The Faint Young Hostile Sun Paradox
According to materialistic theory, the Earth is 4.7 billion years old, with life forming between 3.5 and 4 billions years ago. As the story goes, the sun and Earth were still acquiring matter through the constant bombardment of asteroids and comets. Even though some of these objects were massive and forceful, up to and including the moon in size and composition, the Earth’s orbital trajectory, velocity, rotation, and tilt were steady enough to keep it within the narrow radius around the sun that supports life.
How implausible that is in mathematical terms, I do not know. I cannot imagine the odds being anything short of astronomical. It’s a bit like a truck with no driver traveling at a hundred on an icy road, which is of course crashing into things and being crashed into, somehow staying on that same road for thousands of miles.
Despite the gravity of such concepts, the stability of Earth’s orbit is a side-tangent of this argument. I am going to focus on the sun itself: where it was supposed to be in its evolutionary stage, what its natural tendencies would have been at the time, and how that affects the origin of life scenarios on the ground.
The Sun as a Toddler
To the untrained and unequipped eye, the sun’s performance is constant. That loving, revealing glow and embracing warmth is just expected to be the same day after day. It’s so much like clockwork that we base our clockwork on it. The truth is our sun’s output is variable in a lot of ways. While it is true that many of those variables are remarkably stable and life-friendly, especially its heat flux and flare outputs, that couldn’t have always been the case according to current theories of stellar evolution.
One of the first problems encountered in the study of the Milky Way’s origins is the faint young sun paradox. Simply put, using Stefan Boltzmann theory to compute the sun’s early luminosity yielded a value that is around 30% less than what it is today. Thirty percent less irradiance at Earth’s surface is too much of a drop to maintain a stable supply of liquid water. This is one of the major reasons why most of the origin of life research focuses around undersea volcanic vents.
That is a plausible solution to the heat problem, but it does raise several concerns in organic chemistry. I’ll leave those concerns on Earth for now and focus on another problem that relates to the conservation of angular momentum. Stellar evolution states that stars are born when spinning clouds of dust collapse inward. As a result of that collapse, the star’s rotation accelerates as its radius shrinks. This greatly affects its magnetohydrodynamic reactions, and ultimately, the strength of the magnetic field produced at the time.
The Temper Tantrums
Ironically, this means that our young, toddler-like sun would have came complete with toddler-like tantrums. In solar terms these appear in the forms of super-strength Extreme Ultra-Violet light (EUV), X-ray flares, powerful Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), and very high energy particle radiation storms. All of which effect our atmosphere in a variety of ways.
Like the mature adult that our sun is now, today’s tantrums are very nuanced. Even throughout many of the more vicious event, say the 1859 Carrington Event for example, are minuscule in terms of what a young sun would produce regularly. For those that don’t know, the Carrington Event was a caused by a solar flare with the energy of ten billion atomic bombs. It flung a charged gas cloud and high-energy particles towards Earth, destroying approximately 5% of the atmospheric ozone, which is extremely significant considering the event lasted only a few days, two if I am remembering correctly.
To characterize just how big those young-sun temper tantrums supposedly were, I defer to some recent work out of NASA. They claim that they would have been 1,000 times stronger than those observed in today’s era, and they would occur as frequently as daily for 500 million years. This harsh solar environment, coupled with the sun’s rapid rotation, would’ve created exceptionally hostile conditions on Earth as well. Conditions which include:
Any accumulated ozone concentrations would be suppressed due to higher levels of nitrous oxide generation in the ionosphere, resulting in high levels of ground level UV, EUV, and X-ray radiation.
The strong and recurring high-energy proton storms would have caused ground-level neutron radiation to accumulate to very high levels, levels that would be fatal to organic life.
The sun’s stronger magnetic field, which computations and comparisons to similar stars (such as G5V Kappa-1 Ceti) indicate, would average 24 times stronger, peaking at 61 times stronger than present day rates. The resulting compression of the earth’s magnetopause would make it between 34-48% of current levels, which would decrease the ability Earth’s magnetic field to repel harmful radiation.
A stronger solar wind and the frequent proton storms, when combined with a suppressed magnetic field, would strengthen the effects of the electric wind, which strips atmospheres of hydrogen and oxygen ions, as well as atmospheric water vapor.
The Implications
Today’s origin of life scenarios are already in a dismal state; and most of those exist in the vacuums of favorable laboratory or virtual reality conditions. Even there, evolutionists cannot develop realistic mechanisms for producing any sufficient quantities of basic amino acids, let alone a homochiral mixture of them. Even if they did, they still need hundreds of specified proteins to form from them, and a genetic code that not only tells those proteins how to function, but how to build new copies in a manner that facilitates reproduction. Remember, getting one protein is well beyond the scientific threshold of possibility, and they need hundreds of complimentary proteins to appear within the same cubic millimeter, at the same time, and arrange themselves in a particular manner to build a cell, and then somehow start all the metabolic processes to make it alive.
Factor in the hostile solar environment, frequent meteorites, and radiation, and the exceptionally improbable origin of life scenarios become exponentially worse. And they need life to not only form and survive, but thrive for billions of years under those conditions. Add on top the magnetic field differences, the ionized polar regions, and a more forceful solar and electric wind, and its doubtful our planet could have retained its life-essential elements of water and free oxygen. In other words, according to naturalistic theory, this blue, life-filled planet we live on should not be blue or life-filled.
The more we learn through scientific research about our universe, the more naturalistic and materialistic scenarios without God become unlikely. Delving into the details has not uncovered a universe filled with natural-law based possibilities. It is paradoxes that we find. Paradoxes that show this universe and its current configuration, require God to explain how it came to be.
References
Airapetian, V.s., Glocer, A., Gronoff, G., Hebrard, E. and Danchi, W., Prebiotic chemistry and atmospheric warming of early Earth by an active young Sun, Nature Geoscience 9:452-455, 2016; doi: 10.1038/ngeo2719 23 May 2016
Sibley, A., Superflares and the origin of life on Earth, Journal of Creation 31(1):111-115, 2017
