It would have lit up the sky like a Christmas tree. The biggest meteor showers recorded in history would have paled in comparison. However much you think landed on the Moon, 10,000 times that would have fallen back to Earth and every piece of it the size of a grain of sand or larger would have burned as it fell back through the atmosphere.
Of course, the only people left alive to witness it would have been shut up inside the Ark so maybe they just missed the greatest meteor shower of all time.
There was one window, near the roof:
Genesis 6:16a KJV — A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above;
So Noah and his family might have witnessed your shower.
Maybe. But visibility is being assumed here.
Under HPT, the early Flood atmosphere would not have been a clear night sky with a convenient view of meteors. The fountains of the great deep would have put enormous amounts of water vapor, spray, cloud, mist, sediment, and debris into the atmosphere. The earth was also under sustained catastrophic rainfall, at least for the first forty days.
So even if fallback material produced atmospheric light, it does not follow that Noah had a clear view of it through the ark window. A window exists, yes. A clear sky does not necessarily follow.
Also, if much of the fallback occurred while the waters still covered the earth, then debris that did not burn up could have hit the global ocean, been pulverized, buried, or incorporated into Flood deposits. That affects what kind of evidence we should expect.
It is not merely a mathematics problem. The mathematical difficulty reflects something true about reality itself, namely that extremely small differences in initial conditions can produce radically different long-term outcomes.
I agree with this part.
The three-body problem is not merely an artificial human math puzzle. It reflects real dynamical sensitivity in multi-body gravitational systems.
But that does not get you to impossibility.
The three-body problem shows that such systems are complex, sensitive to initial conditions, and difficult to predict in closed form. It does not show that stable or quasi-stable multi-body systems cannot form, cannot persist, or must have been specially created in their present arrangement.
So the correct conclusion is:
“Pluto’s system is dynamically nontrivial.”
Not:
“Therefore Pluto’s system could not possibly result from any post-ejection process.”
That stronger conclusion still has to be argued.
This does not mean that every system containing three or more bodies is automatically unstable, which seems to be how you are interpreting my argument.
I am not interpreting you that way, at least not any longer. I understand that you are making a sensitivity/stability argument, not saying every three-body system instantly falls apart.
My point is that sensitivity cuts both ways. If the outcome depends heavily on initial conditions, trajectories, near-encounters, relative velocities, collisions, captures, and energy exchanges, then those details matter enormously. You cannot simply label the event a “chaotic steam explosion” and treat that as though it rules out every possible pathway.
The three-body problem tells us the pathway would be complex. It does not prove there is no pathway.
Pluto has orbited the sun less than 20 times throughout the whole history of mankind. There HAS NOT been anywhere near close to the amount of time it would have taken for that system to develop to the state we observe it in.
That point cuts both ways.
If Pluto has completed fewer than about twenty solar orbits since the Flood, then it has also had relatively few full solar-orbit cycles for external perturbations from the broader solar system to destabilize it.
Meanwhile, the internal Pluto-Charon system operates on much shorter timescales. Charon and the small moons orbit the Pluto-Charon barycenter in days to weeks, not in 248-year cycles.
So “Pluto has only gone around the Sun about twenty times” does not automatically count against post-Flood stabilization. It means the detailed trajectory history matters: how the material got there, what it interacted with on the way, what relative velocities were involved, and how much local internal cycling occurred after capture or association.
My arguments are based on the realities that exist, not the least of which are the facts that Pluto is many billions of miles away from Earth, that there are six quite small objects (on astronomical scales) in a very low gravitational environment that almost any other physical force would perturb and destabilize, and that Pluto and it's moons have not been so perturbed and are in exquisitely stable, almost perfectly circular orbits!
But Pluto’s system should not be overstated.
It is not six little planets and/or moons in serene clockwork order.
Pluto and Charon are rounded. The smaller moons are not gravitationally rounded planetary bodies. They are small, irregular bodies orbiting the Pluto-Charon barycenter. Some of them also have chaotic rotations. The system is compact and organized in some respects, but it is also dynamically strange.
So yes, Pluto is a hard case. I grant that. But describing it as an “exquisitely stable” system of “planetary bodies” makes it sound cleaner than it is.
I do not need to know anything more about what it does or how it behaves beyond the fact that it is an uncontrolled explosion, columnated as it may be, that supposedly is capable of accidentally creating a stable binary planetary system some 3 or 4 billion miles away from where the explosion happened.
But if the mechanism is what you are objecting to, then the details of the mechanism matter.
