I think the rock was not perfectly cylindrical and a snowflake slid under it by wind.
I was looking for that question to be answered scientifically . I found it interesting.
gib, you really need to learn to follow the path of the posts. lol But they do at times become confusing and convoluted.
That statement had nothing to do with S. I don’t see him as a snowflake though we are all in truth snowflakes in that each of us is different in some way.
You, gib, are simply a flake but a cool one, a nice one. Maybe t’would have been better had I not typed in the last seven words. :-"
I don’t suppose that that could be the beginning of what you suggested to me in PM, could it? 
[
THAT does not answer my question.
Were snowflakes here on Earth before rocks or vica versa?
You being rude and nasty, you mean? Yes, but you were supposed to come back as a sock puppet!
Anyway, the scientific answer to the question is simple: the rock came first. Rocks are old. Their lifespan lasts for millions of years sometimes. Snowflakes last no longer than the Winter season if they don’t melt as soon as they hit the ground.
Taking rock as simply, earth, and snow as crystallized H20, The earth was said to be a very forming from accretion, as is standard for how celestial bodies form. This process is very warm as I understand it in so much as “Gravitational and frictional forces compress and raise the temperature of the material causing the emission of electromagnetic radiation” - Being that the core of the earth is maintained through nuclear fission to this day, it is safe to say that there was no atmosphere as we know it now during the formation of earth; when the outers layers of earth began to cool, further away from the core, it would be reasonable to state that rocks formed, in so much as rocks as we know them, prior to their being an atmosphere cool enough to result in crystalized water in the atmosphere. Being that the earth was “a ball of molten rock” - snow probably didn’t occur until after rock formed as we know it.
Now based on that alone, “On earth” meaning, was snow on earth, and not in the atmosphere, there’s no evidence that could be remotely possible at all, and everything points to rocks being “on earth” prior to snow.
Thanks WW. In hindsight, it made a lot of sense. 
Very interesting read. Obviously the rock came before the snowflake. The more i learn the more I realize how little I know. An explanation is far better than a simple - the rocks came first.
Thanks from this kid. 
gib,
Thank you, gib. I’m going to be very mean to you now. 
Your answer was incomplete. I know that rocks are very very very old but you left out the explanation dealing with the time schedule between the rock and the icy snowflake. I don’t think I worded that correctly. 
That being said though, I’m sure you knew the correct answer where I didn’t so…thank you for your helpfulness.
How am I doing? Was that mean enough?
Please don’t. I like the nice Arc.
(* sigh * – I guess I brought this on myself.)
Oh, man, we’re gonna have to work on this. 
This rock/snowflake thing can get complicated if you think too deeply about it. For example, how should we interpret the question: what came first, the first rock or the first snowflake?
I thought about this long and hard and I thought that since rocks solidify at a much higher temperature than snowflakes, the first rock to ever form probably came first; The universe began in a blaze of heat and I’m sure the temperature at which rocks are able to solidify was reached long before that at which snowflakes are able to form.
But then again, it might depend on the chemical composition of the rocks and the snowflake. Snowflakes need hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen was only formed in the nuclear fission reactions of the first stars. Rocks are made of calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium (according to this site) which were also created in the nuclear fission reactions of certain stars (I don’t know about the first). Given that oxygen is easier to produce (through fission) than these other heavier elements, we might get away with saying oxygen came first. And of course, hydrogen was there even before the first stars formed, so it’s conceivable that, given some cold pocket of the universe in which H2O molecules existed, the first snowflake formed before the elements for rocks were even possible, thus contradicting my own analysis above.
(And now I’m wondering if snowflakes need some kind of atmosphere to form, which is still conceivable in the old universe, as opposed to just a droplet of ice forming in empty space… oh, it gets complicated).
gib,
All of my sock puppets are in the laundry basket. I use them for dusting. I have none left for ilp.
Each snowflake is an individual, gib.
Under what circumstances might a snowflake not melt when it touches the cold, cold ground?
How long does it take a snowflake to die, to melt away? Is it different for each individual snowflake?
Now that’s a very interesting question. Does the unique pattern of each snowflake have an effect on its melting time? I doubt it. But this is the kind of question which can only really be answered by experiment.
