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Sunday, March 25, 2018

Planetary Defense is Failing

The title sounds a bit like a line in a Western-style space opera, doesn't it? "Message coming in now, Cap'n. Planetary defense is failing!" Then the unlikely hero suits up and saves the world. In reality, we have planet-sized deflector shields in place. It's been there since the creation of all things a few thousand years ago.

Image credit: NASA (Usage does not imply endorsement of site contents)
"Come on, Cowboy Bob! Everybody knows that the universe is billions of years old. An atheist on a forum said so."

The space protector comes from the magnetic field. (Other planets have magnetic fields, but ours is better.) This bad boy has been a favorite evidence for Earth being young, because it is decaying. Yep, been measured and everything for quite a few years, and it's not as intense today. If you work backward, the magnetic field would be so strong, it would wreck our happy home, so it cannot be billions of years old.


Secular scientists have been attempting to make rescuing devices, saying that the magnetic field has reversed. That's mighty fine, and creationists agree that the evidence shows this. However, a reversal does not mean that it begins again at the original strength. There are no plausible hypotheses or models for the reversals. (Biblical creationists propose that the reversals may have been a consequence of the Genesis Flood.) The field would be ineffective to protect us in a relatively short time.
Old-earth belief tries to paper over a disturbing fact with speculative models, but 160 years of measurements show the strength of our planet’s magnetic field is dropping fast.
How do secular geophysicists deal with one of the longest-running measurements in the history of science? The strength of the magnetic field was first measured 183 years ago by Karl Friedrich Gauss in 1835.  For the past 160 years or so, continuous measurements have been made. Early measurements show the field was 5% stronger than it is now. Continuous measurements plotted on a curve show an exponential drop in the overall strength of the field year by year. If this were to continue, it would put life at risk on the planet in mere thousands of years. Extrapolating backward, a stronger field would have made the earth uninhabitable a few tens of thousands of years ago.
 To read the rest, click on "Earth Magnetic Field Still Decaying".