Is the Universe Full of Water?

"And God said, 'Let there be a firmament between the waters to separate water from water.' So God made the firmament and separated the water under the firmament from the water above it; and it was so. Then God said, 'Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear'; and it was so."
-- The Book of Genesis 1, v. 6, 7, &9

Have you ever wondered where the Earth got its water? I have pondered this question for many years, and so have scientists around the world. I don't pretend to be a scientist, but I do have a theory about this which modern science so far has failed to consider. Perhaps my theory is as far out into space as the possible source of Earth's water - I'll let you be the judge of that.

To begin with, why does the Bible begin with telling us that God divided the "waters" into the "waters above" and the "waters below" the firmament? (In updated versions of the Bible, "firmament" has been replaced with "expanse." I use the word "firmament" here because it is the original wording, and updated versions have distorted the meanings of some of the text to conform to the understanding of the rewrite authors, which may or may not agree with the original intended meaning.)

The point here is that God's words talked about dividing the "waters from the waters." I find it interesting that this emphasis was placed on water before the Earth was even formed, which lends credence to what I am about to suggest.

No, I am not suggesting that God is a fish, however it does appear that life-giving water existed before the Earth, if you believe in God‘s words. But let us not get bogged down in a biblical discussion and move on to a more scientific discussion.

We know that water could not have existed on the Earth when the planet formed as a hot, molten ball of space debris. Likewise, water could not have existed when the planet was struck by whatever celestial object it was that created our moon, again turning the Earth into a molten ball floating in space. Water had to come to the Earth sometime later after the planet had cooled.

Scientists not long ago came up with the theory that the water came to Earth in its early days from comets, which are made mostly of water ice. What a hailstorm that must have been. Can you imagine how many comets it would take to fill our oceans?

This theory was put to the test on July 3, 2005 when NASA’s Deep Impact “Impactor” probe smashed into Comet Temple 1. The collision threw up ice particles, which were captured and analyzed by the mother vehicle. It was found that the hydrogen isotope contained in the comet ice did not match the hydrogen isotope found in the waters of the Earth. Comets were ruled out as the source of Earth’s water.

So the scientists and astronomers tried again. They pointed infrared telescopes at a 129-mile wide asteroid orbiting near Mars. Spectroscopic analysis of the asteroid 24 Themis reveals it to be coated in a thin layer of water ice that closely matches the water on Earth. The latest suggestion is now that water came to Earth via asteroids.

For either of these above suggestions to be true, you have to ask the question; where did they get the water? And why wouldn’t the Earth get its water from the same source? There are only two possible answers. Either they were formed with a water content, or they collected the water after they were formed. In either case, where did the water come from?

Let us first consider what water is made of. An H2O molecule is two hydrogen atoms bonded together with one oxygen atom. Not only is Hydrogen the most common element found in the universe, but is also the primary building block of matter. It is the first atom formed when energy begins to cool into mater.

Oxygen, on the other hand is somewhat heavier in atomic weight, but will attract hydrogen under the right conditions until it has acquired two of the little devils to create water, or water vapor. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the first element created in the universe after the “big bang” is the same element that makes up 2/3 of the water molecule.

Astrophysicists have been studying the size of the universe and trying to explain it in physical terms. Not only are they trying to determine the actual size, but also how it works. They have developed the science of astrophysics now to the point to where they can theoretically measure the forces that hold the universe together.

They want to know the eventual fate of the universe; will it continue to expand forever, or will it reach equilibrium between the forces of expansion and gravity. Or perhaps expansion will ultimately become contraction and the universe will collapse back into a singularity.

However, a problem with their equations has them stumped. In trying to balance their equations to describe accurately the current expansion, they find that about 40% of the matter in the universe is missing. In other words, the balance between gravity (galaxies pulling on one another) and momentum (galaxies expanding away from each other) is not what the equations predict.

The expansion is slower than it should be which indicates that there must be more matter and consequently more gravity in the universe than all observations have found - 40% more.

Unable to explain this phenomenon, they have resorted to a trick sometimes used in physics when an equation fails to balance. They invent something. In this case, they invented what they call “dark matter.” Adding “dark matter” to their equations makes them balance, but they don’t know what “dark matter” is.

It is my belief that this “dark matter” is water, or to be more precise, water vapor. It is impossible to detect because it consists of nothing but free H2O molecules floating around in space. Without air pressure and proper temperatures they cannot come together to form water, yet space may be full of water.

Our solar system was full of water when it first formed, but planets and asteroids orbiting the Sun have collected most of it by now. We see it everywhere on the surface of planets as ice, except for on Earth because of Earth’s climate temperature and air pressure. Mercury and Venus are too hot to support water. Mars’ thin atmosphere provides too little pressure to support water.

