The Physics of The Rapture
One of the core beliefs of Evangelical Christians is that Jesus Christ will one day return to Earth to rescue his true believers or “church” from the evils of the Anti-Christ, before or during the end-times, depending on the school of thought. Before I continue, I should point out that at one time, I would have called myself an Evangelical Christian, and I have read the Bible (King James Version) cover to cover several times. I have read all of the Left Behind novels, and many other “non-fiction” books that detail The Rapture, based on interpretations of the text contained in the King James Bible. Just a little disclaimer, so you know that I did not read about The Rapture in a junk e-mail and am writing a knee-jerk response.This post has nothing to do with the question of Jesus’ divinity, the nature of The Rapture, or the Bible it’s self, rather an examination of some the physics that would be involved as calculated by a rank armature.
To begin with, The Rapture as described by many authors, including Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, would appear something like this: You are working on you car in the drive-way on a Saturday afternoon in spring, watching people come and go, when all of a sudden; several disappear into thin air! You run into your house looking for your wife, and all you see is a dress and wedding band on the floor! You franticly dash upstairs to your child’s room and you hear no sound. All you see is an empty diaper in the crib… This would be a bad day for anybody, but it gets worse.
Ok, let’s examine this scenario, and I will try not to get too philosophical with it. According to the Bible, God created the physical universe that you and I live in, therefore the universe that you and I live in are subject to the laws of physics. Metaphysics and the supernatural are moot here, because we live in the physical universe (anthropic principle). Barring any divine intervention, this is the sort of scale we are talking about:Depending on what you read, there is anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000,000 “true” Christians in the world. For arguments sake, let’s say that during The Rapture, 500,000,000 people “disappear”.
Where did they go? It really doesn’t matter, because unless God’s Kingdom is somewhere inside the physical universe that we live in, The Rapture violates the law of the conservation of matter, and the first law of thermodynamics: So people can not just disappear into nothingness, as far as we know.
I have had several people tell me that “The Church of Christ” will be converted to “pure light” at the time of The Rapture, and taken up to the Lord, or something similar. Thanks to Albert Einstein, we know that matter can be converted to energy (E=MC^2), so it is possible that 500,000,000 Christians can be converted to “pure light”. What would happen? Well if 500,000,000 people were instantly converted to energy… Here are some figures:
The average mass of a human is about 70kg
1kg of mass converts to 89.875 petajoules of energy, or 21.48 megatons of TNT, (the largest explosion created by Humans was the test of the the Soviet "Tsar Bomba", 57mt) or about 1.5 gigatons of released energy per Ruptured person. To put this in perspective, this is a 75,180X more energy than “Little Boy” unleashed on Hiroshima. Multiply that by 500,000,000 and you get about 37.6 QUADRILLION Hiroshima bombs (If you took that many Little Boys, and stacked them end to end starting at the sun, the light emitted from Sol would take over a month to reach the end) worth of energy, or nearly what the Sun releases 3 months! Needless to say the Earth would be turned into an incandescent fireball... the end of the world to be sure.
-Masterson
To begin with, The Rapture as described by many authors, including Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, would appear something like this: You are working on you car in the drive-way on a Saturday afternoon in spring, watching people come and go, when all of a sudden; several disappear into thin air! You run into your house looking for your wife, and all you see is a dress and wedding band on the floor! You franticly dash upstairs to your child’s room and you hear no sound. All you see is an empty diaper in the crib… This would be a bad day for anybody, but it gets worse.
Ok, let’s examine this scenario, and I will try not to get too philosophical with it. According to the Bible, God created the physical universe that you and I live in, therefore the universe that you and I live in are subject to the laws of physics. Metaphysics and the supernatural are moot here, because we live in the physical universe (anthropic principle). Barring any divine intervention, this is the sort of scale we are talking about:Depending on what you read, there is anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000,000 “true” Christians in the world. For arguments sake, let’s say that during The Rapture, 500,000,000 people “disappear”.
Where did they go? It really doesn’t matter, because unless God’s Kingdom is somewhere inside the physical universe that we live in, The Rapture violates the law of the conservation of matter, and the first law of thermodynamics: So people can not just disappear into nothingness, as far as we know.
I have had several people tell me that “The Church of Christ” will be converted to “pure light” at the time of The Rapture, and taken up to the Lord, or something similar. Thanks to Albert Einstein, we know that matter can be converted to energy (E=MC^2), so it is possible that 500,000,000 Christians can be converted to “pure light”. What would happen? Well if 500,000,000 people were instantly converted to energy… Here are some figures:
The average mass of a human is about 70kg
1kg of mass converts to 89.875 petajoules of energy, or 21.48 megatons of TNT, (the largest explosion created by Humans was the test of the the Soviet "Tsar Bomba", 57mt) or about 1.5 gigatons of released energy per Ruptured person. To put this in perspective, this is a 75,180X more energy than “Little Boy” unleashed on Hiroshima. Multiply that by 500,000,000 and you get about 37.6 QUADRILLION Hiroshima bombs (If you took that many Little Boys, and stacked them end to end starting at the sun, the light emitted from Sol would take over a month to reach the end) worth of energy, or nearly what the Sun releases 3 months! Needless to say the Earth would be turned into an incandescent fireball... the end of the world to be sure.
-Masterson
posted by Venjanz at 2:07 AM
1 Comments:
I moderate the comments on my blog, and I have never before let somebody that uses hyperlinks through… however I have posted yours. I find it interesting that you wrote something about “The Rapture” many years before the term was commonly used in the American lexicon (and 10 years before I heard the term). No offence, but I couldn’t follow anything that you wrote, so I posted your comment so others will read your stuff and give me feed back.
-Masterson
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