I need you to provide an overwhelming body of evidence for this assertion, otherwise the rest of your argument it based on nothing.
First, the Faint Young Sun Paradox is not my idea. The first paper to point out the problem was written by Carl Sagan and George Mullen back in 1972, but the idea that stars steadily rise in luminosity as they age is older than that, and it is a very well established outcome of our understanding of how stars work. Basically as a main sequence star converts H->He in its core, the density of the core increases over time, which causes the core's pressure to increase in order to keep the star in hydrostatic equilibrium, and its luminosity rises as a consequence of the higher nuclear reaction rates in response.
Secondly, you need to provide some metric as to the magnitude of the "faintness" for the early sun.
An approximate functional form of the luminosity as a function of time is given by Gough (1981, Solar Physics) L=1/(1+0.4*(1-t/4.5e9))*3.9e33 erg/s (where t is given in units of years). This form, while an approximation, has been well matched by computer simulations of solar evolution, and is well matched by observations of stars on the main sequence.
And thirdly you need to show a clear (and backed by evidence) timeline for your faint early sun, the formation of the Earth, and then all of the historical data (geologic record) we have for the Earth.
Based on measurements of the partitioning of the elements Hafnium and Tungsten in rocks from the Moon mantle we can date when the giant impact that formed the Moon occurred. You can read more here. Basically Earth completed its formation in less than 100 million years after the start of the solar system, about 4.57 billion years ago. The earliest minerals on the Earth are zircon crystals that form in continental crust, which are dated to at least about 4.3 billion years ago, and seem to indicate formation on a planet with liquid water oceans on the surface. The earliest whole rocks on the surface are about 3.8 billion years ago. Plate tectonics has a tendency to recycle and destroy rocks, but nevertheless geologists have been able to identify several locations where very ancient bits of the Earth are still preserved. The Faint Young Sun Paradox is about the time from about 4.3 billion years ago to the Archean/Proterozoic boundary at about 2.5 billion years ago, or about 2 billion years after the formation of the Earth.
For the Earth to be moving away from the sun it must be gaining energy to "climb the gravitational well" from the sun. Have you done the calculations for this? Do you have a plausible source (and transfer mechanism) for this energy?
The mechanism by which Earth gets its orbit raised is by a corresponding decrease in the orbital distance of a hypothetical Venus-precursor body. Yes, I did those calculations. That was the point of the talk this article is about.
Finally, I saw a talk a couple of months ago by a world leading expert in N-body solar system simulations.
The person you describe sounds an awful lot like Jacques Laskar. Yes, I am aware of his work, and in fact it was that result that you describe that inspired me to try my hypothesis out.
Don't let my criticism get you down.
I won't
Keep going with your work, just dig deeper and be sure to always present a clear line of reasoning from what is established, to what you are claiming
Your mistake is a common one that I find in places like Slashdot and other online communities. The bulk of scientific discussion and debate takes place in the peer reviewed literature. It's what it's designed for, and for all its flaws, it works quite well. People often mistake articles written in the popular press, such as TFA, as accurately reflecting the science. Unfortunately by their nature these kinds of articles offer only a distorted shadow of the science they are reporting on. Now that's not necessarily a criticism of science reporting, as my own attempt at distilling my work here in these comments is also a pale distorted shadow of the work. It is quite difficult to distill complex topics down into short, digestible chunks. Even a single peer-reviewed paper can't possibly contain everything about a piece of scientific work. You have to follow all the references, and all the references in those references, and so on to really *get* all the pieces of a scientific story. But we try our best.
And only 1200 so far may look reasonable.
Still a good ratio.
Considering that out of the 150,000 stars, there are 1200 planetary systems that are both oriented such that the planets pass directly in front of their stars as seen from our solar system, and did so over a period of about 4 months, that's a *very* good ratio. The whole point of Kepler is to gather statistics on planetary systems. There's no need to wait 20 years. Trend lines are being plotted now.
then why wouldn't it be 13 times per year?
I would guess that some of the data is submitted monthly and the tracts show when the data was submitted, not necessarily observed. there's also a lot of big pulses early on, far larger than the overall rate would see to indicate as within the normal deviation of observation rate at that point. hence, the thought that it's mapping based on submission date and some are submitting bulk results on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Well, to an astrophysicist "roughly 12 times" is equivalent to 13 times, but your point is taken. I've sat in with the Catalina guys (on a nearly full moon night, so they didn't discover anything while I was there), and they don't wait to submit data. They send candidate objects to a followup telescope to confirm the discovery, then publish any object with the Minor Planet Center as soon as they are confirmed. They need to act quickly, because orbit refinements often rely on followup observations (often by amateur astronomers), and many objects, especially Near Earth Asteroids, could be lost if they are not followed up quickly. The big pulses in the discovery rates at early times are because objects were only discovered in sensitive surveys that were not run very frequently (and before the mid 1990s usually relied on photographic plates). After about 1997 once LINEAR got going (and later Catalina and a couple others) asteroid surveys have more or less been continuous, with lulls arising due to full moon nights and the weather patterns of southern Arizona and New Mexcio.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.