I”m grateful to Bill Kettenhoffen from refraining from identifying his “Moon was once as bright as the Sun” hypothesis for the origin of the earth in his “Original Intensity” letter in the October 10 Record-Bee as science. Like all branches of human endeavor, science is circumscribed by certain rules or assumptions. One of the fundamental assumptions is that nature is consistent across time and space. This is not something we can “prove” with absolute certainty, but without it we are free to just make stuff up and endow the universe we have imagined with reality. That hardly seems the best path forward to solving the challenges we continually face in out interactions with nature.
Mr. Kettenhoffen may not be aware of the fact that the energy source for stars is the fusion of lighter atomic nuclei to form nuclei of heavier atomic elements. This has been the scientific understanding of stars since the 1930s, when German physicist Hans Bethe worked out the theoretical reaction sequences. Hydrogen bombs are artificial devices operating on the same principle. However, in an H bomb, the extremely high temperature necessary to start the reactions is provided by the detonation of a fission bomb. In a star, this high temperature is achieved through compression of the core during the time the star is coalescing gravitationally. The minimum mass necessary to start a fusion reaction and produce a hot, incandescent celestial body, a star, is about 0.075 solar masses, or roughly 25,000 times the mass of the Earth. Such a star would be classified as a red dwarf and be much dimmer than the Sun. The Earth would be in orbit around it, not vice versa. In Mr. Kettenhoffen”s hypothesis, the Moon was once a star as bright as the Sun. Such a star would necessarily be as massive and as big as the Sun. Such an Earth would be almost instantly toasted, if not vaporized, by its companion.
Mr. Kettenhoffen further states that the Sun was eight times brighter than it is today only a few thousand years ago. Such a bright Sun would also challenge any life forms on the planet with extreme thermal stress. He says that the planet maintained a very comfortable temperature in spite of this intense radiation due to a much higher concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere shielding the surface. Unfortunately for his hypothesis, water vapor is one of the most potent greenhouse gases known to science, helping to trap thermal energy and further boost the temperature. Again, I am making the scientific assumption that the laws of nature have not changed in the past few millennia.
Thousands of years ago, imaginative people made up stories to account for the world as they experienced it. We don”t know how literally the people to whom these stories were first told accepted them, but I suspect they were regarded as the post Stone Age equivalents of modern movie scripts. Today we call them myths. Some had important ethical or moral content, like the story of Prometheus giving fire to humans and suffering the wrath of the Titans in consequence, a tale of courage and self-sacrifice. Others probably just provided entertainment around the campfire after supper in the evening. It is possible that some of the listeners thought that the stories contained literal accounts of events of a bygone age and insisted on their absolute veracity. I regard it as irresponsible and possibly dangerous to act up or insist that others act upon fantasies that have no observational or theoretical basis.
Steve Harness, Witter Springs
