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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."
This article is another slashdot dupe or hoax
Do they have a copy of God's diary? How could they have figured this out?
Of course it was. Even then, everything crashed on Mondays.
So to borrow from someone else's profound statement, all of our recorded history in well within the margin of error (by 4 orders of magnitude or so).
There's a nice political joke in there for those not yet in their holiday brain coma.
...to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years.
Similarly, I've discovered my birthday to be defined as subsequent to July.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Clearly this is bad information, because the morons at http://www.answersingenesis.org/ and their 27 million dollar monument to ignorance (http://www.creationmuseum.org/) say the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and surely the universe can't be that much older than the Earth.
And i was born 22 years ago, within a range of 10 years
Pretty big error (almost 50%)
To think that the span of a human life is at best about 1/250 millionth of that cycle. Light from distant stars does eventually get here, it just happens on timescales that are beyond imagination.
Such a shame that we occupy such a small blink in the process, and can't witness cosmic events on any larger a level.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Can we break those intermediate steps into seven phases or so and declare each of those a "day", get a copy to the Pope, and settle this whole religion versus science mess now? Or at least build some bridges for the Bible folks and the Science folks to agree to something that makes a little more sense?
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Yeesh, you people are so negative! The hint is right there in his username!
I need to know the calendar date so I can convince my boss it's a holiday. In fact, why don't we make it an international paid holiday?
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
So god made the earth about the time civilization was making beer...and the solar system is over 4 billion years old... man sometimes Im a little late to work but this guy takes the cake! Hes still pretty keen on taking the credit though...
Nothing to see here. It is not like the radiometric dating methods are completely speculative and saddled with risky assumptions at all. These dates are solid! 4Ma + or - 2Ma... or maybe + or - 4Ma or 40 trillion years, it is not like we are guessing at all.
Have you ever wondered why we haven't encountered intelligent life forms other than ourselves? An advanced race with regular slower-than-light starships would be able to colonize an entire galaxy within a few million years (barely an instant on a geological timescale). One possible explanation for our apparent solitude in the universe is that the number of planets with the proper conditions for developing life is vanishingly small. (Read about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox for other possibilities)
For example Earth's moon creates tides (and tide pools) and stabilizes the earth's seasons and axial tilt. According to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis the Moon was created as a result of a chance collision between the proto-earth and a Mars-sized object. Without the presence of the Moon the conditions might have been too harsh to support life.
As we learn more about how the solar system formed we will be better able to predict which stars might have life-bearing planets, so we can begin our own colonization of the galaxy (assuming humans can survive long enough to overcome war, disease and ecological destruction).
Unlike science, Gods word never changes.
The flat earth is 5000 years old.
It explains it all.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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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to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years
And on the seven hundred fifty-nine million seven hundred three thousand seven hundred seventy-third day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seven hundred fifty-nine million seven hundred three thousand seven hundred seventy-third day from all his work which he had made.
You just got troll'd!
Dude, how can this be possible? The Universe is only 5768 years old according to the Old Testament! For the sake of argument, we'll ignore the fact that time dilation will stretch the first six days of Creation into approximately fifteen billion years, according to the physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder.
It's written in the stars...
Maybe "slippery when wet"?
--
make install -not war
Instead of arguing the contemporary equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, I'd be more concerned with religions that have twisted views on more practical and real world matters, like considering people who have the audacity to get gang raped as having perpetrated a criminal act (see Islam). Or musing whether their main mortal boy would have enjoyed marrying a blonde. Or marking for death anyone who no longer subscribes to their fiction.
Christianity is the grass snake outside your house. Islam is the cobra in your room!
Well with the whole global warming problem we are facing, no way am I lighting that many candles!
In that sense, I think that astrophysics, followed by geology, are the most melancholy of sciences.
sig sig sig siggy sig
The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing.
It's supposed to be.
The MAD doctrine deters nuclear war by threatening a retaliation that would likely bring down civilization and possibly end the human race and much of life on Earth.
For it to work, US presidents have to put on a show, looking crazy enough that they'd actually do it - but sane enough that the won't shoot first and can be reasoned with on issues that otherwise would have been "solved" by the outcome of a war. (IMHO it's likely the term "Mutually Assured Destruction" was chosen at least partly for the acronym, to help put on this show. Psych warfare was pretty well developed by the start of the Cold War.)
