The Growing Earth.. Do The Numbers Add Up?

There are many threads here on ATS about the theory that the Earth has been growing, expanding, getting bigger. The old idea of this planet having one massive ocean and one massive land mass, which broke up, is slowly beginning to change towards the idea of an expanding globe. For those of you who have not seen the video then let's begin with that, just to get everyone on track,


So what do we have to back up this video? What can we do to try to show that this is correct.

Let's start with some simple numbers and some time, well quite a lot of both actually.

Modern geologists and geophysicists consider the age of the Earth to be around 4.54 billion years (4.54 × 109 years ± 1%).[1][2] This age has been determined by radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples.

en.wikipedia.org...

"Earth." The World Book Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. Chicago: World Book Inc., 2001. "Mass: 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.6 sextillion) short tons (6.0 sextillion metric tons)." 6.0 × 1024 kg

hypertextbook.com...
Fair enough... but this is at our current position today.. what could it have been all those billions of years ago? Does this also include the weight of the water?

My ability with math and really big numbers is not as good as I would like it to be and just getting my head around the age of the Earth is bad enough, but to give some indication of where the extra mass has come from we have to look elsewhere.

37,000 to 87,000 tons of meteorites fall to Earth every year. Most of them are dust to pea-sized fragments that burn up in the atmosphere. Many of the space rocks that are big enough to survive the fiery plunge, land in places unpeopled or inaccessible.

www.areavoices.com...
Obviously, this is a calculated number as we cannot catch and weigh every single particle that enters the atmosphere, but it is still a significant amount.
Let's give this a 'round-about' figure with which to work with, let's say that it averages 55,000 tons a year... This adds up to 55 Trillion (55,000,000,000,000) tons of matter added to Earth every 1 Million years, so the Earth is 4.54 Billion years old... Which starts to give us all a headache.. To put this into perspective, a little,...

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There are 2.7 million books in the Milwaukee Public Library. Only 1,000 books represent the time humans have been on the Earth.
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The distance from Carroll College to San Diego is 2,100 miles. The dinosaurs went extinct in Escondido, California, about 30 miles outside of San Diego.
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Humans blink 10,000,000 times a year. Only the last 4,000 blinks (4 hour’s worth) represent the time humans have been on the Earth.
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Every year, 227,500,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered. Only 110,000,000 pieces, which represents 0.04 percent of the total amount of mail delivered, is the time humans have been on the Earth.6
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The average human will eat 60,000 pounds of food in a lifetime. Compared to the timeline of the Earth, humans have been around for the last 24 pounds.7
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Of all the days in a calendar year, the dinosaurs went extinct Christmas Eve, and humans started roaming the earth at 8:30 P.M. on New Year’s Eve.

www.actionbioscience.org...
Now we can just about begin to imagine the amount of matter that the Earth has and s collecting. And don't forget this does not include events like the meteorite that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs and other similar collisions the Earth has endured.
This last site also gives us two very helpful charts from which we can work from too;
www.actionbioscience.org...
www.actionbioscience.org...
According to others, though, the Earth has hardly ever 'expanded'.

Modern measurements have established very stringent upper bound limits for the expansion rate, which very much reduces the possibility of an expanding Earth. For example, paleomagnetic data has been used to calculate that the radius of the Earth 400 million years ago was 102 ± 2.8% of today's radius.[6] Furthermore, examinations of earth's moment of inertia suggest that no significant change of earth's radius in the last 620 million years could have taken place and therefore earth expansion is untenable.[7]

en.wikipedia.org...
But even Darwin considered the possibility and has anyone considered the likelihood that a Mars sized object hit Earth and helped to create the Moon?
Which amount of this object was left to join with the Earth? How much did Earth expand from this event alone?
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/e158a5acba82.jpg[/atsimg]
starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov...

Going through some of the other threads on this topic, you'll see a heck of a lot of very good questions and theories, so we must also take these into consideration in trying to find if Earth is actually growing.

the earth is not getting larger. As layers get deposited the weight of them pushes them further down, eventually to be recycled into the mantle.

www.abovetopsecret.com...
But this is the exact process needed for the Earth to grow, otherwise all the debris we get from space would just simply fill up the oceans and the land. Theoretically we would have less ocean if the magma did not recycle the mantle. There are only two events which can help reduce the stress of excess matter on the Earths crust, Volcanic eruptions and Earth quakes along continental plate seperations.

