Privileged Planet: complete eclipses (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 27, 2017, 15:00 (2707 days ago) @ David Turell

The book Privileged Planet makes a big point about total eclipses. This article thinks it is all coincidence, but at this exact time when humans are actively studying astronomy, the eclipses are exactly perfect to help us understand the sun. They weren't in the past and won't be in the future:

https://www.livescience.com/59608-why-total-solar-eclipses-are-coincidences.html?utm_so...

"After all, that's what a total solar eclipse really is: a total coincidence.

"'The [diameter of the] moon is almost exactly 400 [times] smaller than the sun's diameter, and the sun is almost exact 400 times further away than the moon," said Mark Gallaway, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. "The consequence of this is that the angular diameter, or the size we see, of the sun and the moon in the sky are almost exactly the same.”

" Such a nearly perfect match wasn’t always the case, however. Because the distance between the moon and the Earth is slowly changing, solar eclipses looked very different millions of years ago — and they will again, tens of millions of years in the future. "It's a beautiful coincidence — life has been on Earth for about 400 million years, and we're living in this little window of time where this is happening, which is pretty amazing," Gallaway told Live Science.

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"'At the moment, the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth at about the rate your finger nails grow," Galloway said, "so in a few tens of millions of years, we will stop having eclipses like this."

"Solar eclipses would also have looked very different in the distant past, when the moon was much closer to Earth and appeared much larger, Gallaway said. (Though perhaps at that time, only dinosaurs would have been around to see it.) "The moon would have completely covered the sun [at totality of the eclipse], so we wouldn't get all these weird effects like Baily's beads and the diamond ring effect," he said. Baily's beads are points of light sometimes seen when the sun reappears from behind the moon. Sunlight flooding through lunar mountains and valleys causes the phenomenon. The diamond ring is a similar effect but on a much larger scale, occurring when light from the emerging sun flares out along one side of the moon's disk, Gallaway said.

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"A total solar eclipse is unlike any other astronomical event — changes happen above you, around you and within you," Russo told Live Science in an email. "Totality occurs because of the coincidence in scale, allowing the moon to fully block the sun. But what makes totality so special is how immersive the experience is. It is otherworldly and awe-inspiring on a scale never seen before. You don't 'see' a total eclipse. You 'experience' it," Russo said."

Comment: A coincidence says the atheist scientist. The ID author of the book notes that human development is exactly the right point to study a moon, sun event that is perfectly sized for the time being. He says God is at work.