Continued...

However, the outer planets seem to have an abundance of water ice. NASA suspects that there may even be subsurface water oceans on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. This is not to be confused with frozen methane found also on the outer planets.

Planetary gravity has scooped up most of the water within the solar system. Comets are rogues that probably came from outside the solar system and were captured by the sun’s gravity. They may have begun their life as small rocks and collected water molecules during their journey to our solar system, which would explain why we see them as ice balls.

But what about the space between the solar systems? More importantly is the space between galaxies. How much water may be there that we have no way of detecting, except by the mass and gravity of the universe which science explains with the use of “dark matter.”

So the answer to where the water on Earth came from is; it came from space itself. I realize this may sound crazy to some who read this, but when you consider the evidence I have presented here, is it really so far fetched? Do you have a better answer to the question? If so, I would like to hear it.

However, before you do, ask yourself this one question: If water came to the Earth from some other source, how did the other source get the water?

Source

I've never really thought about the universe this way and thought this article was immensely interesting. So in the sharing spirit, enjoy and feel free to share any thoughts.


admin edit edited source link to the original article.

[edit on 5-13-2010 by Springer]

Water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, right ?

So I don't think it is so surprising at all.

reply to post by Crossfate


Maybe our universe is like an airplane in freefall so everything inside of it seems like its floating until it hits the ground.

Hello crossfate,
This will look strange in a science based forum, but when I read the Nag Hammadi documents, the Gnostic version of genesis goes as follows: " The favorite angel of God decided he, too, was the Eternal God. So God, to punish him, put him to sleep, in a bubble of water. "

Since it is said the universe is filled with hydrogen, i found it interesting.

PS: I should add that the " punished " dreams of the universe in this bubble...

[edit on 13-5-2010 by Aresh Troxit]

We find water just about everywhere we look for it. Including interstellar space. I don't know what that guy is on about with not being able to detect water. We can and it is not dark matter.

A team of U.S. astronomers, led by Cornell University astrophysicist Martin Harwit, has discovered a massive concentration of water vapor within a cloud of interstellar gas close to the Orion nebula. The amount of water measured is so high -- enough to fill the Earth's oceans 60 times a day -- that the researchers believe it provides an important clue to the origin of water in the solar system.

www.scienceblog.com...


Water vapor is detectable directly through spectroscopy. We've known about it for a long time. Water ice is trickier but we also know it's there. A lot of it.

The team found that 99 percent of the water in cold clouds is ice condensed on cold dust grains, while only 1 percent is in gaseous form.

www.astrobio.net...

reply to post by Phage


WOW! Thank you for that phage. I'm definitely gonna read it over. More information is always welcome.

Originally posted by Crossfate

Adding “dark matter” to their equations makes them balance, but they don’t know what “dark matter” is.

It is my belief that this “dark matter” is water, or to be more precise, water vapor. It is impossible to detect because it consists of nothing but free H2O molecules floating around in space. Without air pressure and proper temperatures they cannot come together to form water, yet space may be full of water.

Well, the universe is full of H2O. However if you restrict the definition of "water" the way your source does to mean only the liquid form of H20, and not the gaseous or ice forms, I'm not so sure water is that abundant. Just look at the Phage's post, it refers to both the versions of H20 that are NOT liquid water.

But Phage's post also shows that the source is NOT correct that water is impossible to detect, did the author never hear of spectroscopy?

The other problem I have with the author's comments is that if we don't know what something is, we don't know what it is. Saying we don't know what dark matter is, therefore it must be water is almost as bad as someone seeing a fuzzy dot in the sky we can't identify, and then saying since we don't know what it is, it must be (fill in the blank...usually aliens, or a transdimensional vehicle, or whatever).

The elemental composition of both our solar system and the universe gives us a clue why H20 is abundant even if "liquid water" may be more rare: Hydrogen is the most abundant element and Oxygen is the third most abundant:

www.ask.com...

In our solar system:

Isotope---------Mass fraction - parts per million
Hydrogen-1----- 705,700
Helium-4 --------275,200
Oxygen-16---------5,920
Carbon-12----------3,032
Neon-20------------1,548


In our galaxy:

Isotope---------Mass fraction - parts per million
Hydrogen------- 739,000
Helium-- --------240,000
Oxygen-----------10,400
Carbon-------------4,600
Neon---------------1,340

Seeing how abundant hydrogen and oxygen are, it should be no surprise that H20 is abundant. But I suspect a lot of it is in the form of ice and gas, and not liquid water.

Originally posted by Crossfate

Comets were ruled out as the source of Earth’s water.

