The downvotes are misplaced. This is a good question.
The value of HN is when people-who-know help curious folks understand the validity of a story. Surely someone here is more capable of assessing this story and I agree that skepticism is in order at first.
Except the article explains in fairly easy to understand terms how the study came to this theory, and the original paper is linked from that article. The question here gives the impression that the asker read only the headline.
The downvotes are because people are reading the question as rhetorical rather than being asked out of genuine curiosity. It's only a good question if the person asking it is doing so with an open mind.
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".
The article claims that 363 billion tons of phosphorous were dropped on earth 3.26 billion years ago during a decade of darkness.
I’m completely incapable of making sense of that claim because it’s so far outside of my expertise.
But my fundamental problem is that I don’t trust the source’s incentives to deliver reliable information and I want someone independent to help me understand if this is a how strong or weak this science is.
And my starting point for that is “it’s very hard to know anything specific about the deep past. And I’m tired of scientific retractions.”
There's no one stop shop for instantly correct science, think less about retractions and more about incremental advances toward better understanding.
> The article claims that 363 billion tons of phosphorous were dropped on earth 3.26 billion years ago
The article correctly reports that a series of papers claim that a bolide (large mass) of an estimated diameter of 37 to 58 km across impacted some time ago.
There's a slew of paths forward for anyone interested in knowing more and questioning these claims.
The 96 references cover such things as estimating the impact crater, spray field, and impactor size.
You might want estimate for yourself the mass of a spherical cow some 40km in diameter if the material were to be (say) nickel iron .. and then perhaps back of the envelope determine what fraction of that would 363 billion tonne be.
It may or may not help to know that W.Australia move a billion tonne of iron ore per annum, that's a certain volume of mesa uprooted and moved to China, and 363 years of that would be a similar mass and volume.
This goes to having a feel for the paper's methodology in estimating P mass.
You may also wish to review papers and books on the K-Pg bolide, the one that "killed the dinosaurs" which is estimated to be some ~50 to 200 times smaller by mass than the one discussed here.
There's also a body of work on theories of planet formation via big rocks smashing into each other, sticking together, and planets slowing growing as stray rocks get hoovered up.
I meant that "you" like the general you, not iambateman you. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I couldn't figure out a better phrasing at the time. Hopefully it's better now.
I'm nobody to lecture people. I don't matter. I just really dislike seeing epistemic nihilism framed as skepticism, and that's the vibe I was getting from the top of the thread.
Science is the proven process for investigating nature while dealing with questions like "What if you're wrong about everything?" The comment at the top reads, out of context, like an absolutely wild example of someone asking, "What if you're wrong?" as if it's something new that's never been asked.
363 BB tons / (1 ton / cu m) / (1 BB cu m / cu km) is the mass of a 9-km-diameter ice ball, smaller for rockier materials.
363 BB tons / 10 years = 100 MM tons / day.
By comparison, Mount St Helens (1980) and Eyjafjallajökull (2010) each produced 500 MM tons of ash. So the amount of material is about equivalent to having a similarly-sized volcano eruption every few days for ten years straight.
The Earth's surface area is 500 MM sq km. If we were to distribute 363 BB tons uniformly, that would be an average of 1000 tons per sq km. If the layer had a density of 1 ton per cu m (same as water), the resulting layer would be 1/1000 of a meter thick. This seems to be thinner than the spherule layers described.
We're assuming an even average distribution, and comparing ash to spherules - which would have different patterns of sedimentation depending on how far from epicenter one is. Although, for a large enough impact, the distribution radii overlap around the planet so there may be quite a bit of averaging as the sun+atmosphere provides a mixing medium and the energy to do so.
> And my starting point for that is “it’s very hard to know anything specific about the deep past. And I’m tired of scientific retractions.”
There's no way to prove the past without doubt. It's always going to be conjecture.
What people do is that, they observe current phenomenon, and see what kind of artifact it produces and leaves behind. They then work backward from that, if we see the same artifacts, they connect that back with a similar cause from the past.
Generally, people consider this even more reliable than human written artifact, because, well, human write a lot of BS. But when there are also written texts or drawn glyphs, those are looked at for corroboration.
All of that is added up to gain some level of certainty, but it'll never be for sure, because we'll always be working with incomplete information, and we'll use today's assumption to interpret the information from the past, but even the wildest things might be possible, like that the very nature of physics was different 1 billion years ago, and the same phenomenon would not result in the same kind of artifact as they do today for example.
You have to decide for yourself if this inherent uncertainty makes you more skeptical of historical claims, or if you feel the methodology is still reliable enough for practical purposes.
And I'd like to contrast this with science about the present, where once we assume something to be true, we can test it by predicting the future with it, and then seeing if that future materializes. If it does, it reinforces the validity of our truths, the more it can accurately predict the future, the truer it is, and where it fails to do so, we know it's not as accurate as it needs to be.
Science is about using the best methodology to get us as close as possible to the truth as we can be. Historical sciences have less to work with, but this might still be the best methodology if you want to be as close to the truth. Experimental sciences are able to have even better methodology that allows us to be even closer to the truth.
The value of HN is when people-who-know help curious folks understand the validity of a story. Surely someone here is more capable of assessing this story and I agree that skepticism is in order at first.