Meteoric Dust

Before the first manned Moon landing by Apollo 11 in 1969 some lunar geologists feared that there would be such a depth of dust on the Moon that the lunar lander would sink without trace.  Figures of tens if not hundreds of feet of dust were bandied about.  In the event, as we all now know (and assuming they did actually get there), the dust proved to be no problem to the lunar explorers, their boots making rather small depressions in it.  So why was the dust so feared?

As the Earth and Moon sweep through space they collect meteoric dust that flies about the solar system.  We can, with some precision, calculate how much dust the Moon, and the Earth, would accumulate in a certain time.  Apparently about 14 million tons of meteoric dust arrive on the Earth’s surface each year, and somewhat less on the Moon, of course, because it is smaller.

Nevertheless, at the present rate of accumulation it has been estimated that 4,500 thousand million years of accretion would have produced a dust layer some 180 feet (55 meters) thick on both satellites.  On the Earth this may well have been incorporated into the soil and rocks, and washed into the oceans.  But this cannot apply to the Moon because it has no water, no atmosphere and therefore no weather.  It would have stayed where it landed.  Hence the worry.

The amount of dust actually found on the surface of the Moon, about a centimeter in thickness, indicates an age of a few thousand years at most, certainly not millenia.  A few thousand years, then, is the outside age of the Moon, and therefore, presumably the Earth.  We assume that they are of comparable age because the reigning dogma (do you detect a certain cynicism here?) is that the moon was flung off from the presumed 'protoearth' when it was still very hot, billions of years ago.

OK, OK, I know: this isn't logical, for if the Earth is only a few thousand years old the moon cannot have come from it by that method, can it?  Let's backtrack a few steps.  Let's just say that this raises huge questions about the assumptions that scientists have blithely made about this subject.

The only remaining possibilities, such as a (very) late capture of the Moon by the Earth, or a (very) recent cosmic event of such magnitude that most of the dust was swept off the Moon’s surface, are issues which the modern scientific establishment reject as heretical.  So this issue remains a problem, one that most scientists simply ignore.  But there is no question that it seriously undermines the idea that evolution was responsible for life on Earth.