Patrick Degan wrote:
The insults started flowing early from your end.
Your first post suggested I was the proponent of nonsense, that my defense was comedic, and so on. However, I ignored these jabs and insults of yours in my reply. After my reply, your second post was titled "Oh, good, he wants to play", featured a gross misrepresentation of what I said (which, unless your IQ is that of a doorknob, suggests dishonesty on your part), and referred to my words as "ludicrous".
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 2&start=35
You may now drop the pretense of being the innocent little angel, assaulted by Big Bad DarkStar.
Stop the straw men.
You failed or refused to explain the lack of atmospheric turbulence where the beam would have propagated through to the surface if there is no planetary shield to block it. You put forth the claim that your MUM theory explains this. Then you fail to explain it.
Y'know, I'm actually starting to think that maybe you and a doorknob do have something in common.
Start with one naked, shieldless Earth-like planet. Fire a planet-killing DET weapon through a cloud. What will happen? Over and above any atmospheric scattering of the beam due to air and the ionization thereof, you're going to be burning through whatever clouds, atmosphere, and what-have-you that you're shooting through.
Now, reset. Take the naked, shieldless Earth-like planet. Fire a planet-killing beam that, according to theory, reacts with the solid mass of an object to produce a devastating energy release effect on that target. Now, fire it through the clouds. Is there any reason whatsoever to assume that the beam's composition will liberate sufficient energy on those clouds to result in a burn-off? No, because the atmosphere is not solid matter.
But, let's run the numbers, and see what we might expect according to your revision of my theory.
As I say on my site, an Earth-like planet, assuming 100% mass-energy conversion, has 5000 times the necessary material to produce 1e38J. So, in spite of the fact that we're dealing with atmospheric gasses, let's assume that a rough 1/5000th efficiency holds against atmospheres, too, even though this concept is also contrary to the theory.
So, let's estimate the mass of the atmosphere that the beam touches. The total mass of Earth's atmosphere is 5.14e21 grams. Earth's total surface area is about 509,600,000 km^2. Judging by the Death Star as it fired the shot, the superlaser couldn't be more than about 5 kilometers in diameter, for a total area of 25 km^2, or about one twenty-millionth of the total surface area of the planet. Assuming the atmosphere is approximately homogeneous in mass over the surface area, that's 257,000,000,000,000 grams. Insert the 1/5000th efficiency, and we're down to 51,400,000,000 grams, or about 5.1e7 kg. Give a nod to Einstein, and that's 4.5e24J.
The troposphere, which contains about 75% of the mass of the atmosphere, extends an average of 12 kilometers above the surface. It's also the area where clouds are most likely to form, as opposed to the much drier stratosphere. So, let's take the total volume (235.6 km^3), and use 3.5e24J for the energy. That gives us an energy density of about 14,590,000,000,000 J/m^3, or 14.6e12J/m^3.
That's almost 3.5 kilotons per cubic meter of Earth-like tropospheric atmosphere. Given that the density at sea level is about four times what it is at the top of the troposphere, that's a "mere" .9 kilotons or so per cubic meter at the likely height of the thick Alderaan cloud-tops.
Now, do we see any evidence that .9 kilotons per cubic meter is released in the region of the cloud tops, much less 3.5 kilotons? Nope.
Does your addendum to my theory therefore have any weight? Nope.
What we
do have is a band of destruction encircling the globe, once the superlaser strikes the surface.
Just like I said.
No matter what mechanism you wish to invoke to explain the superlaser, there must be a physical interaction between the beam's energy field and the atmosphere of the planet. That is no strawman. It is a gaping great hole in your case.
It is no such thing. We do not know the composition of the beam, nor how it should be expected to behave with atmosphere. If it is anything like the SPHA-T weapons, it seems to have no real interaction with air (because, if those SPHA-T's are really as powerful as is claimed, they should have ionized the air and made a hellacious thunderclap, among other things).
It is simplest, but it is not an explanation. DET utterly fails to address the nature of the destruction, or the various other effects that are a part of it.
Beam strikes planet. Planet goes
BOOM!
