Defining an aspect of Physical Reality.

General Discussion
1

It would be nice to have a different kind of discussion. I know that I go on and on about physical reality; deep-time and striving to appreciate evolution, It’s a difficult thing, I guess, at least for others. Me, I’ve been soaking in deep time and scientific new findings as they’ve been publishing and publicizing them, for all my aware life. I mean I was among the grade schoolers that soaked up the plate-tectonics revolution and the first topo map of the ocean floor a la National Geographic. That’ aware world, cause parents where, is I’m coming from, that’s what it is. … and I don’t get why there are so few who want to think above it and discuss it and their own ideas. We all have them what good are they if we don’t mix it up.

Art of the Dialogue: (That would make a good thread, but time to cut it short.)

I want to try something, here is my exhibit one for what I mean by Physical Reality, evolutionary jazz, such as appreciating that within my blood I possess vestiges that go back billions of years in a most fantastically beautifully poetic manner, folds within folds … I’d like to share this video, I think it does a beautiful job of conveying why I believe such things, at least the heart of it and absorbing its profound implications. This is what appreciating physical reality begins with.

 

History of the Earth

Researched and Written by Leila Battison Narrated and Edited by David Kelly Art by Khail Kupsky Thumbnail Art and Art by Ettore Mazza

2

I for one, am very interested and eager to read you posts. You have taken the time and effort to do the research and in 30 minutes I can learn what may have taken you days to discover and verify.

CC , you are an asset to this forum or to any science forum.

3

Thank you, W4u.

Here’s another fun one, the next step, it demonstrates how consciousness, or biological agency, can emerge from simple physical principles and change over time.

 

“Do all living things have free will? Or are they controlled by DNA and other forces?”

Arvin Ash introduces Philip Ball on biological agency - a non-metaphysical look at the evidence.

This is one video with a descriptive description:

 

Link to Philip Ball’s new book: “How to grow a human”: T.LY URL Shortener

How low in complexity can you go and still have free will. Does a bacteria have free will? Do single cells have it? What do we know about agency in living systems? I collaborated with physicist and author Philip Ball, a former editor at the prestigious journal Nature. who has written extensively on this and other subjects.

What’s the difference between a living thing and one that’s not alive? Scientists don’t agree. But we can say living organisms do things to suit themselves. They rearrange their surroundings for their own purposes.

Even single living cells act with agendas. Macrophages in your immune system chase a bacterium across the slide, switching course as its prey tries to escape, before finally gobbling it up.

But is this an anthropomorphic way of describing a biological process. Single cells don’t have minds of their own – so can they really have goals?

Biologists often insist that cells and bacteria aren’t trying to do anything. it all comes down to genes, chemistry and physics – no aim or design, but which fool our narrative-obsessed minds.

This is “agency” - the ability of living things to alter their environment (and themselves) with purpose, and an agenda. It might help us to understand what “free will” means. Agency supplies what genetic hard-wiring cannot. It’s not feasible to program complex living organisms for every situation they might encounter. For example, the hare is trying to escape from a wolf by being unpredictable. An organism that reacts differently in identical situations stands a better chance of outwitting predators.

The choices we humans make might be carefully deliberated: we contemplate the imagined future scenarios if we do this or that, involving our internal mental models of how the world works and of our position within it. This is what we experience as free will. But this is far from free because of the influence of memories, emotions, social conditioning, and physics.

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined a very simple scheme for how an agent could achieve a different outcome from the one the world would otherwise produce spontaneously. He imagined an ingenious demon that operates a door to sift “hot” from “cold” particles in a gas confined within a box.

The second law says this segregation of hot and cold should never happen of its own accord. But the demon does this by agency - gathering and acting information. But any real memory will eventually fill up – so the memory has to be wiped every to make room for new information. That erasure produces entropy. So all the entropy lost by separating hot from cold is recouped by clearing the demon’s memory.

Complex-systems theorist Stuart Kauffman and philosopher Philip Clayton, say we need a theory of organization. That doesn’t really exist yet.

In 2012 Susanne Still of the University of Hawaii, working with Gavin Crooks of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and others, showed that any entity with a goal – like a cell, an animal, or even a tiny demon – needs to have a memory if it is to work efficiently without wasting energy. They found that energy efficiency depends on an ability to focus only on the information that is most useful. Efficient agents are discerning ones.