Anyway, we should really bring this back to the subject matter: what do snowflakes have to do with civilization? Is civilization a snow storm?
gib
What about the Arc who is not nice? Do you like her too, gib?
Yes, you did bring it on yourself. It was your suggestion but I really have no plan to go through with it. I’m just playing. Be careful what you ask for.
You see, the way I look at it ~~ if we were actually having a discussion and/or an argument about this in here, it would be more important to me to state that your answer was incomplete. But why would someone - otherwise - be deliberately mocking unless kidding - unless trying to gain the upper hand. Some things are just a bit too meaningless for that. But where things are not meaningles, and where it might be understood in a more universal sense, that these things are not meaningless - then you might say that your answer is incomplete.
The answer to that would still be the same - “first” doesn’t play a part in it, the object does. We know it’s the rock.
I
You thought about that long and hard? I can see myself doing that as I do not have the knowledge that you have readily available in my brain but YOU, gib, do. Based on Earth’s process, I don’t think that in this case there is a “probably” about it. You can’t get a snowflake from mucho heat.
Yes, I don’t necessarily go along with “shoulds” but why wasn’t that your first response?
Well that’s certainly an interesing thought bearing exploration. But I need evidence for it. I’m a skeptic. Can you even imagine a snowflae though among all of that heat? That would be some unique snowflake. Not sure it’s possible though.
Doesn’t EVERYTHING need some kind of atmosphere in which to form?
“Old” universe? Which universe would that be? Ours is an ongoing one. Who can say about the ones which may have come before this one?
We thrive on the complicated.
Who is this mysterious Arc of which you speak?
Just kidding. I’m sure you have a mean side. I’ve just never seen it here on ILP. Would I like such an Arc? Depends on if it’s a salient part of your personality. We all have a mean side in the sense that we have bad days, we get angry, we have buttons that people really don’t want to push, but what it boils down to is: can “being mean” be accurately described as a persistent characteristic of your personality?
I’d be really surprised if this turned out to be you in reality.
Of course. But do you always do things for other people’s sake?
Well, as I always say:
^^ See Arc? It’s all about love.
Sure, I could have elaborated, I suppose, but that can’t possibly be mistaken for being mean. You weren’t even saying I was wrong.
Well, now I’m confused. The question was: what came first, the rock or the snowflake? Which rock? Which snowflake? I thought I’d interpret it as the first rock… ever… the first snowflake… ever.
Oh, but there’s so many different angles from which to look at it, so many different scenarios to consider. You give me certain truth and I will turn it into ambiguous uncertainty.
Dunno. This was a line of thought along the way to my own self-contradiction. I felt it was important to show how I got there.
This is the “old” universe, which just means the universe in one of its earlier stages of development. This is the stage after the first super-novas, which means the heat throughout the universe was already unevenly distributed. Suns were hot, but there was already the deep of inter-stellar space (I think) which was bitterly cold. I’m imagining a droplet of water out in this cold deep. No doubt, it would freeze, but would it form the symmetrical geometric pattern snowflakes are known to take?
(But then there’s the microwave background radiation; how hot was it at this stage of the universe? Hot enough to melt snow and ice wherever it was? ← See, this is me throwing another wrench into the thought experiment by which I might arrive at yet another self-contradiction!)
Does it? Why would that be?
This will answer many of our questions:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUot7XSX8uA[/youtube]
And then there’s this:
popia.ft.uam.es/aknebe/page3/fil … istory.pdf
On page 12 of this PDF, it gives a graph depicting the thermal history of the universe. If 0 Celsius is 273 Kelvin, then it looks like the first time snowflakes were possible was 1 thousand million years after the Big Bang. It also depicts galaxies and stars and stuff being around at that time, and that the first atoms were around long before that: about 300 thousand years after the Big Bang when the universe was 6000 Kelvins. If those atoms included the elements essential for rocks, and if rocks could solidify at 6000 Kelvins, then I think we have to return to the original conclusion that rocks came before snowflakes.
And then came civilization…
I thought that you wanted to get back to the thread, gib.
We’ve more than derailed this train. When I have time, maybe I’ll respond to some of this in a PM to you.
Sounds good, Arc, sounds good.