Your third option isn't precisely the same as the second but it is little more than a modified version of it and it would fail for the same reason. Objects with the size we are talking about simply do not do gentle collisions,
That depends on relative velocity.
If two large bodies collide from unrelated trajectories at high relative speed, then yes, they tend to shatter rather than merge. But that is not the only possible scenario. Material ejected from the same event, in related streams, in the same general direction, and at similar velocities would not necessarily be colliding like unrelated objects approaching from opposite directions.
A debris stream can be moving extremely fast relative to Earth or the Sun while neighboring fragments within that stream have much lower relative velocities with respect to each other.
HPT would allow streams of material to travel in the same general direction and velocity range.
And two objects moving in the same general direction at similar speeds have low relative velocity to each other. They may never meet at all unless their trajectories are altered by gravity, or unless their paths already converge. But if they do meet, the collision is not automatically a high-speed destructive impact.
Depending on their relative velocity, mass, shape, and gravitational interaction, such bodies could collide, bounce, fragment, remain loosely associated, or form rubble-pile/contact-binary type structures. That does not prove HPT’s scenario happened, but it does mean “large objects cannot do gentle collisions” is too broad. Large objects cannot do gentle collisions at high relative velocity. That qualifier matters.
they do not cluster together
That is too absolute.
Bodies in space can and do exist in clusters, families, binaries, contact binaries, rubble piles, and captured groups. So the issue is not whether clustering is impossible in principle. It is whether HPT’s proposed event could produce the kind of clustering, capture, and stabilization necessary for the bodies in question.
That is a fair question. But simply saying “they do not cluster together” does not answer it.
Especially if the material began as related ejecta streams rather than as totally unrelated bodies approaching from random directions. Related ejecta would already share some commonality of origin, direction, timing, and velocity. That does not prove later clustering must happen, but it makes the situation very different from a random cloud of unrelated objects trying to assemble from scratch.
and there simply hasn't been sufficient time for Ceres and especially Pluto to have captured all the scattered debris that would surely have been created by an explosion of material of sufficient power to send these objects into their current orbits.
This still assumes the wrong sequence.
You are treating Ceres and Pluto as though they first existed as completed bodies, and then had to go around collecting scattered debris afterward. That's not what HPT claims.
The question is whether related Earth-origin ejecta could have traveled in streams, fragmented, clustered, collided, and stabilized into the bodies and systems we now observe, not whether a finished Ceres or a finished Pluto had enough time to sweep up everything after the fact.
Also, “scattered debris” does not necessarily mean a perfectly random cloud dispersed equally in all directions. If the material came from the same catastrophic event, from related regions, in related directions, and with related velocities, then it would not be starting as unrelated particles spread evenly across the solar system. It would already have some commonality of motion.
So the time question cannot simply be framed as, “How long would it take a finished Pluto to capture all this random material?” That is not what HPT posits, nor is it the scenario I'm defending.
And forget about Pluto's system ever getting organized the way it is via random accretion processes (i.e. fragmentation, collision, clustering, capture, and later dynamical stabilization) resulting from a chaotic explosion that occurred billions of miles away from it's current location.
That is still your framing, not mine.
I am not arguing for “random accretion” from a chaotic cloud of unrelated debris. I am arguing that HPT allows related ejecta streams: material launched from the same catastrophic event, with related origins, related trajectories, and related velocity ranges.
Those are not the same thing.
Calling fragmentation, collision, clustering, capture, and stabilization “random accretion” does not answer the argument. It just renames it in a way that makes it sound as implausible as possible.
The question is not whether a random explosion billions of miles away magically organized Pluto’s system. The question is whether related Earth-origin ejecta could produce temporary clusters, collisions, captures, and later stable or quasi-stable configurations under gravity.
You may reject that. But the thing you are rejecting needs to be stated accurately.
Also, “organized the way it is” should not be overstated. Pluto’s system is not a calm miniature solar system. It is a compact circumbinary Kuiper Belt system with near-resonances, chaotic rotations among some of the small moons, and an eccentric, inclined solar orbit. It is orderly in some respects, but strange in others.