You don’t necessarily need a big brain to do it, but just the right rules. Sometimes Maxwell’s demon can work best by taking a gamble on when to open and close the trapdoor, rather than responding to every individual molecule.

4
... the first topo map of the ocean floor ...
I looked at the many expansions (eruptions along fissures) shown on those maps and had to wonder what it would have looked like before they happened. I'm sure I'm not the only one who tried to imagine what could be discovered if those expansions could be reversed somehow. The best idea I found is that the planet would be about 55 to 60 percent of its diameter if all the expansions were rolled back. This seems to me to be consistent with the "small earth" theory wherein the continents we see today were more or less the solid surface of a smaller planet.

The only mechanism I’ve been able to imagine that might account for the increase in size is nuclear fission. The estimates of increasing day lengths over long time seem to indicate only a very minor or even no increase in total mass but, like a spinning ice skater extending his/her arms, a slowing of rotational speed as the diameter increased. It is called conservation of angular momentum and it can be calculated if one has the mathematical tools and the proper info (I don’t).

I know the small earth theory has been rejected by some, but for me the evidence shown on the topo maps is an aspect of physical reality that is just too much to deny. I cannot even guess if a more dense and rapidly spinning planet would have had gravity different than it is now or how shorter day length might have impacted living things on the surface or how a closer moon with more gravitational pull would have produced different tides and ocean currents. One thing that seems obvious is that animal distribution across one more or less contiguous land surface area would have been easier and probably quicker than distribution across continents separated by vast oceans. I reject any notion that we should consider the development of life over long times without also considering the total physical reality of the environment during that development period.

5
and I don’t get why there are so few who want to think above it and discuss it and their own ideas --cc
I knew a Young Earth Creationist that said the different sexes disproves evolution. Because men and women are different, so we couldn't have evolved from the same source. No, really, he said that.

I know what mitochondria is, but the point about how if it hadn’t developed sexual reproduction we probably wouldn’t be here, never occurred to me. Things like that make science interesting.

Also the Shumer guy (I’ll have to look that up), the one who studied chloroplasts. I’m always looking for that origin of an idea, in this case, one footnote. It’s fun to imagine him having the idea, realizing it’s implication, then thinking he better not oversell it!

6
@ibelieveinlogic. - I reject any notion that we should consider the development of life over long times without also considering the total physical reality of the environment during that development period.
Occasionally we agree on stuff.
I know the small earth theory has been rejected by some,
But have you looked into why it's been reject by most all (and indeed I'd be surprised to know that any actual geologists who supports a small Earth theory these days)? "Some" Dilettantes on YouTube don't count. Yes it could be said I'm a dilettante myself, but at least I appreciate my limitations and know I'm no smarter than experts and I also love digging up expert understanding to share with others. Plus I love learning new stuff, which requires being able to admit I can be wrong and have lots more to learn.

Here’s what the scientists say about the Expanding Earth Theory, as summarized at WIKI:

Main arguments against Earth expansion

The hypothesis had never developed a plausible and verifiable mechanism of action.[15] During the 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics—initially based on the assumption that Earth’s size remains constant, and relating the subduction zones to burying of lithosphere at a scale comparable to seafloor spreading[15]—became the accepted explanation in the Earth Sciences.

The scientific community finds that significant evidence contradicts the Expanding Earth theory, and that evidence used in support of it is better explained by plate tectonics:

… *Measurements with modern high-precision geodetic techniques and modeling of the measurements by the horizontal motions of independent rigid plates at the surface of a globe of free radius, were proposed as evidence that Earth is not currently increasing in size to within a measurement accuracy of 0.2 mm per year.[1] The lead author of the study stated “Our study provides an independent confirmation that the solid Earth is not getting larger at present, within current measurement uncertainties”.[26]

… *The motions of tectonic plates and subduction zones measured by a large range of geological, geodetic and geophysical techniques supports plate tectonics.[27][3][28]

… *Imaging of lithosphere fragments within the mantle supports lithosphere consumption by subduction.[3][28]. {This explains where the extra land that Earth is constantly creating at the mid-ocean ridges goes to, it gets folding back into the sub-surface-crust}

… *Paleomagnetic data has been used to calculate that the radius of Earth 400 million years ago was 102 ± 2.8 percent of today’s radius.[29][5] However, the methodology employed has been criticised by the Russian geologist Yuriy Chudinov.[30]

… *Examinations of data from the Paleozoic and Earth’s moment of inertia suggest that there has been no significant change of Earth’s radius in the last 620 million years.[2]


As for Earth moon in the early years, yeah baby that must have been amazing, short days and nights with tides we can’t even imagining, racing across the surface of Earth.