One more correction to the source claims, comets were not ruled out as a source for Earth's water, they were ruled out as the SOLE source, so contrary to what your link claims, some of Earth's water probably did come from comets.

www.accessmylibrary.com...

Earth, water, and comets. (the ice-water in comets have been ruled out by French scientists as the source of earth's waters)

Although comets contain an abundance of water-ice, they could not have been the main source of water for Earth's oceans. That's the conclusion of a group of French, Swiss, and U.S. researchers who measured the ratio of heavy hydrogen, or deuterium, to ordinary hydrogen in water in Comet Hale-Bopp.

Once again, we see the content of the article contradicts the headlines, as the body of the article includes the qualifier "main". So it helps to read past the headlines, which unfortunately many people seem not to do.

Comets May Be the Source of Earth's Water

Astronomers have discovered three icy comets that may help explain how the Earth's oceans formed. These new comets have asteroid-like orbits, and formed in the warm inner Solar System, not in the outer reaches like most comets. This lends evidence to the theory that the main asteroid belt isn't bone dry, as previously believed, but is actually quite rich in ice – a major source of our planet's water.

I guess part of this involves defining what a comet is. If it's a big ball of ice orbiting in the asteroid belt, is it a comet?

I'm delighted to see this research because I never believed the asteroid belt lacked icy comet-like bodies in addition to the rocky bodies, and now there is some proof I was right.

Physicists tell us that all water molecules that exist today in the Universe existed in the earliest days of the Universe, basically just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which I find quite odd, indeed.

Essentially, they're telling us that the bonding of hydrogen and oxygen atoms into water molecules happened just once, such that water is among the oldest compounds in the Universe. The half-gallon or so of water that you drink today (and that you will piss away later) has existed for about 13 billion years, and it will still exist 13 billion years from now.

Which I don't buy for a moment.

I've seen lab experiments in which pure hydrogen gas and pure oxygen gas are mixed and then sparked with a minute amount of electricity, which creates a startling explosive reaction, and the result is a small amount of water. Similarly, passing an electrical current through water can split the hydrogen-oxygen bond, changing liquid water back into its gaseous components, oxygen and hydrogen.

Are physicists telling us that such bonding and splitting doesn't take place all the time in Nature, given the abundance of hydrogen and oxygen and electricity out there in the Universe?

I mean, you can look anywhere in the cosmos and, through spectrographic analysis, know that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, and there's no lack of oxygen out there, either.

Personally, I think water is created all the time through purely natural processes. I have no doubt that the Universe is full of water; or, at the very least, the Universe is more than capable of manufacturing massive quantities of the stuff on a moment's notice.

— Doc Velocity





[edit on 5/13/2010 by Doc Velocity]

reply to post by Doc Velocity

What physicists say that? It's pretty well established that the creation of water is an ongoing process, though the mechanism (in some cases) is uncertain.

www.sciencedaily.com...
www.sofia.usra.edu...



[edit on 5/13/2010 by Phage]

Originally posted by Doc Velocity
Physicists tell us that all water molecules that exist today in the Universe existed in the earliest days of the Universe, basically just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which I find quite odd, indeed.

I never heard any physicists say that either, what are your sources?

Originally posted by Phage
What physicists say that? It's pretty well established that the creation of water is an ongoing process, though the mechanism (in some cases) is uncertain.

Well, that's always been my contention, as well, that water assembly and disassembly is an ongoing, never-ending cycle. However, over the decades, on more than one of the "edutainment" networks, I've heard "scientists" — including Dr. Carl Sagan — rather matter-of-factly assert that there is as much water in the Universe now as there has ever been, and that the quantity of it is an unchanging constant.

Now, if they're speaking in terms of the elemental components of water, then they're not making themselves quite clear. That's a bit like erroneously asserting that, because the elemental components of humankind are nearly as old as the Universe itself, then humankind is as old as the Universe itself.

— Doc Velocity

I have done a very thero investigation of every verse of Genesis all the way up to verse 11.

We have to make 2 separate observations when we try to defy what the universe consist of to day, and what it did consist of before God said: Let there be light.

Because in verse 6. God said! Let It separate the waters from the waters. It means the firmament. And the firmament will emit energies. And these energies would be the only energies we would be able to observe from our position.

Before God initiated his creation. God explained what infinity looked like in verse 2. Than Moses says in the last sentence in verse 2: And Gods spirit moved upon the face of the waters.

IN verse 6. God explains how the waters in verse 2 are separated from the waters produced by the firmament in verse 6.

There is no way we can say for sure what the waters in verse 2 consist of.

There is at least one reason why we cant. We cant measure the time from 2010 too zero, the beginning of time.

The above can also be describes like this. It is impossible to measure the distance from 1 too zero.