I don't think it does, JR. Sure, these objects are small compared to Earth but Earth is not a small object at all. Earth might be small in astronomical terms but that doesn't mean it isn't vast in terms of the things we are here discussing and Pluto isn't all that small, even compared to the Earth (it's about 18% the mass of Earth's moon). When you include Eris (another dwarf planet that must surely be included as debris from Earth in Walt's theory), the two together are about 42% of the mass of the Moon and that doesn't touch all of the other debris in the Solar system that you think is counter to a "very good" creation, which, if you add it all up, comes to a minimum of 2.5 Lunar masses and perhaps as much as 10 Lunar masses. That's still only just over 3% of Earth's mass but, once again, the Earth is not a small thing and it's still qualifies as an absurdly large amount of material to get ejected from Earth and sent into orbits many billions of miles from the Sun. 2.5 Lunar masses comes to something like 1.84 × 10²³ kg, that's 184,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.
I agree that Earth is vast, and that a few percent of Earth’s mass is enormous in human terms. I’m not using “roughly 3%” to make the event sound small or easy. I’m using it to keep the scale proportional to the theory.
Yes, 1.84 × 10²³ kg is an enormous number. But that is just another way of stating the same few-percent figure. Stating it in kilograms, lunar masses, or diameter comparisons changes the rhetorical presentation, not the mass budget.
The real question is not whether the number sounds big. Of course it does. The real question is whether a few percent of Earth’s original mass is obviously beyond the scale of a catastrophic rupture of the fountains of the great deep.
And that is where HPT needs to be answered on its own terms. It is not proposing ordinary volcanism, ordinary geysers, or a steam-boiler accident. It is proposing a global rupture involving extreme subterranean pressure, supercritical water, runaway crustal failure, and a sustained high-velocity water-rock slurry.
So yes, the energy and trajectory requirements are the real dispute. But that is different from saying, “Pluto and the asteroid belt sound too big, therefore impossible.” If HPT fails here, it fails because its proposed energy mechanism is insufficient, not because the mass budget is automatically ridiculous.
Once again, for "later fragmented, sorted, collided, captured, and stabilized" read "accretion" of one sort or another.
Calling both “accretion” does not make them the same process.
There is a major difference between slow secular accretion from a primordial nebula over vast ages and catastrophic post-ejection aggregation/capture from related ejecta streams. The former is the model I reject. The latter is what I am saying HPT allows.
So if by “accretion” you simply mean that some material can gather, collide, cluster, or stabilize, fine, I don't care about the label. But then the word is being used so broadly that it no longer identifies the specific process you originally objected to.
The question is not whether we can apply the word “accretion” in some general sense. The question is whether HPT requires the kind of slow, ordinary, secular accretion model you were contrasting with “launched intact.” It does not.
Yes, just keep in mind that "coherent", "correct" and "convincing" aren't synonyms. I was simply acknowledging that the post responded directly to the objection I presented as I presented it. The only thing it convinced me of is that, due to its proposed columnated nature, there is no need to think that it would have all been turned into super-heated plasma.
If that specific objection is answered, then the disagreement moves to the next question: whether the HPT mechanism has enough energy and the right dynamics to produce the resulting debris populations and orbital configurations.
That is still a serious disagreement. But it is a narrower one than saying the fountains could not even function as an ejection mechanism in principle.
It doesn't answer other issues that I haven't really voiced here. Not the least of which is the fact that there is no biblical evidence that the rain in Noah's flood was anything other than water. That is, there is no biblical indication that it rained large chunks of rock and other debris, nor is there any record, in any flood story from around the world of such debris fall nor is there any mention of the ceaseless meteor shower that would have resulted and which would have lasted for weeks and months had such a large quantity of material been ejected into the vacuum of space.
I agree that the rain was water.
But HPT is not claiming that the rain itself was made of rocks. The rain and the fountains of the great deep are related parts of the Flood event, but they are not identical phenomena.
Genesis says the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened. It does not give a full physical inventory of every consequence of that rupture. So the fact that the rain is described as rain does not mean no rock, steam, mud, ejecta, or debris could have been launched by the fountains.
As for the “ceaseless meteor shower,” that assumes a lot about what the returning debris would look like, how much of it would return, where it would return, when it would return, and how survivors or later traditions would describe it.