But mind you, Earth had 3.5 billion years of geologic and primitive life evolving. Creatures didn’t show up until after an awful lot of geologic processing already unfolded. As for the rest of it, why not give a good friend of mine, and this time it’s more than virtually :slight_smile: - Wayne Ranney,

Geologist Wayne Ranney describes the history of the Colorado Plateau. With illustrations and excerpts from the book he Co-authored, Wayne Ranney explains live on the plateau over the last 500 million years. Presented by Grand Canyon Trust, and the University of Utah Environmental Humanities Graduate Program, supported by The Nature Conservancy, SUWA, and the Pax Natura Foundation.

Talk given at the University of Utah College of Humanities

 

“Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau with Wayne Ranney.” (2015)



Lausten, was that Schumer 2014?  My search took me into the weeds of scientific papers in a hurry - and I don't have time for that today, besides I had the impression you might have been talking about a popular article, or interview, rather than a scientific paper.  Do share, if you come up with it.  It hinted of a good example of how real scientists work,  questioning themselves first and 'hardest'.

 

 
7

One of the interesting parts of white bloodcells is that pseudopodia are driven by microfilaments and microtubules in the hunt and capture of invasive organisms.

It appears that the microfilament family (micro filament, intermediate filaments , microtubules) are involved in just about every sensory and dynamic function of living organisms.

I suspect that especially microtubules may be the generators of physical consciousness. They are present in humans by trillions and are the heart of the neural network responsible for transporting sensory data to the brain and back to the body.

They are the control mechanism of accurate cell division (mitosis)

Microtubules

800×426 115 KB

As their name implies, microtubules are small hollow tubes. The walls of the microtubule are made of polymerized dimers of α-tubulin and β-tubulin, two globular proteins (Figure 4.5.44.5.4). With a diameter of about 25 nm, microtubules are the widest components of the cytoskeleton. They help the cell resist compression, provide a track along which vesicles move through the cell, and pull replicated chromosomes to opposite ends of a dividing cell. Like microfilaments, microtubules can dissolve and reform quickly.
Summary

The cytoskeleton has three different types of protein elements. From narrowest to widest, they are the microfilaments (actin filaments), intermediate filaments, and microtubules. Microfilaments are often associated with myosin. They provide rigidity and shape to the cell and facilitate cellular movements. Intermediate filaments bear tension and anchor the nucleus and other organelles in place. Microtubules help the cell resist compression, serve as tracks for motor proteins that move vesicles through the cell, and pull replicated chromosomes to opposite ends of a dividing cell. They are also the structural element of centrioles, flagella, and cilia.

8

Yipes W4u, just saw this. Man that’s a half day of googling and culling. I took a quick look at your links and am familiar with those outlines. Since you’ve brought them up before I went big with a HailMary google search term: “Are microtubules the answer to life’s secrets.”

Near the top was “Cracking Nature’s Code: The Potential Answer to Everything
By JB Head PhD”. Took me to a text reader.

But, I gotta peel myself away from the computer and get on with the day, so I’ll leave it to you. Are you familiar with J.B. Head and his work?

 

9

This is a link from the J B Head article. Maybe we can start here:

10

Hopefully these three presentations give a fairly comprehensie look at the proposition of MT as the major ingredients of living Eukaryitic organisms and perhaps the seat of emergent consciousness.

11
plausible and verifiable mechanism of action
The "gotcha" in that is the "verifiable". Formation of a specific planet is a non-repeatable process, no? Thus, not verifiable. One-off conditions even in a common environment will produce one-off results, yes?

To me the plausible part is fission. Makes sense to me that the “heavy elements” would be the most gravitationally attractive and would be the planet forming “seed”. “Heavy”, radioactive, elements would tend to sink into the core. Fission creates heat producing a molten core. Fission produces less dense elements, including gasses. We know Earth gives off more heat than it gets from the Sun. The moving molten iron core produces Earth’s magnetic field. Every volcanic eruption leaves evidence of radioactivity. What causes eruptions? Expanding gasses.

I do not understand why many, if not most, people in the field reject the idea that there is a continuous widespread nuclear reaction taking place throughout the core.

