Could the flood have been ...?

No, I don't think so. Such a meteoroid (not meteor) would need such massive gravitational effects to cause a tidal wave that it would leave other evidence in the geological record. There isn't any evidence for such a thing (nor for such a large flood, I believe).

Furthermore, objects do not move in or out of geostationary orbit - they are either in a closed orbit or an open one (flyby).

>>After all, the moon came into a stable orbit around the earth<<

That's a very different scenario, as the Moon was formed by a piece of the very young Earth which was broken off by an impact.

>>and, one day, will escape it.<<

No, it won't. Eventually the Moon and Earth will be tidally locked to each other. The Moon is only moving away from the Earth due to angular momentum exchange, which will eventually stop. At that point the Moon will stop moving away from the Earth and only one side of the Earth will ever see it. However, this is expected to occur on a timescale longer than the time from now to the red giant phase of the Sun - so it may not get the chance to happen.

The story of an enormous flood appears in many cultures, in the same way as does the story of someone dying and coming back to life etc. I suspect that it was lifted from elsewhere before being included in the Bible, and probably didn't even happen. What I think did happen was that someone found fossils of sea creatures much higher than sea level but had no knowledge of geological processes which pushed the rocks up, so they explained it with a story about a massive flood.

No, this wouldn't be possible. The Earth does occasionally capture passing asteroids. But not in that manner. The orbital speed of an object in geosynchronous orbit is only about 7,000 mph or so relative to the Earth. There's just no way an asteroid would be coming in at a low enough speed relative to the Earth to be captured in that orbit. It would've fallen into the Sun....

Regardless, the evidence that some massive flood like that did NOT take place anywhere, much less in the middle east, is overwhelming. It's pretty clear that the myth of Noah's Ark is simply a retelling of the mesopotamian myth of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Which itself is at best based on a retelling of a small local flood almost certainly related to the ending of the last ice age. Sea levels rose dramatically over a relatively short period of time. In some places, like the Black Sea, it was a sudden deluge when an earthen dam was breached. These myths started as stories about these local floods. And like many myths became worse and worse with each retelling until eventually it was a "global" flood myth.

Let's assume there is some truth behind legends...

What do we know from biblical account?

When?:

- there were cities

- farming was well known

- some people mastered shipbuilding

This suggest a late neolithic event

Where?

- the Flood account in Genesis is similar to other Middle-East texts (Sumer, Greece, Iran...) but also somewhere westward (Atlantis), in India (Veda) in America (though Mayan Flood sounds more like a meteorite or a tectonic event)

So, almost everywhere, but more traumatic in Middle East.

How?

- Tidal wave (from a meteorite, seismic tremor...)

why not?, but I think this would have only affected coastal cities around the same sea or ocean. But Gilgamesh and Genesis clearly describes people trying to escape in land.

- More likely, Global sea level rise.

We do know sea level rose by 135 m in the 6000 years after the end of last glacial. Some present days seas didn't exist.12,000 years ago (Baltic, English Channel, Persian Gulf...).

Those seas steadily flooded coastal plains centuries after centuries.

But Black Sea wasn't a gradual process. It happened suddenly when Mediterranean sea water rushed into this fresh water lake 200 m above, drowning villages of farmers/fishermen around the lake.

This event didn't exactly flood the whole world, but a quite big part of the civilized world.

Such a trauma probably stayed in oral traditions of all the region and eventually in first written texts: Gilgamesh Epics, later copied in Genesis.

Some accounts point to the time where there was a landbridge between Spain and N Africa and the Mediterranean was much lower than it is now. At the end of the last ice age, the level of the Atlantic rose and/or there was an earthquake and the landbridge broke, let the water in and voila, a large flood.

The meteor would need to be huge to achieve what you are thinking of and the chances of it appearing, causing a flood and then wandering off again are pretty remote.

There is SOME evidence of a (possibly) world-wide flood some 12,000 years ago.

The (paltry) evidence is found in the Arctic regions (North America and Russia) and shows that humans had to contend with surviving it.

There is no evidence for a more recent world-wide flood. Localized floods are possible and several mythologies still carry traces of it (some dating to before the writing of the Biblical narrative).

And for all we know, there may have been more than one local flood. For all we know, even the evidence for that 12,000-year-old flood could be interpreted as "localized"... to a large region around the pole.

The Biblical narrative does not talk of a "sudden" flood (this excludes a large impact scenario), and it does describe waters rising from below (sinking land? rising sea level?) accompanied by a long period of rain. Such a flood could have happened at the end of the ice age... but that is too far back for any Chronological dating associated with the Bible.

The word "planet" is not in the texts that led to the Bible. There is a word that has been translated as "world", and that word is defined in Genesis 2 as being an area bounded by four "rivers" (or more precisely, four bodies of water... the original word is very general and could represent ocean, sea, river, lake).

Clearly, the word "world", as used in the oldest texts, did not mean the entire planet, but a specific area known to the Hebrew culture.

