Re: The Moon, Pangea and Drake's Equation

This is my idea for very much simplified model of Earth's continental
timeline: Picture an undisturbed pail of water, then drop a rock into
it. Water splashes out, and ripples continue to form patterns on the
surface over a period of time. In 3 dimensions, on a ball of
freestanding matter, the shifting and twisting between sea and
continental landmasses may be somewhat analogous to the wave patterns
in a closed system like a water pail.

Also, when referring to axial tilt, we should never leave out the
additional phenomenon of true polar wander.


Agent Smith wrote:
I've always been fascinated by the gross planetary dipole antisymmetry
associated with the supercontinent Pangea, and wondered whether it was
the other half of the dipole left behind when the moon separated from
the earth. However, Pangea only dates to 225 million years ago, while
the moon was created about 3.5 billion years ago. This leaves
unaccounted for the entire period of time between those two dates.

Of course, the earth wasn't static during that time, which raises the
question of what happened to Pangea before 225 million years ago? Were
there many continents that coalesced into Pangea or just one large one
that drifted around for 3.25 billion years? When did it appear and what
was there before it?

The Drake Equation has a parameter called fl, which is the probability
that any given planet harbors life. It seems to me that we can try to
write an expression for fl that breaks down Drake's problem into another
series of probabilities for more specific parameters that affect the
occurrence of life. It is a multiplicative series of whatever
parameters require any planet to fall with a band around the parameters
that our earth has. Some of those important parameters would be the
sun's habitable band, parameters of the moon, the tilt of the earth's
axis, and the surface proportions of water and land. I guess that the
density and O/N proportion in the atmosphere must also be accounted for,
but that doesn't seem like a probabilistic question to me.

Thus Drake's fl has the terms fh, ft, fm, and fco, where fh corresponds
to the habitable band, fm embodies all the necessary lunar parameters,
ft the tilt of the axis and fco the continent-to-ocean ratio on the
surface. That's where Pangea comes in. My improvement to Drake's
Equation is then fl~fh*ft*fm*fco, where the tilde is read "scales as,"
and implies a linear scaling. Some people use a symbol very much like
the Greek letter alpha for that, but that's not on my keyboard. I could
also write this as an equation fl=ff*fh*ft*fm*fco, where ff is the fudge
factor that accounts for any parameters that I've forgotten. If nobody
can think of anything I've left out, then ff=1.
.

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