[edit on 27.06.08 by spy66]

reply to post by Doc Velocity

I see you still have no sources and are making more unsubstantiated claims. Are you making this stuff up? I never hear scientists say the stuff you are accusing them of saying, including Sagan.

Or, since Dark Matter theorists suggest, in part, that water may comprise the great bulk of Dark Matter out there, I wonder if the Genesis verse, separating the waters from the waters refers to God parting the Dark Matter, moving Gravity and Mass around on a cosmic scale?

— Doc Velocity

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
I see you still have no sources and are making more unsubstantiated claims.

"More unsubstantiated claims"... Such as what? Don't be such a horse's ass.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Are you making this stuff up? I never hear scientists say the stuff you are accusing them of saying, including Sagan.

You don't listen very closely, or perhaps you only hear what you want to hear.

— Doc Velocity





[edit on 5/13/2010 by Doc Velocity]

Originally posted by Doc Velocity
Or, since Dark Matter theorists suggest, in part, that water may comprise the great bulk of Dark Matter out there, I wonder if the Genesis verse, separating the waters from the waters refers to God parting the Dark Matter, moving Gravity and Mass around on a cosmic scale?

— Doc Velocity

Well if you pay attention to solids. It will give you a clear indication of what God did initially.
God must have initiated a compression, because every solid consists of compressed energies. This will tell you a lot about what infinity is like pressure wise.
Solids can emit energies because finite energies have a lot more pressure than the infinite dimension of energies has. The infinite is the source that lets matter emit energy so that solids can change and evolve.

Dark matter is just finite matter with less pressure, that has come further in its stages of emission of energies.

[edit on 27.06.08 by spy66]

If we could figure out what light consists of exactly. We could be able to observe the changes in light as it travels towards the infinite. Since light is the fastest traveling source we know of.

Where the light no longer is light we would be very close to the border of infinity. And when we find the border between finite and infinity, we would be able to determine what the waters are like on the other side.

EDIT to add. The light from the Big Bang. Can not be any of the reflections we think we observe. Because light expands a lot faster than matter. And the infinite darkness will not reflect any light or radiation. Keep that in mind when you read science magazines.



[edit on 27.06.08 by spy66]

From what I understand, Earth got most of its water from asteroids and other rocky materials floating around at the beginning of the solar system. If you heat rocky meteorites, they give off all kinds of water vapor.

As for the rest of the universe, I suppose there's a decent amount of water here and there. There's a lot of everything in the universe, seeing as how big it is. More than anything, though, the universe is filled with a whole lot of nothing. If it was filled with more stuff, you wouldn't be able to see many stars.

So I guess compared to vast reaches of space where there basically isn't anything, there isn't really that much water after all. Add to that all the stars and planets that don't have any water at all, and you have almost no water, period, really.

Originally posted by Doc Velocity
You don't listen very closely, or perhaps you only hear what you want to hear.

Pot meet kettle.

I have sources to backup my claims that oxygen and/or water haven't been around since the beginning, as you claim physicists said:

Abundance of the chemical elements

Hydrogen and helium are estimated to make up roughly 74% and 24% of all baryonic matter in the universe respectively. Despite comprising only a very small fraction of the universe, the remaining "heavy elements" can greatly influence astronomical phenomena. Only about 2% (by mass) of the Milky Way galaxy's disk is composed of heavy elements. These other elements are generated by stellar processes.[2][3][4] In astronomy, a "metal" is any element other than hydrogen, helium or lithium. This distinction is significant because hydrogen and helium (together with trace amounts of lithium) are the only elements that occur naturally without the nuclear fusion activity of stars. Thus, the metallicity of a galaxy or other object is an indication of past stellar activity.

Nucleosynthesis

Nucleosynthesis is the process of creating new atomic nuclei from pre-existing nucleons (protons and neutrons). It is thought that the primordial nucleons themselves were formed from the quark-gluon plasma from the Big Bang as it cooled below two trillion degrees. A few minutes afterward, starting with only protons and neutrons, nuclei up to lithium and beryllium (both with mass number 7) were formed, but only in relatively small amounts. Then the fusion process essentially shut down due to drops in temperature and density as the universe continued to expand. This first process of primordial nucleosynthesis may also be called nucleogenesis. The subsequent nucleosynthesis of the heavier elements required heavy stars and supernova explosions.

So that says elements with an atomic number up to 4 have been around since the beginning. Atomic elements with higher numbers are believed to have been formed by stellar fusion, supernovae, etc. And Oxygen has an atomic number of 8 so it wouldn't have been around since the beginning, it's formed on an ongoing basis just as Phage said. So regardless of whether you're referring to elemental oxygen, or H20, neither one has been around since the beginning.