MAD is pretty terrifying. But it reversed the ongoing escalation of wars right after the bombs were proven to work under battle conditions (and two fried cities were substituted for the years of war that had been expected to be necessary to end the Japan part of WWII). It's been over half a century and no nukes have been used in war since those two.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is good news! The Solar System has been bummed out lately 'cause it couldn't prove it's birthday to anyone. All of the other solar systems could get into the cool clubs, but not ours.
Now it's PARTY TIME and the drinks are on Sol!
-David
Interesting that no mention is made of other astrophysicists declaring that this model is out by several orders of magnitude using reflected radiation from this dwarf star [wikipedia.org]
It's a fucking *long* time until Sunday then.
The cake is a pie
Considering we've only had video capability for 100 years, it would be obvious that any alien that landed here would have video records of us. Imagine that, watching actual footage of Mozart performing, Christ's crucifiction (if some "event" like that actually happened), Charlemagne leading troops, etc. I'm sure they would have had tabs on every significant event that happened, and might have even documented it. Heck it might even be in hologram format. While we probably don't have the technology to view their files, I'm sure they'd have years of it.
Come on, we all know everything was created by a flying spaghetti monster, not a freaking fairy!
You realize the Catholic Church is fairly liberal when it comes to interpreting the Bible, right? It's the Protestant evangelical fundies who are the literalists.
In some sense the smaller the are the most likely we are to survive and the less resources we are going to need to maintain ourselves. So maybe small size is a virtue (and ants or small microorganisms have more evolutionary potential to survive from a supernova or asteroid, maybe).
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's French-Canadian. For us, the comma is the decimal separator, so 4,568 million actually looks like "4.568" million -- whereas it actually is "4.568" billion.
...
Of course, the next sentence shows 2,080,000 and that just completely ruins this
Nevermind.
Al
The Canadian Shield is thought to date back 4.5 billion years or so, which corresponds to this date of creation of the solar system. If so, shouldn't there be some "exotic" content to the Canadian Shield? It's not just parts of Canada which date that old, there are zircons in Australia which date back 4.4 billion years. The Earth could hardly have been consolidated at that time, since I believe the creation of the Moon from a collision of something with Earth also dates back to about that time. That doesn't leave a lot of time for the accretion process to make something big enough that the Moon can get generated as a result of the collision.
There are plenty of examples of mainstream religious doctrine changing to accommodate scientific discovery. It doesn't happen fast but it is more or less inevitable.
Unfortunately it isn't all progress because there are people making up new religious bullshit all the time.
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you commie.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Ironically if you see the imaginary figure that everyone believes in but can't see or hear you then become a saint.
if you know the exact date' we can have a public holiday!
± 2,080,000 years? I thought they'd say something like "March 12, 4,568,422,12 BC"...
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.
And then came Patch Tuesday...
"Get off my lawn!"
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
You mean the universe didn't start on 01-01-1980?
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Its coming out I tell ya! Better believe it!
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.
Whatever happened to just using billions of years? If they are attempting to keep the years and tolerance in equivalent units they could have just said, 4.568 billion years within a range [tolerance] of 0.00208 billion years and let people do the math.
So today would be Stardate 4 billion five hundred sixty eight million one hundred seventy thousand seven hundred twelve point twenty, take or leave a couple of million!
Not much info on how to "accurately" cimpute our suns' stardate on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardate, someone care to update?
I know what you try to do.
1. Announce DNF time and again.
2. ???
3. Prophet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It would have been better if they had found out it was 4,567 years ago, or at least it would have been easier to remember, though, not entirely correct.
It's a shame they can't give us an exact date. That would be one hell of a birthday cake :-)
Supposedly, our solar system was formed from the remains of another solar system with a short-lived sun that went supernova.
Was that theory invalidated and I missed the news?
Should we not trace the "birth" of our solar system to the explosion of that star?
Because a billion means different things depending on where you live.
You mean, "qui donne une merde concernant ces culs muets", surely?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It has had a pretty good uptime since then.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
4,568 million years is a decimal number (4.568) for most of europe,
why do you use the comma in that manner anyways?
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
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Everytime I read something like this I cannot help but wonder how they claim to have figured it out. To me it always sounds like they're just making up yet another wild number to keep the funds flowing.
...or something like that...
Scientist #1: crap, it's evaluation in a week
Scientist #2: so?