Most all agree planet formation is a process of accretion. Thus we must acknowledge a smaller Earth growing larger throughout time up until it reached some size. At some point, probably at the end of the accretion period, portions of the surface solidified. We know the sea floor spreading continued and still does to some extent. I accept subduction, but I don’t see subduction and expansion as necessarily mutually exclusive.

During a period of a hotter more liquid mantle expansion could have pushed solid surface areas around more easily. Subduction may have begun only when the mantle cooled enough to make the solid surfaces more resistant to dislocation.

Interesting article: Earth’s lost history of planet-altering eruptions revealed | Nature

The timeline of 400 to 620 million years ago for the Earth to have reached its current size is probably too recent to include an expansion phase. It could be that subduction began around that time. The fact that we are experiencing only a little increase in size today may be due to a combination of factors. We know that a unit increase in volume will produce a lesser increase in diameter as the diameter gets larger. If we do an “everything else being equal” sort of calculation, we should recognize that some, possibly much, of our nuclear fuel has already been spent. We should expect sea floor spreading to have slowed over time and at some point it should stop. At that time we should expect to have no subduction, probably little volcanic activity and no more mountain building. Eventually cooling in the core should result in loss of the magnetic field.

And on that happy note I have to stop writing.

12

Fascinating article, thank you. Though I don’t think it addresses the expanding Earth arguments.

 

Regarding Earth radioactive core, here’s some interesting details:

Radioactive decay accounts for half of Earth’s heat 19 Jul 2011 Hamish Johnston

https: //physicsworld . com/a/radioactive-decay-accounts-for-half-of-earths-heat/

About 50% of the heat given off by the Earth is generated by the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium, and their decay products. That is the conclusion of an international team of physicists that has used the KamLAND detector in Japan to measure the flux of antineutrinos emanating from deep within the Earth. The result, which agrees with previous calculations of the radioactive heating, should help physicists to improve models of how heat is generated in the Earth.

Geophysicists believe that heat flows from Earth’s interior into space at a rate of about 44 × 1012 W (TW). What is not clear, however, is how much of this heat is primordial – left over from the formation of the Earth – and how much is generated by radioactive decay. …

… One possibility that has been mooted in the past is that a natural nuclear reactor exists deep within the Earth and produces heat via a fission chain reaction. Data from KamLAND and Borexino do not rule out the possibility of such an underground reactor but place upper limits on how much heat could be produced by the reactor deep, if it exists. KamLAND sets this limit at about 5 TW, while Borexino puts it at about 3 TW. …

{Then it gets complicated}


Then, I googled "directly measuring the “expansion of Earth” "

Expanding Earth?–by Bill Mundy 1988 - https: //www .grisd . aorg/origins-15053
Seemed like an article you might be interested in reading, lots of names and old papers mentioned, gives both sides of the arguments and weaknesses mentioned. Definitely one to learn from. Mind you it's like 33 years old.

 

This one I found interesting because of its red flag of deceptive slight of hand rhetoric:

Scrutinizing Science pp 289-314| Cite as "The Theory of an Expanding Earth and the Acceptability of Guiding Assumptions"

https:// link.springer . com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-2855-8_14

Richard Nunan. (with all of one citation racked up for the article)

Abstract
For over two decades plate tectonics has enjoyed a dominant position in the earth sciences. The intellectual grandchild of Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, plate tectonics is the now familiar explanation of continental displacement as the product of lateral movement of rigid lithospheric plates in which continental blocks are embedded. …

(2nd paragraph) Most scientists read as little as they can get away with anyway, and they do not like new theories in particular. New theories are hard work, and they are dangerous — it is dangerous to support them (might be wrong) and dangerous to oppose them (might be right). The best course is to ignore them until forced to face them. Even then, respect for the brevity of life and professional caution lead most scientists to wait until someone they trust, admire, or fear supports or opposes the theory. Then they get two for one — they can come out for or against without having to actually read it, and can do so in a crowd either way. This, in a nutshell, is how the plate-tectonics “revolution” took place. (Greene, 1984, p. 753) …


Utterly off base BS, real scientists stick to their topic and the evidence, rather than whining about their convictions that their professors and other scientists are stupid lazy fraudsters. (‘Why’s everybody always picking on me’, is no way to do serious science, which doesn’t hand out ribbons for showing up. Nor does science care about salving our ever so tender egos, it is what it is, until you prove with evidence that it’s something else.)