So if this theory was true, and all the land masses were all connected when the size of Earth was smaller, then where did all the ocean water come from? He said in the video that the trees were the same on the northern hemisphere because they were connected at one time, so the water could not have covered the globe, which is what would happen if we could shrink the globe back to the size it started. The oceans would deepen and cover the globe.

This theory doesn't make sense. The video shows the continents spreading apart and the oceans just magically appear.

www.abovetopsecret.com...
What happens if you're in the desert, dig a hole, cover the hole with a plastic sheet and let it dip in the middle and leave it over night? You get condensation occuring and you can collect the water that drips off the bottom of the sheet. Now, imagine an entire planet, covered in prehistoric plants and trees, a 'tropical' planet...constantly causing condensation and water constantly collecting into ever growing pools. Water always finds its own level and would do its best to get to the lowest points. It's also known that too much water can kill a plant, water even erodes rock. There is also the settling of the planet too, the extreme weather conditions, volcanic eruptions all contributing to a 'green house effect causing massive rain clouds.

The best "evidence" I heard of was that some of the dinosaurs that were meat eaters had to hunt for meat, but to this date physics of the recovered bones proves otherwise. Either some of the dinosaurs were not eat meeter's and if they were it would impossible to chance an animal and turn 90 degree in a drop of a dime as they would snap their neck based on the weight of their head. So one and pretty much only way they could have done this was if earth was smaller with lower gravity. Based on this theory earth was 1/4 of it size 200 million years ago and so must have it's gravity!

www.abovetopsecret.com...
This is an interesting theory, and in a way, makes some sense. A smaller planet may have shorter day lengths too, especially when the Earths day is getting longer..

The current rate at which the Earth day is increasing is 0.0018 seconds/century.

www.astronomycafe.net...

Actually during the "pre-flood" time period, the Earth had 7x more oxygen in the air. This caused creatures to evolve larger, a few scientist have reproduced results in a lab setting. Many use this is explain why dragonflys are now 1/15th the size they used to be (random number!), and why dinosaurs could grow to such proportions. As for people? Who knows, their are tales of giants afterall.

www.abovetopsecret.com...
This is another very interesting point and adds to the growing collection of possible data that contributes towards not only the size of creatures but also to the planets atmospheric conditions in order to produce enough water.

In my opinion, we have the numbers, we have the science, the data and the ability to sit down and work this out... To so many here on ATS and elsewhere, the idea that Earth is growing appears to make so much more sense with its far simpler logical approach than it just being one size for all of its time.

Anyone good at math?


[edit on 4-5-2009 by Extralien]

Nice gathering of info and sources. S+F. Since being a kid I have always though that the earth was growing. I'm fairly new to this site and didnt really see the evidence against it. It never really came in any conversations either. Something else to keep my mind out of the gutter.
thank you

Originally posted by Extralien
Let's start with some simple numbers and some time, well quite a lot of both actually.

"Earth." The World Book Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. Chicago: World Book Inc., 2001. "Mass: 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.6 sextillion) short tons (6.0 sextillion metric tons)." 6.0 × 1024 kg

Fair enough... but this is at our current position today.. what could it have been all those billions of years ago? Does this also include the weight of the water?

Well, given that the earth is thousands of miles across, the deepest ocean averages at around 4 or 5 miles deep, and water is about 1/4 or less as heavy as rock, the mass of the water would be negligible.

This adds up to 55 Trillion (55,000,000,000,000) tons of matter added to Earth every 1 Million years, so the Earth is 4.54 Billion years old... Which starts to give us all a headache..

From this point on I assume your 'tons' do in fact mean short tons (I think, I personally prefer SI, but hate the conversions, so any description of tons, is assumed to mean the same thing).

That figure for a million years, when multiplied by 4,540 to give the figure for the age of the earth, gives 2.5 x 10^17 tons. The mass of the Earth given previously was 6.6 x 10^21 tons. So the mass added by asteroids, A, comes to 0.378% of the original value. Since mass is directly proportional to volume, working out from this will give an approximate comparison of spheres madev from these two masses. The radius of the combined asteroid mass, Ra, came out to be 3.3% of the radius of the Earth, Re.

So that would be comparable to a marble and a football (or soccer ball, depending on locality). The added radius from that mass turns out to be invisible with my calculator, so the amount that it grew from the extra mass? Somewhat similar to coating the football with the glass of the marble, and then trying to work out the change in radius. It will work out to be minute.

So from these figures, Growing Earth is wrong.

Unless you'd prefer to magic the extra volume from a hat, that is.