The Origin of Urantia

57:6.1Sub­se­quent to the birth of the so­lar sys­tem a pe­riod of di­min­ish­ing so­lar dis­gorge­ment en­sued. De­creas­ingly, for an­other five hun­dred thou­sand years, the sun con­tin­ued to pour forth di­min­ish­ing vol­umes of mat­ter into sur­round­ing space. But dur­ing these early times of er­ratic or­bits, when the sur­round­ing bod­ies made their near­est ap­proach to the sun, the so­lar par­ent was able to re­cap­ture a large por­tion of this me­te­oric ma­te­rial.

57:6.2The plan­ets near­est the sun were the first to have their rev­o­lu­tions slowed down by tidal fric­tion. Such grav­i­ta­tional in­flu­ences also con­tribute to the sta­bi­liza­tion of plan­e­tary or­bits while act­ing as a brake on the rate of plan­e­tary-ax­ial rev­o­lu­tion, caus­ing a planet to re­volve ever slower un­til ax­ial rev­o­lu­tion ceases, leav­ing one hemi­sphere of the planet al­ways turned to­ward the sun or larger body, as is il­lus­trated by the planet Mer­cury and by the moon, which al­ways turns the same face to­ward Uran­tia.

57:6.3When the tidal fric­tions of the moon and the earth be­come equal­ized, the earth will al­ways turn the same hemi­sphere to­ward the moon, and the day and month will be anal­o­gous—in length about forty-seven days. When such sta­bil­ity of or­bits is at­tained, tidal fric­tions will go into re­verse ac­tion, no longer driv­ing the moon far­ther away from the earth but grad­u­ally draw­ing the satel­lite to­ward the planet. And then, in that far-dis­tant fu­ture when the moon ap­proaches to within about eleven thou­sand miles of the earth, the grav­ity ac­tion of the lat­ter will cause the moon to dis­rupt, and this tidal-grav­ity ex­plo­sion will shat­ter the moon into small par­ti­cles, which may as­sem­ble about the world as rings of mat­ter re­sem­bling those of Sat­urn or may be grad­u­ally drawn into the earth as me­te­ors.

57:6.4If space bod­ies are sim­i­lar in size and den­sity, col­li­sions may oc­cur. But if two space bod­ies of sim­i­lar den­sity are rel­a­tively un­equal in size, then, if the smaller pro­gres­sively ap­proaches the larger, the dis­rup­tion of the smaller body will oc­cur when the ra­dius of its or­bit be­comes less than two and one-half times the ra­dius of the larger body. Col­li­sions among the gi­ants of space are rare in­deed, but these grav­ity-tidal ex­plo­sions of lesser bod­ies are quite com­mon.

57:6.5Shoot­ing stars oc­cur in swarms be­cause they are the frag­ments of larger bod­ies of mat­ter which have been dis­rupted by tidal grav­ity ex­erted by near-by and still larger space bod­ies. Sat­urn’s rings are the frag­ments of a dis­rupted satel­lite. One of the moons of Jupiter is now ap­proach­ing dan­ger­ously near the crit­i­cal zone of tidal dis­rup­tion and, within a few mil­lion years, will ei­ther be claimed by the planet or will un­dergo grav­ity-tidal dis­rup­tion. The fifth planet of the so­lar sys­tem of long, long ago tra­versed an ir­reg­u­lar or­bit, pe­ri­od­i­cally mak­ing closer and closer ap­proach to Jupiter un­til it en­tered the crit­i­cal zone of grav­ity-tidal dis­rup­tion, was swiftly frag­men­tized, and be­came the pres­ent-day clus­ter of as­ter­oids.

57:6.64,000,000,000 years ago wit­nessed the or­ga­ni­za­tion of the Jupiter and Sat­urn sys­tems much as ob­served to­day ex­cept for their moons, which con­tin­ued to in­crease in size for sev­eral bil­lions of years. In fact, all of the plan­ets and satel­lites of the so­lar sys­tem are still grow­ing as the re­sult of con­tin­ued me­te­oric cap­tures.

57:6.73,500,000,000 years ago the con­den­sa­tion nu­cle­uses of the other ten plan­ets were well formed, and the cores of most of the moons were in­tact, though some of the smaller satel­lites later united to make the pres­ent-day larger moons. This age may be re­garded as the era of plan­e­tary as­sem­bly.

57:6.83,000,000,000 years ago the so­lar sys­tem was func­tion­ing much as it does to­day. Its mem­bers con­tin­ued to grow in size as space me­te­ors con­tin­ued to pour in upon the plan­ets and their satel­lites at a prodi­gious rate.

57:6.9About this time your so­lar sys­tem was placed on the phys­i­cal reg­istry of Neb­a­don and given its name, Mon­ma­tia.

57:6.102,500,000,000 years ago the plan­ets had grown im­mensely in size. Uran­tia was a well-de­vel­oped sphere about one tenth its pres­ent mass and was still grow­ing rapidly by me­te­oric ac­cre­tion.

57:6.11All of this tremen­dous ac­tiv­ity is a nor­mal part of the mak­ing of an evo­lu­tion­ary world on the or­der of Uran­tia and con­sti­tutes the as­tro­nomic pre­lim­i­nar­ies to the set­ting of the stage for the be­gin­ning of the phys­i­cal evo­lu­tion of such worlds of space in prepa­ra­tion for the life ad­ven­tures of time.