Scientist #1: well, the people who are giving us all our money will want to know what we made of it and we have nothing to present
Scientist #2: ah, well, let's just make up some wild number on how the universe is more or less exactly 4 billion years old...noone can really prove that wrong anyway...
Scientist #1: hmm, this might just work...
Scientist #2: and just to top it off we'll even admit we're wrong by a few million years...just so noone asks how we can be so sure
Scientist #1: My dear Scientist #2, you are a genious!
Not really, the sun is down half the day
....isn't that far off then?
4568 million years vs. somewhere around 6000 yrs. That's only 6 orders of magnitude, I mean, really they're just ZEROES.
-Styopa
"suck Satan's cock!" - bill hicks
I am made of the dust of the stars And the oceans flow in my veins ...
'Only a Barbarian believes that his tribes customs are the laws of nature'
Actually, the way I know it - Everything crashes on Friday. Afternoon. Preferabley after 17:00 when you are just about to put your foot out of the front door of the office.
So, this pretty much proves that the creationists were right. The earth was created only 4,000 years ago. They were just a little off by a few billion years.
Secondly it proves that the Earth's a Libra and according to today's horoscope says: More planetary changes bring the focus back to home matters and yet more change. A makeover for your room might appeal, but the planetary line-up could be a lot better than it currently is. Hold on to your ideas and wait until you have more time and a healthier looking budget!
which is mostly correct.
Do we know its sign?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Wow, how in the holy hell did THAT happen? Can we get this fixed, already? Also, convert the US off of Imperial ...
Most of the US likes Imperial and has no desire to switch. Yes it's just because we all grew up using it, but that's something that can't be easily undone. Imperial isn't like a cubit or something where it varies from person to person. All of the measurements are a very specifically defined amount and work perfectly fine for everyday use, and would technically be fine for scientific use if people wanted to utilize them.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Explains why my drill index has THREE different measuring systems, then, all for Imperial. Fractional, numeric for sizes in between those expressed as fractions, and lettered sizes. Any system where it's not immediately obvious without a few years of experience what size is the next smallest after, say, 1/4", is a pain in the ass and a confusing, antiquated barrier to entry. I'm an American, I like Fahrenheit because it works just fine, but Imperial for tools and shop measurement is plain counterproductive. Pisses me off every time I have to go to two different hex driver sets because an unknown bolt might be metric or Imperial.
I think the science was just a cover-up to find Duke Nukem Forever's original release date.
-
It has had a pretty good uptime since then.
Bah, that's easy when the majority of your system is just running their idle loops! Out of the whole dang system only one core has any active clients, and it's been starting to look a little flakey lately as the client process is gobbling up all the resources.
The enemies of Democracy are
Shouldn't that be current stage?
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we can have an astrologer create the appropriate charts and divine it's future
God created the lights in Heaven on the fourth day. And the seventh day was Saturday when he rested.
4 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning--the fourth day.
When they say 6000 years, they're rounding the numbers: 6000 years plus or minus 4500 million.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In Engineering terms, 10^9 in SI or Imperial is still 10^9 and if you prefer I say 5.xxx x 10^9 years with a tolerance of .002 x 10^9 so be it. Then people reading the units of time would know the ratio of .002xxx/5.xxx = a very small difference.
Let me rephrase it:
If someone believes that Firefly documents events that take place in our physical reality, then they would not make good rocket scientists.
that, it might have been born at night, but it certainly wasn't born last night!
It's good to read of the fruits on another person's life's work, and I appreciate the effort and good intentions of the intelligent people who make these "When did the universe begin" and "When does life begin" and "Physics geeks say your math is off" arguments.
... when the latest theory is disproved by another scientist's bold assertion, or by revelations that much of what this kind of science asserts as fact is not factual.
It's also disappointingly typical of many scientist, though, to doggedly pursue an answer without a sound, logical question, or in this case, a question based on theories with fundamental flaws.
If you insist on linear thinking and pursue the beginning of everything, you duck the question of what was there before the beginning. If everything started somewhere at some time, logically it must have had a place to start in. Is that what you're telling us? Can you give an accurate address of a home by listing the city but not the state?
We can't make sense of the question's premise so we decide that's a kind of science we can't comprehend but we'll proceed with the question anyway. Worry about the details later
It's not unlike the scientists who once believed the earth was flat. In this case, we seem to believe in a linear universe, and for some reason, we feel a need to attach another troubled concept -- time -- to this belief. And we accept it.