Some material would escape. Some would fall back. Some would burn up. Some could hit the ocean. Some could be pulverized or buried. Some effects could simply be remembered as part of the general catastrophe rather than as a separate “meteor shower” category.
Ancient Flood accounts are not physics logs, and the Bible does not give us a detailed global history of the centuries after the Flood. From Noah to Abram, the biblical narrative is highly selective and covenantal, not a worldwide catalogue of every atmospheric, geological, or astronomical event. The Earth is a big place, and most of biblical history focuses on one general region and one developing line of descent.
So the absence of a detailed biblical statement saying, “and then meteors continued falling for some time,” does not by itself refute the idea that ejecta and fallback occurred as part of the catastrophe or its aftermath. At most, it means Scripture does not explicitly describe that proposed consequence.
I'm still pretty solidly on the "obviously impossible" end of the spectrum. Since we're discussing Noah's flood, let's compare it to God's seven colored rainbow. If "It obviously happened that way." is Red and "It's definitely utterly impossible." is Violet, color me Indigo.
Fair enough.
I agree that I have not falsified the theory.
Well, the three body problem presents a bigger issue than I think you're willing to admit. If the Pluto system looked like the so called "scattered disk", you'd be in a better position.
Pluto is definitely a harder case than scattered debris. A compact Pluto-Charon system with small moons in nearly circular, nearly coplanar orbits is more difficult to account for than a loose scattered-disk population.
But “harder to account for” is not the same thing as “impossible,” and the three-body problem still does not establish impossibility. It establishes mathematical complexity and sensitivity to initial conditions. It does not prove that stable or quasi-stable multi-body configurations cannot arise or persist.
Also, Pluto’s system should not be described as though it were simply a serene miniature solar system. Pluto and Charon are a binary-like pair, the smaller moons orbit their shared barycenter, and some of those small moons have chaotic rotations. So yes, the orbits are more organized than the scattered disk. But the system is also dynamically strange, not a simple “therefore specially created there” arrangement.
So I can grant your narrower point: Pluto is one of the more difficult parts of the debris claim. What I am denying is the stronger claim that the three-body problem proves it impossible.
No, it isn't dead on arrival. Not by any means. The source of the water makes sense. The movement of the land masses makes sense. The explanatory power for all sorts of geological things we see all makes perfect sense. Even the idea of sending some quantity of material into space isn't too hard for me to accept. A comet or two, here or there, I can buy, but the entire asteroid belt, and Pluto? No. I don't buy that for a second.
That is a fair place to focus the disagreement. I understand why you find that hard to accept. But “I can buy a comet or two, but not the asteroid belt and Pluto” is still a judgment about plausibility and scale. It is not, by itself, a demonstration that the model is impossible.
That is the distinction I have been trying to preserve.
The asteroid belt and Pluto are not a different kind of problem from “some material into space.” They are a larger and more complex version of the same basic problem: how much material can the fountains eject, how much energy per unit mass is available, what trajectories result, and what later gravitational sorting/capture/stabilization occurs.
So the question is not, “Can HPT send a comet or two into space?” and then a totally unrelated question, “Can HPT account for the asteroid belt and Pluto?” The latter is where the former gets tested at scale.
And that is why the mass-budget point matters. If the debris population required half the Earth, or another Earth-sized mass, I would agree that the scale itself becomes absurd. But if the total debris population is on the order of a few percent of Earth’s original mass, then the issue becomes whether HPT’s proposed catastrophic mechanism can plausibly supply escape-scale energy to that fraction of Earth’s mass and distribute it into the resulting orbits.
That is still a serious question. But it is different from treating “asteroid belt and Pluto” as automatically disqualifying merely because they sound too large.
So I would frame it this way: HPT either has enough energy and the right dynamics to account for the whole debris population, or it does not. But if it fails, it fails there in the detailed energy/trajectory/dynamics argument, not because “a comet or two” is acceptable while “the asteroid belt and Pluto” is self-evidently impossible.
Again, I am not claiming this proves HPT. I am saying your objections have shifted from “impossible in principle” to “I do not think the HPT mechanism can scale up to the asteroid belt and Pluto.” That is a real objection, but it is not the same as a falsification, and it is not answered by labeling the result “too big” or “too organized.”