That sounds an awful lot like the over-simplistic-thinking example I gave in my last message: "Duh, energy beam make planet go kaboom."
Planetary matter is ejected violently outward at several tens of thousands of kilometres per second, which conforms to DET.
However, the globe-encircling band, double rings, and secondary explosion don't seem to phase you.
I have made observations, crafted a hypothesis, and observed the hypothesis survive and thrive in the light of new evidence (ship-killer shots from the DS2, the off-center explosion of the DS2, et cetera).
Once again, I am not responsible for your fantasies.
Fantasies?
I don't have to know what it is to know what it does.
An interesting wrinkle on the Appeal to Ignorance argument.
There is no appeal to ignorance in play, and you know it (or should).
Early Darwinians knew very little about the nuts and bolts of how heredity worked and how the environment shaped life . . . but, according to your argument, the fact that Darwin didn't explain DNA in "Origin of Species" makes evolution the BS idea of the age.
Now who's putting up strawmen? Darwinians certainly could demonstrate the process of more advanced forms of life developing from the earliest stages and how enviroment shaped evolutionary choices through selection. The fossil record gave us the clear evidence for evolutionary development.
The fossil record was chock full of gaping holes at the time . . . that's where all the creationist "missing link" shit comes from. Hell, Lyell, "Darwin's early hero", maintained that the fossil record showed species immutability. They didn't even have anything prior to the Cambrian.
Further, the nuts-and-bolts mechanism was missing. The theory was forced to rely on Lamarck for a time. Darwin had little to offer those who wanted more, because there simply wasn't anything more available, at the time. "The paradox has often been noted that the first edition of The Origin of Species makes a better case than the sixth. This is because Darwin felt obliged, in his later editions, to respond to contemporary criticisms..." (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986, p. xvi.)
All he could do was try to explain the problems as best he could, and offer workable solutions. In the absence of data on the nuts-and-bolts mechanism, that's all he, or any other early Darwinian, could be expected to do.
Your response also plays right into the analogy, and facts of our case. Like the early Darwinians, I have a theory which explains exactly what we see, in a way that DET/Creation does not. Some of the nuts and bolts are missing, but a determination of the properties of the mechanism has been made. We know how it acts, and we know what it does . . . the unfit die.
Darwinians' overarching "mysterious unknown mechanism" was natural selection. It explained all the no-longer-existing creatures in the fossil record (or, at least, what they had of it), posited a more rational origin for the species that did exist, and easily trounced the competing theories, the main one being creationist Biblical thought. He didn't have DNA to explain the nature of heredity, nor did he have mtDNA to trace the human lines, or the huge mass of fossils we have today, but he was right.
In regards to my theory, there are these same basic issues that early Darwinians faced. You complain because I have no DNA-esque mechanism to explain how the beam liberates the energy of the planet. And yet, in spite of the fact that we both see the same bands, the same rings, and the same counterintuitive secondary explosion, you feel that this lack of mechanism constitutes a failed attempt to prove the theory. Well, it doesn't. True, our "fossil" is the canon, and that is all we have to go on . . .
. . . but the point you miss is that those early Darwinians were substantially correct. Even if no other fossil had been found . . . even if every university and research institution had closed its doors the day after Origin of Species came out . . . even if we never learned of DNA, the origins of the universe, and all the other elements of scientific knowledge that support the Darwinian viewpoint . . . they would still be right, and a helluva lot closer to being right than creationists.
Like creationism, DET is a simple theory. It is, in a way, the superlaser equivalent of "goddidit". After all, when it comes to where the rings came from, or what the hell the bands were, or why there was a secondary explosion, all I hear from Warsies are slightly-more-rational-sounding variations of "goddidit". Instead of recognizing the fatal flaws in your theory that are right before your eyes, you postulate impossible ideas. I'm almost waiting for some Warsie to claim that there was a water canopy (or, better yet, gasoline canopy) or two over Alderaan to explain the rings. You think I'm joking, but you guys just don't seem to realize how badly DET fails.
