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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."
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?
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)
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).
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!
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
It's a fucking *long* time until Sunday then.
The cake is a pie
You need to understand that radiocarbon dating and isochron dating are two different methods of dating an object, although both are based in radiometric dating. A rebuttal of radiocarbon dating is not a rebuttal of radiometric dating or other methodologies, and further a specialist can easily show just about anything to a lay-person, without it necessarily being true.
I'd say that Milton's a crank scientist, but if you believe him can you outline where you disagree with Richard Dawkin's review of Milton's book?
You have to wonder when just about every other person in a profession disagrees with you if it's more likely that you're wrong or that they're all wrong.
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'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
God's word maybe never changes. Unless some bible thumper takes it and twists it around, of course. It's amazing how you try to "defend" the words of the Bible by quoting it wrongly.
Twice.
In a single sentence of just seven words.
First: Nowhere in the Bible, it says anything about the world being flat. We read about the waters being divided and the water being told to recede so land can form, but I can't remember a single word stating anything about the shape of Earth.
Second: The bible never ever mentions anything about a timeline or a date for the creation. What happened is that some Bishop in the 4th or 5th century tried to puzzle together a creation date for Earth, based on the various stories told therin and the acting figures, as well as their relation towards each other. Now, first of all he only had a rather bad translation of the original text to work with, second he tried to rely on the dates given (which also were a bit contradicting in the various books) and finally he took human life spans of his time as a standard. He made so many assumptions and filled the blanks with the information and rumors available to him about the ancient kingdoms of the east (which were spotty to say the least, and wrong in many cases) that as a statistician I can only dismiss his "calculations" as guesswork.
So, if you really want to rely on the Bible as the sole authority, you can neither claim that earth is flat nor that it's 5000 years old. Neither is by any means supported by the Book.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm curious, where does it say that?
if you know the exact date' we can have a public holiday!
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...
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.
"This is the kind of unhelpful response that doesn't win any converts to your way of thinking."
Scientists are frequently arrogant, perhaps because the validity of scientific findings are independent of whether or not you or anyone else agrees with them. Simply put, there's no real need for winning converts -- nor is it accurate to write it off as "a way of thinking".
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
It's a shame they can't give us an exact date. That would be one hell of a birthday cake :-)
Because a billion means different things depending on where you live.
It has had a pretty good uptime since then.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
....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
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