If HPT is proposing supercritical water under extreme pressure, columnated flow, pressure-release acceleration, entrained rock, and related ejecta streams, then reducing that to “an uncontrolled steam explosion” is not answering the theory. It is replacing the theory with a simpler version that is easier to dismiss.
You may still reject HPT’s mechanism. Fine. But the mechanism has to be addressed as stated.
Think of it this way. Imagine a much easier scenario. Let's pretend someone was trying to create a stable system that rested inside one of Earth's Lagrange points...
I do not think this analogy works.
You are imagining material being shot with control over only amount and direction, and then asking whether that alone would create a stable six-body system. But that strips out the very variables that matter: velocity distribution, mass distribution, angular momentum, related ejecta streams, collisions, fragmentation, dissipation, gravitational interaction, and capture.
HPT is not claiming that direction alone magically produces Pluto. It is claiming that material ejected from the same catastrophic event could have related trajectories and velocity ranges, then undergo fragmentation, collision, clustering, capture, and stabilization.
So the analogy does not address the claim. It removes the relevant physical variables and then declares the result impossible.
Would such a shot, no matter how many times we did it, ever end up created a system where six gravitationally rounded bodies of material ended up orbiting each other - at all?
Again, Pluto’s system is not six gravitationally rounded bodies.
Pluto and Charon are rounded. The small moons are irregular. That matters.
You cannot shoot what is effectively a shotgun blast of material and have any reasonable hope that it's going to end up spinning around itself in a stable clockwork fashion.
That assumes the ejecta behaves like a random shotgun blast of unrelated pellets.
But that is exactly what we are disputing. Related ejecta streams are not the same thing as random pellets moving in all directions at unrelated velocities. Material launched from the same event, from related source regions, and in similar velocity ranges can share a common frame of motion.
Relative velocity matters.
Systems simply do no go from a state of massive entropy to almost none (comparatively speaking).
That is too broad.
The second law does not mean local order can never arise from energetic processes. If it did, gravity could never form rings, disks, clusters, binaries, rubble piles, sedimentary sorting, crystals, or any other locally ordered structure.
The question is not whether order can ever arise after a violent energetic event. It can.
The question is whether HPT has the right energy, trajectories, interactions, dissipation, and time to account for Pluto’s system specifically. That is a fair question, but the second law does not settle it by itself.
At the end of the day, we are talking about an explosion of one sort or another producing an orderly system of planetary bodies billions of miles away from the energy source that supposedly produced it.
At the end of the day, that is your framing.
My framing is different: HPT proposes a catastrophic rupture of the fountains of the great deep, involving high-pressure supercritical water and entrained rock, producing ejecta streams that later undergo gravitational sorting, collision, capture, dissipation, and stabilization.
That may fail. But it needs to fail as HPT, not as “a steam explosion accidentally made six planets.”
In other words, if you want to claim that there are forces involved sufficient to control the position and relative velocities of these bodies that accounts for their current positions, orbits and overall condition... then by all means show it to us...
That is fair as a burden question. HPT does have to account for the relative velocities, trajectories, captures, and final configurations.
But that burden is not met or refuted by saying “explosions do not create order” or “the second law proves it impossible.” Those are too broad.
The actual dispute is whether HPT’s proposed ejecta mechanism, followed by gravitational interaction and stabilization, can account for the scale and organization of the debris populations.
That is where the argument has to be made.
They haven't done so because it cannot be done. Explosions do not create more order, they create far less. Pluto, flat out, was not ever part of the Earth - period. The second law of thermodynamics is all the proof anyone needs.
No, the second law is not “all the proof anyone needs.”
The second law does not forbid local decreases in entropy or local increases in order in an open system with energy flow, gravity, collisions, and dissipation. If it did, an enormous amount of ordinary physical structure would be impossible.
An explosion can scatter material, yes. But the aftermath of an energetic event is not automatically permanent maximum disorder. Material can expand, cool, sort, collide, fragment, shed energy, clump, and become gravitationally associated.
So if HPT fails, it fails because its proposed mechanism cannot supply the needed energy, trajectories, capture conditions, and stabilization. It does not fail merely because “an explosion cannot create order.”
A single body here or there like Haley's comet or whatever - perhaps. But a complex, multi-bodied exquisitely stable planetary system 4 billion miles away - not a chance. It did not happen.
That is still the conclusion, not the demonstration.
I agree that Pluto is harder than a comet. I agree that Pluto/Charon is harder than scattered debris. I agree that this is one of the more difficult parts of the debris claim.
But “harder” is not “impossible,” and “not a chance” is not an argument by itself.
The real question remains whether HPT’s mechanism can account for the mass, energy, relative velocities, trajectories, and stabilization involved. That is the argument to be had.