And yet, you wonder why I continue to defend my argument.
The only thing which allows for DET is if you take the most simplistic approach possible
Such as watching the movie and seeing what's up on the screen.
You cut out the part that you damn near quote way above . . . "Duh, energy beam make planet go kaboom."
Watching the movie and seeing what's up on the screen is my belief of how one should do things. It obviously isn't yours. DET and rings? DET and a secondary explosion? What, was the planet just a ticking bomb waiting to go off a few seconds after being tapped by a superlaser? You seem to think so.
On the other hand, if you actually watch the film, and pay attention to those annoying details like rings, bands, clouds, et cetera, you might just end up realizing the plain and simple fact that pure DET didn't happen.
Right. The beam makes contact with the periphery of the atmosphere but does not affect it, somehow cascades into an umbrella enveloping the planet which then somehow sinks into the mass of the planet or induces some secondary nuclear reaction in non-fissionable or non-fusionable matter, and
then causes Alderaan to violently explode. This to you is a simpler and more rational theory than Direct Energy Transfer?
No . . . but, then, the drivel you have written above bears very little resemblance to my theory.
At no point do I suggest that the beam
only makes contact with the periphery of the atmosphere. It does, but only as it travels on through. When it hits the surface, it initiates some sort of reaction which results in a globe-encircling band of destruction, laying waste to whatever it touches, and gaining energy as it travels around the globe. At the same time, a peculiar planar ring appears, moving at ~.3 lightspeed. What is occurring inside the planet is uncertain at this point, but what is clear is that at the time the band meets itself on the other side of the planet, there is a tremendous secondary explosion, resulting in the total destruction of the planet, and a corresponding second ring, this one moving at .9 lightspeed (or possibly better, according to Saxton).
There is no atmospheric cascade, nor is there some magical sinking umbrella. The closest you could hope to come would be that the bands are operating not only on the surface but also beneath the surface, which is a likely idea, but not one that can be conclusively proven based solely on the visual of the planet . . . we can't see beneath the surface. There is also no reference made to nuclear, antimatter, or any other sort of 'common' interactions.
It would be nice if we had more to go on, but we don't . . . all we have available is the view of Alderaan from several thousand kilometers as it is being destroyed. However, that gives us all we need to see that the idea of the superlaser as a DET weapon is impossible, and it gives us all we need to construct another, more plausible theory, based on the evidence.
Now, if the superlaser had magically halted Alderaan's spin, and magically converted around a thousandth of that energy into acceleration of a millionth of the planet's mass, you might have something. However, that's a little outside the parameters of a DET device, wouldn't you say?
It is precisely
because of Conservation of Angular Momentum that the inertial motion of Alderaan's spin remains in force even as the planet is exploding. Tangental geometry dictates that matter imparted along a given vector will continue along that vector. The vapourised material ejected from the equatorial region of the planet would propagate outward along the planet's rotational plane, given additional momentum by the force of Alderaan's disruption. There is no magic involved, and certainly no necessity to invoke MUMs.
Nice try, kid, but it doesn't work.
Over and above the fact that you'll have a helluva time explaining why vaporized ejecta will organize itself along a plane and manage to collect the necessary energy to depart at .3c,
and the fact that, much to your chagrin, I'm sure, your own Saxton disagrees with you, you'll
still have to explain how the ring departed the planet using vaporized material, when, at the time of the first ring's appearance, there was no material vaporization occurring over any part of the globe except over the superlaser strike zone.
Even if I don't ask you to prove that material was being vaporized on the farside, you're still left with the left and right sides of the planet that are unscathed, but ring-producing:
I have no idea how you expect to explain how to get the vaporized material from the strike zone to maneuver itself in the way you require. But, please, be my guest.
The rings of material tossed off by supernovae (see SN1987A, to name but one example) certainly do not require MUMs as the mechanics of their propagation, and are very much governed by Conservation of Angular Momentum.
A pity you have no idea what you're talking about . . . those aren't rings, they just look that way under the illumination:
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/guidry/viole ... rings.html
Sorry, couldn't resist.
