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Solar System Date of Birth Determined
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "UC Davis researchers have dated the earliest step in the formation of the solar system — when microscopic interstellar dust coalesced into mountain-sized chunks of rock — to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years. In the second stage, mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today. The dates of these intermediary stages are well established. The article abstract is available from Astrophysical Journal Letters."
It's been amusing over the past 10 years to see young-earth creationists squirm about the fact that cosmology has become a high-precision science, with the age of the universe going from having 50% error bars to 1.5% error bars. Now these folks have apparently measured the age of the solar system to within .05%. For a long time, young-earth creationists (YECs) were trying to say that the science was all very uncertain, so you couldn't trust the science. Hmm...now it appears that Archbishop Ussher's date for creation is off by 2000 standard deviations. Oops!
It's unfortunate that the authors don't seem to be in the habit of posting preprints on arxiv, or on their university web site. TFA doesn't really explain very well, for example, how they know the primordial Mn/Cr ratio so precisely, and why the Mn/Cr ratio in the universe as a whole wouldn't change at the same rate as the ratio in asteroids. As a California taxpayer, is it too unreasonable of me to expect research funded by my tax money to be available freely?
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Bible thumpers: Big imaginary fairy created the world 4,000 years ago.
Science folk: You're insane, it's all in your head, and I have proof.
You think those two views can be reconciled?
What I find bizarre is that religion is not considered a form of mental illness in the US. The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing.
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Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
I'm sure he thinks he does, but I don't really have any intention of buying his book. Any time one starts with a discussion on physics and ends up being pointed to a sermon on the wrongness of "Darwinism" it's pretty clear that physics isn't the real topic and real data isn't the point. My guess is that like everybody else publishing that sort of junk in the popular press, Milton is bringing up the same old tired appeals to all of modern physics being wrong (speed of light bouncing all over the place despite lack of data to support it, every type of radiometric decay miraculously changing in concert with every other type, etc.) in order to support his personal religious views. Nothing says kook better than somebody desperately making modification after modification to atomic theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc. in order to get the numbers to work out right and patch up the holes that their ideas poke in other well established frameworks rather than simply accepting the preponderance of evidence that Earth is, in fact, quite old.
Seriously: Where did the straight line come from? Most of the objections to common radiometric dating are irrelevant to the dating method used in this article and the one in the link I referenced (i.e. people who understand radiometric dating will weep if the response contains words like "carbon dating" or references to hucksters dating sea snail shells). So what's wrong with the line? Why, aside from God's Divine Preference for Straight Lines are the points in the graph collinear? Until somebody can, on one hand, completely destroy radiometric dating and its underlying theory and, on the other, explain that beautiful collinearity, they're just blowing so much smoke.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I'm curious, where does it say that?
mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today.
Another slashdot article about a month ago suggested that the type of collisions needed to create our moon were relatively rare, based on dust analysis of new systems. However, 20 Mars-sized proto-planets seems like it would create pretty good chances for moon-creating collisions. (Although gas giants probably hog most.)
Table-ized A.I.
It always amuses me to see something like this get reported as certain. Inevitably someone will come out next year and make it older or younger. It's like being a deserted island for one year. Then seeing a large carved boulder and saying "we can be certain that the bolder has been here for around 500 years by calculating the amount of erosion around it and the fact that it only rained once this past year". Then of course next year it rains 50 times, making the calculations just a little bit off.
I don't know if it is a good thing or a bad thing or what the op means, but I don't think the universe will need any help if we ever spread. We've made and continue to make mistakes when it comes to the environment, but we're the only lifeform that can recognize mistakes and try to amend for them. It should also be mentioned that there are plenty of animals that have benefited from the Human Race and not just pets.
We are both a part of nature and responsible for nature. No other lifeform on this planet shares that burden and really, it's only been ours for the last 100 years. Before that, we were still scratching at mud and praying for rain.
I'd love to discuss what it would take to get to the 'universe', cause really, just getting to another star would take a hella long time.
I believe it is inferred from certain passages, for example when Satan takes Jesus up to the top of a mountain to tempt him, and shows him the whole world laid out below. On a spherical world, you can't see everything from the top of a mountain but you can if it's flat.
In the same, if read literally the Bible also says that pi=3.0 (from the passage about a container measuring 10 across and 30 around).
But of course, nobody would try to read something like the Bible quite so absolutely literally these days, now would they...?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Wouldn't work. As I see it, the whole point of having a belief like that is so that you disagree with "Science" and other commonly held beliefs of society. The myth is that you are right and the society is blind in some way to this truth.Ultimately, the point is to disagree. What you disagree about isn't so important.