once in my life. This remark is usually provoked when I question the "accepted" evolutionary models and demand observational evidence rather than the usual fare of theoretical assumptions rife in evolutionary theory. Many "experts" wrote their Ph.D. doctoral theses on the Piltdown Man, a phony fossil which fooled the scientific community for more than 40 years before it was discovered that it was a complete hoax. There is something wrong with the big bang theory, the "accepted" models of star formation, and the standard explanations for the origination of short-period comets.
Evolutionists postulate the existence of dark matter to explain why clusters of galaxies continue to persist after billions of years, which Time explained in an easily understood article. [Lemonick] The velocities of individual galaxies in the clusters are moving faster than the escape speed for the detectable gravitational masses of the clusters.
It seems that evolutionists are guilty of the very thing they accuse creationists. They say that whenever we are ignorant about something we claim that God causes it. When evolutionists are ignorant of something, they invent things like the Oort Cloud, Dark Matter, phlogiston, evolution, which is tantamount to Dr. Steven Morris’ contention that men create gods to explain things they don’t understand. Evolutionists don’t create gods; they create imaginative explanations. Dark Matter cannot be detected, the Oort Cloud lies beyond the reach of our telescopes and space craft, evolution and star formation proceed so slowly we cannot live long enough to perceive them. However, if the debate continues long enough and if evolution is true, we should begin to see new organisms evolve in the next few thousand years. The selection pressure must be very intense if 600 species become extinct every year. We should see new stars form in that time.
Life Spans of Short Period Comets
Short-period comets lose gas, dust and rock each time they swing around the sun. Some of these comets have split into several pieces and even disintegrated during observation. Even Halley’s comet showed an unexpected flare on its journey back into deep space recently, surprising astronomers and everyone else. R.A. Lyttleton calculated the lifetime of comets to be ten thousand years, [Lyttleton] and Fred Whipple calculated that the average short-period comet would make two hundred trips around the sun for its lifetime. [Struve] If Whipple’s estimate is true of Halley’s comet, which returns every 76 years, then Halley’s comet will exist only 15,200 years. This would mean that since the average circuit of short-period comets is only seven years, most comets would survive only 1400 years. If we suppose that the actual life span of comets lies somewhere between Lyttleton’s and Whipple’s figures, and assuming that comets came into existence at the same time as the solar system, this could put an upper- limit of only several thousand years on the solar system. We might conclude that the earth must be quite young. Another possibility, and one that Van Flandern suggests, is that comets are the result of a planet breakup in the recent past. Van Flandern might be correct. There are other explanations for the origin of comets, and some of them are found in Harold Slusher’s Age of the Cosmos, which is available at Master Books (800-999-3777).
Lemonick, M., Nash, J. "Unraveling Universe," Time, pp. 77-84, (1995).
Lyttleton, R.A., The Mysteries of the Solar System, Oxford, Clarendon Press, p. 110, (1968).
Struve, O., Lynds, B., and H. Pillans, Elementary Astronomy, New York, Oxford University Press, p. 154, (1959).