Slashdot Mirror


Planets May Form in Hundreds, Not Millions, of Years

Seanasy writes "Recent simulations on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Terascale Computing System suggest that planet formation may take a lot less time than previously thought. The results were published in SCIENCE."

2 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This isn't at all surprising by MacAndrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a troll, right?

    God made the Earth about 6000 years ago so it couldn't have formed in millions of years.

    Interesting logic. In other words, "Because CONCLUSION, then QUESTION must lead to CONCLUSION." I believe this is called a syllogism.

    I don't care if oil forms in ten minutes, the Earth is not 6,000 years old to a 99.9% level of certainty unless God has a very odd sense of humor (possible). Personally I'm leaning towards 4.5 billion years.

    Seriously, in defense of Christianity, and I am agnostic, scant few Christians subscribe to creationism or intelligent design, so whatever you may believe be careful not to stereotype Christians based on it.

  2. Re:This isn't at all surprising by dvdeug · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The earth couldn't be millions of years old because God created it about 6000 years ago. If the creation of the earth about 6000 years ago is accepted as truth, then we use this to eliminate the question of the age of the earth being 4.5 billion of year old.

    If we start with the assumption that the world is 6000 years old, then given that assumption, it's 6000 years old. If you start without any assumption of Christianity's truth, it looks like the world is roughly 5 billion years old. If you start by assuming the Bible is true, and the information of our senses is true, then you have a fairly complex question, with different answers depending on the believer.

    it is impossible to be a true Christian and not believe that God created the world.

    No where in the Bible does it say the world was created 6000 years ago. I think the Bible has pretty good evidence that the Hebrews didn't view large numbers with the precision we did - notice the symbolic use of 70, 70 times 70, and 144,000 at various places in the bible. It would have been very hard to explain to them that the world was five billion years old. Christians* believe God created the world; but they don't necessarily believe that he felt compelled to give the exact blow by blow to the Hebrews, instead of giving them some version they could understand.

    * Well, most Christians, at least.