Is the Earth growing?

You can call it "just an approximation", but I'd call it "rounding to a sensible number of significant figures" :p

Anyway, what you said in the last post seems unrelated to what you said in the post before it. The energy released from chemical reactions comes from the chemical bonds being broken, not from mass turning into energy.
 
yes, I think we can all agree that there is no way that sunlight contributes any significant amount of mass to the earth and that an expanding earth is a silly idea.

If anyone wants to further discuss mass/energy relations we can do that in another thread.
 
I have to say that this user's response was enlightening:

And why are the rocks with fish on land? Tectonics, pure and simple.
Click to expand...
 
I saw that one the other day. If the Earth expanded like that, then there should be no more volcanic eruptions, since there's a large, empty space. I remember asking my science teacher way back in 6th grade why the Earth doesn't expand if new land is being added (we were learning about plate tectonics).
 
But that mass is sooooo small that it can be ignored in 99.99999% of cases. Just like the mass gained due to kinetic energy can be ignored even upto speeds of 5% of the speed of light.
 
I'm gonna hazard a guess that this guy is into jigsaws.
 
Leifmk said:
Actually, yes, you do. Chemical bonds have associated mass just like nuclear bonds.
Click to expand...
I'm not saying one way or another, but do you have a good source for this?
 
Water vapour in the upper atmosphere very very slowly disassociates into oxygen and hydrogen (due to molecular collisions and cosmic rays) resulting in a gradual loss of mass as the hydrogen drifts off into interplanetary space.
 
Wasn't someone who said 'Matter was nothing
more than slow moving energy'? Even so
someone must be crazy to think that the
sun is causing the earth to grow. It's just
like saying that man is causing global warming.
 
-Tomasz- said:
Gravity depends on the mass of a celestial body, suppose we can assume that the earth is expanding in diameter, how in the world would its mass increase?
And then again, if there is such phenomenon as gravity, then all the particles that make up earth would be attracted to the common centre of mass of the system (in this case Earth), so instead of expansion we should experience a big crunch (which is why spheres are the perfect shapes in the universe, for they are the only stable shape under the forces of gravity).

One more thing, I thought this was a science forum, what the hell with the conspiracy theories? Growing Earth? Hollow Earth? People living on the far side of the moon? Mission to land on the sun at night???
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure the earth isn't a perfect sphere
 
Thats because the earth is rotating and experiences centrifugal forces that make it bulge at the equator. Its still a perfect sphere to over a part in 1000 though.
 
LOL :lol:

"Growing Earth?" This was absolutely crazy funny, though still a necro by some new guy.

"Mission to land on the sun at night" = Hilarious
 
We used to have many discussions like this back in grad school and we never came to any conclusion other than we weren't drinking enough.
 
I would say that its loosing mass if anything from all the satalites we're launching off it
Click to expand...

Is that not more than compensated for by the gain of material from meteorites and micro-meteorites?
 
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