This one seems a reasonable summary article looking at both sides, I’m just sharing finale here:

https:// www. wikiwand . com/en/Expanding_Earth

Main arguments against Earth expansion
The hypothesis had never developed a plausible and verifiable mechanism of action.[15] During the 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics—initially based on the assumption that Earth’s size remains constant, and relating the subduction zones to burying of lithosphere at a scale comparable to seafloor spreading[15]—became the accepted explanation in the Earth Sciences.

The scientific community finds that significant evidence contradicts the Expanding Earth theory, and that evidence used in support of it is better explained by plate tectonics:

… Measurements with modern high-precision geodetic techniques and modeling of the measurements by the horizontal motions of independent rigid plates at the surface of a globe of free radius, were proposed as evidence that Earth is not currently increasing in size to within a measurement accuracy of 0.2 mm per year.[1] The lead author of the study stated “Our study provides an independent confirmation that the solid Earth is not getting larger at present, within current measurement uncertainties”.[26]

… The motions of tectonic plates and subduction zones measured by a large range of geological, geodetic and geophysical techniques supports plate tectonics.[27][3][28]

… Imaging of lithosphere fragments within the mantle supports lithosphere consumption by subduction.[3][28]

… Paleomagnetic data has been used to calculate that the radius of Earth 400 million years ago was 102 ± 2.8 percent of today’s radius.[29][5]

However, the methodology employed has been criticised by the Russian geologist Yuriy Chudinov.[30]

… Examinations of data from the Paleozoic and Earth’s moment of inertia suggest that there has been no significant change of Earth’s radius in the last 620 million years.[2]


Now on to Write4u’s suggested videos.

13

Thanks Write4u, fun videos. Speaking of cells,

Wallace Marshall (UCSF): Ten Craziest Things Cells Do

iBiology | Nov 20, 2017

Dr. Marshall refutes the commonly held idea that cells are just bags of watery enzymes. He runs through his “Top 10 List” of unexpected and amazing things that individual cells can do. These including growing to be huge, navigating mazes, and performing feats that seem to belong in science fiction.

Speaker Biography: Dr. Wallace Marshall is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also a Director of the Physiology Summer Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Marshall’s lab is interested in how single cells count and measure to determine cell size, number and organization. They have developed the single celled giant ciliate Stentor coeruleus as a molecular and genomic model organism for these studies.


 

1 Like
14

Imagine holding a bouquet of single-celled ‘flowers’.

15

Darn you, I can’t keep up.

I just got done with the first vid.

It’s a prequel to the Dino section in Fantasia - for adults :slight_smile:

 

16
Radioactive decay accounts for half of Earth’s heat
Thanks. I must be way behind. I didn't realize that fission is now the consensus reason for core heat. I will be looking for anything relating to the daughter particles of that fission. I have to think that there are gasses produced and it is those gasses that push lava up through the volcanoes. How else would gases get so deep?

My acceptance of an expanding Earth is based on several things:

Consensus is that the planet formed by accretion, therefore it did start small and get bigger. So, in the past it was smaller.

Consensus is that the surface, as well as the mantel, was molten at some time, therefore the surface had to have become solid at some time. When the surface was molten, any water would have been as vapor in the atmosphere, not on the surface. Water could collect on the surface only after the surface cooled to the boiling point at the atmospheric pressure at the time.

Consensus is that the continents are lighter than the material underneath. In other words the continents float on top of the mantle. Perhaps there is some reason why the surface would not have cooled and solidified uniformly, but I am not aware of one.

If the crust cooled and formed uniformly and then fractured I see no reason why those solid areas would become more dense and sink into the mantle. Indeed, it seems likely that the mantle would have cooled some at the same time, thus becoming more dense and better able to support the original solid areas.

The daughter products of radioactive decay are less dense than the original elements and include gasses. Continuing fission would have produced an expanding planet. Given the consensus on subduction today, I accept that the mantle continues to be more dense than the original solid areas, but not by much. The new crust formed at and spread from the ocean ridges seems to be eventually subducted in some, but not all, areas only because it contacts a thicker region of crust and because it is kept at a lower elevation by the weight of ocean water on top of it. My conclusion about that could be wrong, but as Monk says, I don’t think so.