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Tidal effect varies like the mass, and inversely to the cube of the distance.

Even if the asteroid you describe was only 1/10 the distance to the Moon (38,000 km, close to geostationary), therefore 1000 times the tidal effect per kg, it would still have to be 1/1000 the mass of the Moon to have (barely) the same tidal pull as the Moon.

That would be an asteroid bigger than Juno. And the increase in height of tide would still only be a metre or so. If you want an increase of 3 metres, you are into dwarf planet range.

Something that big, coming between Earth and Moon, would do more than raise a few meters of tides, it would interfere with the Moon's orbit in a way that would still show today.

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The Moon will never escape. As it recedes, the tidal effect (responsible for the recession) goes down. Also, the tidal effect is responsible for the slowing down of Earth's rotation, which then means that the rate of recession will go down even faster. Theoretically, recession will cease in 6 billion years. Most of us don't worry because of the Sun's planned red-giant phase in "only" 5 billion years (American short billions = milliards)

Schoolbook evolution is the idea of someone who was studying to become an Anglican Parson (it is hardly an "atheist idea"). Evolution itself had already been accepted as fact by the Church before Charles heard about it at the seminary (the course was called Natural Theology). What was not known, at the time, is how evolution works. The "disputed" theory only deals with "how it works", not about evolution itself.

It is very possible that the Biblical flood is a recounting of a much older story borrowed from another culture (there are a few stories like that in the Bible: adaptation of older myths or legends, from other cultures).

That asteroid would need to be immense to have any significant tidal effect... we're talking Ceres sized here! In the sky that would at least have appeared the size of the moon if not larger. It would have been bright enough to cast it's own shadows and would even be visible in the day. How that could go unnoticed by the bronze age world is...well it's just not feasible.

The chances of a passing asteroid entering Earth's orbit are slim enough by themselves . These things are moving VERY fast and would have to lose a hell of a lot of their speed to come even close to being captured. Captures do occur in the solar system (Triton being the most famous example) but they are rare, and once in orbit they tend to stay there. That said, the Earth-Moon system s unlikely to have tolerated it's presence for very long. I would have thought it more likely that such an object would end it's days breaking up within Earth's roche limit and raining down death and destruction on the planet.

Just to note, the moon is in the process of moving to a higher orbit but it will never escape the Earth. It will stop receding when Earth's rotation becomes tidally locked to the moon many billions of years from now.

No, it's not possible that a meteor could enter into an orbit that was nearly geo-stationary for such a short period of time. Yes, the moon will escape one day, but it's connection with the Earth is MUCH longer than 40 days and 40 nights.

More likely the flood was a real flood caused by an earthquake tsunami or even just heavy rains, and it was greatly exaggerated in the bible.

There are numerous Flood myths (and I use a capital "F" to indicate that I'm talking about the BIG Flood), and they almost always originate from civilizations that lived near major rivers. On occasion these rivers would overrun their banks - sometimes more severely than others - and these periodic devastating floods no doubt gave rise to the "worldwide" Floods of myth and legend. There's no need to look for an astronomical origin for these Flood myths because they are perfectly well explained as a potent mixture of natural events and human imagination.

I hope that helps. Good luck!

Noah's Ark: A biblical story with moral underpinnings, but lacks actual evidence for its occurrence; both the Ark and a World Wide flood. From a scientific perspective and our knowledge about how nature works, a critical analysis of the story is shown at: http://ncse.com/cej/4/1/impossible-voyage-noahs-ar... After you read this analysis, you will see why the story fails the evidence test, not just on one aspect of the story, but on hundreds of logistical and factual inconsistencies with present day workings of nature. It's one thing to have a belief that God Did It, it's another to twist reality and ignore the evidence from biology, geology, demography, and even the science and physics of ship building (that is covered in the article) that makes the story impossible.

Although repeated endlessly by Creationists, about the evidence for a world-wide flood, there is no evidence. Read: http://www.chem.tufts.edu/science/franksteiger/eld... Nor as an integral part of the myth is the earth only 6,000 years old http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_against_a_re...

In addition, Creationists will tell you the 8 people on the Ark had enough time in only a few thousand years to repopulate the earth and contribute to the genetic diversity of present day human populations. A careful analysis of that assumption from the perspective of molecular biology, population genetics, and demography (human populations over time) shows how improbable and impossible is that scenario. http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/2009_...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_flood#Re-popul...

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/may04...

Humans evolved over 200,000 years ago in Africa, and that we do have evidence for.

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence and mitochondrial DNA shows the migration patterns of humans out of Africa:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_D...

The moon will one day escape Earth orbit? No, that's impossible, it will never happen. Not unless invisible pink space alien unicorns come and move it.

The same with the large meteor causing a tidal wave ... that's impossible also. Anything like that would total destroy all life, and not by water. It would be by molten lava and volcanoes all over the world.