You know it’s bad when one of you’re first reactions is “Well, at least it isn’t another fucking Fundie claiming the universe is only 6000 years old”.
I’m not even a scientist and I know some of the bullet points Wolynski apparently doesn’t grasp. As just about any high school science nerd could probably tell you:
–The planets and the Sun were never the same size. The greatest concentration of matter as in the center of the system, and thus became the Sun, the largest object, which is in the middle of spending ten billion years or so converting hydrogen into helium.
-Earth was never a “gas giant”–the cloud of gasses that congealed into it was a lot smaller than the ones that congealed into the actual gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and the ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). There was comparatively less matter in the inner solar system–the Sun itself sucked a lot of it up–so smaller, rockier planets of denser matter were the end result.
-Because Earth was a smaller clump of matter than Jupiter or Saturn, most of the primordial hydrogen and basically all of the primordial helium weren’t held by the planet’s lesser gravity and escaped. That wasn’t the case with the larger planets. Some hydrogen was retained on Earth, though the comparative amount is small–in the form of compounds, as hydrogen is very chemically active. It combines with carbon to make methane, nitrogen to make ammonia, and oxygen to make a little thing called water. Helium is one of the most chemically inactive elements in the universe; we probably wouldn’t have any at all except for…
-Things that make the Earth’s core hot: gravitational stresses from the Moon pulling on the iron core, and lots of heat from billions of years of radioactive elements decaying. Uranium and thorium, for example, have long enough half-lives that there’s still some around. When they decay they produce shorter-lived and thus more radioactive stuff like radium and protactinium and radon, which also decay and produce energy until they finally decay into a stable nucleus, like lead-208. In the process, they emit a lot of alpha particles, which is where all the helium we have today comes from—alpha particles and helium-4 nuclei are identical, two protons and two neutrons. Pick up a couple electrons and boom, helium.
Combine all heat trying to escape from the core and mantle with plate tectonics and hey, there’s your volcanoes.