If we could “roll back” the sea floor spreading we would see that the continents today would come together and form a surface of a planet about 60% of Earth’s current size. One major complaint against this indicating a smaller Earth is that this does not take into account the different shapes and arrangements of the continents over long time.

If we accept that the continents as seen today are, more or less, the remnants of the originally cooled and formed crust of a smaller Earth we should be able to project that with a different arrangement and, even different sizes, of the continents we would see different sea floor spreading but that different sea floor spreading would still indicate a smaller Earth with a surface of those different continents at about 60% of today’s size. This may not be immediately intuitive.

In other words it is the total amount of continental surface area, regardless of configuration, that shows us the surface area and thus the size of the Earth at the time the molten surface cooled and formed a solid surface. This requires us to accept that no significant amount of continental area has been formed or lost since the original cooling. All the models I have seen indicate this is true.

The fact that the continents today fit together rather nicely is just a really big clue, but shouldn’t be taken as indicating the configuration of the surface immediately following fracturing. For those who might want an example, we can take a square pane of glass, break it into pieces and by putting the pieces next to each other in different ways form many different sizes of panes of glass but only with the same area all of which give us a really good idea of the size the original pane.

A bit long but it is how I got there.

 

I was not able to access the article: “Expanding Earth?–by Bill Mundy 1988 – https: //www .grisd . aorg/origins-15053” and I would be interested in seeing it. Is there another way to get to it?

17

https://www.grisda.org/origins-15053

I added some spaces around the dots to disable it.

 

Regarding Oceanic and Continental rocks:

Oceanic Crust The oceanic crust is the component of the earth’s crust that makes up the ocean basins. This part, which as a density of around 3.0 g/cm3, is made up of dark basalt rocks that contain minerals and substances silicon, magnesium, and oxygen. A unique occurrence of recycling happens to this layer. With time, solid mantle gathers on the underside of the oceanic crust thus forming two layers. The extra weight sinks the layer into the mantle which leads to periodic melting and recycling of the continental crust.

Continental Crust
The continental crust is that part of the crust that makes up the earth’s surface. In fact, about 40% of the surface of the earth is made up of this layer. The rocks in this layer are made up of light-colored granite rich in minerals and substances like aluminum, oxygen, and silicon. The continental crust has a density of about 2.6 g/cm3 which helps the continents of the world to stay in one place.


 

 

Happy hunting.

18

 

PBS EONS is a pretty good YouTube channel for more on geology

19

Thanks for both videos.

The continental crust is that part of the crust that makes up the earth’s surface. In fact, about 40% of the surface of the earth is made up of this layer.
I think that statement along with the following two helps make the case of an expanding Earth. These quotes are from the abstract. I did not pay the $32.00 for the full article.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-earth-063016-020525:

“… there is no recognizable mantle lithosphere from before 3 Ga. We infer that there was lithosphere before 3 Ga and that ∼3 Ga marks the stabilization of blocks of continental lithosphere that have since survived.”

“A number of models, using different approaches, suggest that at 3 Ga the volume of continental crust was ∼70% of its present-day volume and that this may be a minimum value.”


To me, these quotes set a date for the solidification of the crust into the surface area of the continents we see today. They say to me that if we accept surface area is/was a function of volume, then the surface area and thus the size of the Earth at 3 Ga was about 70% of the current values. That is close enough to the 65 % figure most of the expanding Earth folks use.

The second video tells us that a “different sort of plate tectonics” began about 2.7 Ga. That corresponds nicely to just after the solid crust date. I think that supports the idea that conditions near the surface of an expanding Earth fractured the surface into continents and they began moving between 3 Ga and 2.7 Ga.

 

I am going to look again at the day length numbers. As I remember them there was a rough correlation to a posited increase in Earth’s diameter.

20

Still looking for day length explanations. The numbers I’ve found so far show a relatively linear increase in day length over time. Fossil growth rings show very short days early on. The consensus is that the Moon has been the predominant factor. One major flaw in that is that at very early time the Moon would have had to be so close to the Earth that Earth’s gravity would have pulled it apart. I see nothing yet to deter me from thinking that conservation of angular momentum during expansion was likely the predominant factor early on. It may be that expansion was greater early on and tapered off fairly rapidly. This would be consistent with a reducing fuel supply having a lesser impact within a larger volume.

The https://www.annualreviews.org site has many interesting articles on a variety of topics, but all I have been able to access for free are the abstracts. I still need help.