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Hubble Data Says Universe Is 14 Billion Years Old
no reason to be here writes "New data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the age of the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. Read this press release for more info."
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What about life, the universe, and everything?
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
finding the oldest stars puts astronomers well within arm's reach of calculating the absolute age of the universe
...May 14th?
Well I have a 1/365 chance of that being right!
It is official; NASA confirms: the Universe is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered scientific community when Berkeley confirmed that Universe inhabitability has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all stars. Coming on the heels of a recent NASA survey which plainly states that the Universe has lost more inhabitability, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Universe is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in the recent Living Times comprehensive livability test.
You don't need to be an Einstein to predict the Universe's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the Universe faces a dark future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Universe because the Universe is dying. Things are looking very bad for the Universe. As many of us are already aware, the Universe continues to lose brilliance. Red dwarfs are flowing like a river of blood. The Milky Way is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core supergiants.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Andromeda Galaxy leader Neo states that there are 7000 stars left in the Andromeda Galaxy. How many livable planets in the Crab Nebula are there? Let's see. The number of Andromeda Galaxy versus Crab Nebula readings on SETI@HOME is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Crab Nebula inhabitable planets. Horseshoe Nebula readings on SETI@HOME are about half of the volume of Crab Nebula readings. Therefore there are about 700 inhabitable planets in the Horseshoe Nebula. A recent article put the Milky Way at about 80 percent of the Universe market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 inhabitable planets in the Milky Way. This is consistent with the number of Milky Way SETI@HOME readings.
Due to the troubles of Grand Overlord Bush, abysmal immigration and so on, the Milky Way went out of business and was taken over by Virgo who sell another troubled galaxy. Now Virgo is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that the Universe has steadily declined in inhabitability. The Universe is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the Universe is to survive at all it will be among interplanetary dilettante dabblers. The Universe continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the Universe is dead.
Fact: the Universe is dying
I don't cary what you fancy-schmancy tele-scope in space says - Jack Chick says the this here universe is only 6000 years old.
Excuse me, while I go back to the trailer.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
What the Hubble measured here was not the age of the universe, but the age of the oldest stars we've seen in it. Those stars were measured to be 12-13 billion years old, based on their temperature.
Different Hubble measurements, based on redshifts, figure that the universe is 13-14 billion years old.
This is good, because older calculations had suggested that the universe was actually younger than the oldest stars in it, which makes zero sense, and caused all sorts of wacky hypotheses.
Since the first stars would have formed about 1 billion years into the universe's formation, it means that we have rough agreement (to, uh, one significant figure) between two independent calculations on the age of the universe. Actually, a lot of other theories come into play here, including a very complicated model of how white dwarfs work.
So this measurement provides evidence for a whole host of theories. I love it when a plan comes together.
'inflammable means flammable? what a country!'
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Perhaps things aren't so different today - many people, while benefitting from more widespread, comprehensive education, still haven't received much meaningful religious or spiritual education. Spiritual education is where sex education was fifty years ago, one of the last bastions of ignorance in modern civilization.
But nevertheless, the audiences for spiritual messages cover an enormous spectrum, ranging from those who still seem to need the simple messages from thousands of years ago, to those who are capable of understanding far more complex and ambiguous truths. It's difficult for these groups to communicate between each other, and most attempts to do so are futile - just as attempting to teach sub-atomic physics to a jungle-dwelling Aztec might be futile, or the Aztec's attempt to explain their theory of human sacrifice to us.
The amusing thing is that we have to tolerate these spiritual cavemen, for their indocrinated beliefs are unshakeable; yet they continually attempt to "convert" us, demonstrating a lack of tolerance which actually goes against the religions they claim to espouse. I used to find this annoying, until you realize how truly sad it is.
My heart goes out to anyone trapped in a network of 4000 year old propaganda, which is so closely enmeshed in our social structure that only the most intelligent and self-aware can find their way out of it - only to realize that it does perhaps serve a strange social purpose, and that we don't really have any good candidates to replace it. Ah, the human condition...
But hey, at least we know that the universe is 14 billion years old - that's something, right? Sigh... :)
Just wait a few months and some astronomer is going to say X billion years.
;).
The "universe younger than stars" was funny tho. Dunno why they threw that one out