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One section of the Papers that requires only a minimal knowledge of arithmetic in order to be able to check its veracity concerns the revelators description of the concurrent development of our planet and its moon by an accretion process:
"2,500,000,000 years ago the planets had grown immensely in size. Urantia was a well-developed sphere about one tenth its present mass and was still growing rapidly by meteoric accretion." (658)
"2,000,000,000 years ago the earth began decidedly to gain on the moon. Always had the planet been larger than its satellite, but there was not so much difference in size until about this time, when enormous space bodies were captured by the earth. Urantia was then about one fifth its present size…." (659)
"1,500,000,000 years ago the earth was two thirds its present size, while the moon was nearing its present mass. (659)
The story the revelators have given us is that our planet and its moon developed together from a meteoric cloud surrounding the sun by the process of co-accretion--and were approximately the same size until 2 billion years ago. At the -2.5 billion years mark we are told that the earth was one tenth its present mass. And since the revelators state the moon was about the same size as the earth at that time, it, too, must have been about one tenth the present mass of the earth.
At the -2 billion years mark, we're told the earth and its moon were still about the same size, and by then, about one fifth the earth's present mass.
But by 1.5 billion years ago, their story has it that the moon was near its present mass, and that the earth had captured enormous space bodies and grown much more quickly than the moon.
Figures quoted in Microsoft Encarta, Encyclopedia Britannica and elsewhere give the present mass of the earth as 5.94 x 1021 metric tons with its radius at 6378 km, while the present mass of the moon is given as about 7.5 x 1019 metric tons with a radius of 1738 km.
Remembering that the revelators story has it that 2.5 billion years ago the earth and moon were about the same size and about one tenth the earth's present mass, that is both are about 5.94 x 1020 metric tons, we have the problem that this makes the moon about 8 times larger then than it now is!
Worse still, a half billion years later, 2 billion years ago, the moon and the earth were about one fifth the earth's present mass, so about 1.2 x 1021 metric tons--which makes the moon 16 times larger than its present mass!!
At present the moon is about 1/80th the mass of the earth, and would have to have shed almost all its mass during the period between -2 and -1.5 billion years of its existence.
Presently the whole of the moon's surface is pock-marked by impact craters and gigantic lava flows, and the basaltic rock sampled from these flows on the surface of the moon dates back to from 3.1 to 3.9 billion years ago. These are facts that are simply incompatible with the story provided in the Papers.
The factuality of our present analysis is readily confirmable by almost anyone prepared to take the trouble. No knowledge of science or any other specialized knowledge is required to see that The Urantia Book's account of the evolution of the earth-moon system is simply impossibly wrong.
(See the note at the end of this paper for a quick and easy way to confirm the -2.5 billion year mass/radius data points.)
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