The FOX television series Cosmos has once again gotten itself into a strange scientific controversy. However this time it is not over global warming, the Big Bang or even evolution. This go-round, it is about comets. The most recent episode explained what comets are and also what they are not. Before science, stated Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson; it was believed that comets were warnings of doom over many different cultures. He also explained that the actual word disaster means “bad star” in the Greek language.
The show proceeded to show some science history and explained Edmund Halley’s life story. He was the one who figured out how comets work and the comet which now has his name comes back by the Earth about every 75 years. It came by here in 1986 and is scheduled again in 2061. Halley was the individual that encouraged Sir Isaac Newton to publish what is thought to possibly be the most important science book ever, the Principia Mathematica.
How did all this make creationists angry? That was due to anyone who is a young Earth creationist not only not believing in evolution; he or she also denies any type of science that even remotely suggests that anything on the Earth or anywhere else out in the universe is over 6,000 years old. This includes comets, most of which are not young.
On the most recent episode, Tyson stated that several comets arrive from the Oort Cloud, which is an extremely far off region of icy figures that lay very far outside of Pluto, yet still orbit the sun. There could be over two trillion of these ice-covered objects, and sometimes, one of them gets knocked from its regular trek and instead takes a very long travel time to the inner portion of the solar system. As that object gets closer to the sun and starts to warm, the transferal of gas and ice provides it with a tail, and if it comes near Earth, than humans may get to view a comet.
However, creationists have a big problem here NASA states that the objects in the cloud region are believed to be left over from when the solar system was first formed about 4.6 billion years ago. They are also so far away that it takes these comets extremely long periods of time to get to the inner solar system. Because of this, they have the name of “long-period comets”.
The problem should now be obvious. There is no way comets can exist that are much older than creationists think the entire age of creation to be. They think the Oort region was just imagined up by scientist to give a birthplace for comets, since they have not existed as long as astronomers say they have. Therefore the Oort area is just fiction. The big problem creationists have is the idea that comets are prehistoric and have traveled enormous distances.
Science says the Earth is old and that the Oort Cloud exists. That does not mean any creationist is going to have his or her mind changed due to Cosmos being on the airwaves. That is really sad too because the awesome, amazing and wonderful Neil deGrasse Tyson has ended up making science cool, and not just for those of us who loved the topic in the first place. He has actually made it fun for everyone in the family to watch, so too bad for creationists and their closed minds. They cannot get any type of enjoyment out of a show that is smart and really fun at the same time. They will just continue to go on wasting their lives denying reality because they feel reality has to bend to what they believe. It cannot go the other way and that is sad. That makes God very tiny and small is something that He is not.
The FOX television series Cosmos almost seems to like getting itself into all kinds of strange scientific controversies.
By Kimberly Ruble