Is the Earth growing?

I would guess the amount gathered by Meteorites would be quite small compared to Manned launches at this point.

Though I think it's worth to note that the vast majority of Satellites get launched into relatively low orbits, and as such are still "part" of Earth as from an outside observer they would contribute (however minutely) to Earth's overall Gravity field and more importantly will fall back to Earth given enough time.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI

This guy claims the Earth is growing and the world's oceans are only about 70 million years old (there were isolated seas before this but not huge vast oceans like today).

I don't know much of anything about plate tectonics or about the possibility of a planet growing (it makes sense that the energy from the sun we convert to matter would eventually cause growth but I didn't think it would be THAT fast).

Is this theory valid?

If it is than wouldn't that mean that dinosaurs had to deal with only half the gravity of modern man?

Anywayz, please discuss!

Well, for one argument:

Crust cannot sink into mantle because it is less dense than mantle.
Of course it cannot, but due to astronomical amount of force necessary to do so, it simply continues to sink.


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???

XDXDXD
 
I would guess the amount gathered by Meteorites would be quite small compared to Manned launches at this point.

Then you'd guess wrong ;)

From a Cornell astronomy website, the estimated range of meteoritic mass is 37 to 78 kilotons. I'm guessing these are not metric kilotons, since it's a US website. So, at the going rate of $10,000 per pound for a low earth orbit launch, we'd have to be spending, at minimum, 740 billion dollars a year on space launches.

I have confidence that we'll see that level of spending (globally) before I die, but we're nowhere near that yet.

And as a previous poster mentioned, nearly every kilogram of matter we send up remains in earth's gravity well. As far as I know, there are only a handful of machines that have left terrestrial orbit, and of these all of them are confined to our solar system except for 3 spacecraft.
 
... I would think that the answer is a definite no. The last amount of substantial growth the Earth had had to be billions of years ago.

However, the Earth did lose some weight so to speak when (some scientists think), a Mars size object glanced against the earth ripping a chunk out of the planet and forming the moon.

On the question of converting energy into mass, CD Anderson discovered a gammy ray photon turning into an electron-positron pair.
 
Meteor mass is neglectable. I read somewhere, that if we could crash into each other all the meteorites in the asteroid belt, we still would not be able to create a fair size planet.

That's true. I've heard the entire Oort Cloud hans't much more mass than Earth. And Oort Cloud is said to be a one and a half light years-sized area full of Dwarf Planets.
 
...no.

This guy is probably right in stating that the oceans are less than 70 myo, but seafloor-spread accounts for that. He's a fool.
 
I believe that the preferred measure of time is now "Ma" or "mega-annum", the Metric unit signifying one million years ago :)
 
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