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The Universe Is 13.73 Billion Years Old
CaptainCarrot writes "Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer has summarized for his readers the new results released by NASA from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been surveying the 3K microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang. Some of the most interesting results: The age of the universe is now known to unprecedented accuracy: 13.73 billion years old, +/- 120 million. Spacetime is flat to within a 2% error margin. And ordinary matter and energy account for only 4.62% of the universe's total. Plait's comment on the age result: 'Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.'"
Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.
I wish we could get to the point where we don't give these people credibility via recognition. People don't feel the need to mention the Flat Earth Theory whenever the subject of the round earth comes up.
I know the Evolution Deniers / Young Earthers are more vocal than the Flat Earthers these days, so it's probably not possible. I think legislative insanity should be fought vehemently. But doing this everyday mocking just plants the idea in people's minds that there is some debate, both with equally valid viewpoints.
One of the best ways to combat crazyness is to ignore it. We have very few Nazis in the United States because they are ignored as lunatics. Europe has a lot of them because they are banned. School shootings are caused by the media publicity of past school shootings. Holocaust denial is done because it gets attention. And similarly, evolution denial is fueled because of the controversy. Some people just want to believe the opposite of the mainstream.
The best way to put evolution denial and young earth insanity in the grave is to ignore it, unless it raises its head and tries for force its views down the throats of children.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Creationist science is like a cargo cult...They buy guys who have letters after their names, they use all the terminology, and put on lab coats...and still don't understand why no one takes their "science" seriously.
And it's the same old argument from ignorance: "No one has proven with 100% certainty how this happened, therefore it must have been God." Of course you can insert anything in where "God" is and the argument will be equally fallacious. I'd be nice if they'd throw out a valid argument every now and again.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"Spacetime is flat to within a 2% error margin."
No, space is flat to within 2% (on cosmological scales, according to WMAP Year 5). Spacetime is curved, as per general relativity.
Most Bible Thumpers have it totally wrong. IF they actually read the bible, they would have found that the earth was NOT actually created in 6 or 7 days. YES YES That is the GENESIS account, BUT, the original hebrew/aramaic translations describe a day as a period or era (really undetermined period of time) Psalms describes that a day with God is as a thousand years (let you look it up for yourself). this does not mean day with God IS a thousand years. It really just means a day is a long long time. hence AS a thousand years and not IS a thousand years. SO it is plausible he created the universe AND still have the big bang theory still be in harmony. Except that Scientists don't want to accept that and Zealot, fundamentalist religionsists do not want to acknoledge this.
Make no mistake, what I am saying here is that an open mind be kept on BOTH sides. It is entirely possible our universe was created by a supreme being. There seems to be too much order in the small and larger details for that to be considered a "random" accident of the universe. On the other hand it coule be random which also seems possible as well. The answer is not conclusivly known for either or, and only human arrogance would presume otherwise. One day we WILL know the absolute truth of it. But at this time there is too much bickering and closed minded ness on both sides to actually try to figure this out.
Hundreds or thousands of years from now our decsendents (assuming we don't blow ourselves up before then) will look at us much the way we look at our ancestors or we will be living life the way the Bible says things will happen. Right now we have "the earth is flat" mentality about all this religion AND science. We know very little about space especially since we have not been out there exploring it. And no being just outside our atmostphere does not count. It gives alot of info, but until we can explore our own Solar System fully, we have very little data to go on other than what we can see with the limits of a telescope.
Alternatively, you could just take it that the Bible Thumpers have taken a good book of mythology and Jewish legend and claimed it as fact. It's kinda like if people still believed that Zeus created the universe from Mt. Olympus. Except people take it seriously.
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And you call that evidence.... we should make better schools.
Evidence? You want scary read this St Louis Post Dispatch story. Thirty people who had been arrested on drug charges were released after the arresting officer was shot and killed. Apparently the only "evidence" was the cop's word.
"Well" you say, "that's just one redneck state?" Well, I live next door to that state, here in Illinois they fired two detectives for perjury, planting evidence, and other bogus stunts - after the two were caught. The detectives weren't charged with their obviously criminal actions, and one man who had been arrested on charges of being a dope dealer, then released when it was clear the charges were bogus, is suing.
It's too bad that the law doesn't have the same definition for "evidence" as scientists. It's pretty easy to see how this "creationist" garbage gets started.
BTW, no where in the Bible does it say how old the universe (or the earth) is or how God went about making life. Like the two stories about dopers, they're just taking some asshat's word for it.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
If you start with a firm belief, you don't actually need any proof at all. But whenever you get anything that seems to support your belief, you will seize upon it.
In this case, the web site seizes upon a few animals that were thought to be extinct and were later found NOT to be extinct. Aside from ignoring the thousands of still-thought-to-be-extinct fossils, it's not even an argument worth winning; natural selection does not require extinction - though it does help explain it when it does occur. But extinction can occur even without natural selection, and natural selection does not try to claim otherwise. For instance, if a new species of bird were to arise on a dormant volcanic island, and then the volcano were to become active and wipe out the habitat, this would cause an extinction without needing to invoke natural selection.
Most theories involving the mass dinosaur extinction do not involve natural selection (aside from the small subset that became modern birds), so claiming that a dinosaur still exists is even more puzzling.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Both" sides?
So which of Earth's many religions is the correct one with respect to the creation of the universe?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Isn't God supposed to be infinitely more intelligent and powerful than we are?
If that's the case, why is he trying to trick us? What the hell would that prove? That he's smarter than we are? It's already pretty much a given if he can make all this. What does he gain by fucking with us? So he can sit back and say, "Ho ho simpletons! Those dinosaur fossils and red shifting really got you good, didn't they?"
It would be like me kicking a puppy for not knowing Calculus. "Ok Spot, what's the first derivative of sin(x)? Wrong!" *boot*
I cannot believe that the creator of the universe would be that fabulous of a bastard. And if he is, I want no part of Him.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You know, the interesting thing is that the Bible doesn't say that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
In fact, the majority of Jews - from whom the scripture came - do not believe it is 6,000 years old.
Nor do the 2 billion Catholics in the world.
Nor do the nearly 1 billion (maybe more) Muslims in the world.
Yet they all believe in the books of Moses.
The belief that the Earth was formed in 4,004 B.C. is held only by a small, minority sect of protestants who insist on interpreting the Bible literally. Problem is, that a literal interpretation of the Bible doesn't support this theory - there are gaps in the genealogies which make arriving at an exact date impossible. In fact, you can't even get a ballpark figure using literal interpretation, because the books weren't written as an historical or scientific reference. So things get left out that you would need to know to determine even the approximate dates.
Suppose, for an instant, that you are God, telling Moses how you created the world:
God: In one femtosecond, I created all the matter in the Universe.
Moses: What's a femto-second? How many days is that?
God: It's a, wait, oh, nevermind... Let me rephrase that: I spoke and created the Universe on the first day...
It's not false, but it's not precise either. However, it is as precise as could be written down at the time, because the concept of a femto-second wouldn't become widely known for another 40 centuries.
No matter what the topic, you can find people who will read their particular biases into anything. You can find the same behavior among the Da Vinci code believers who think somehow that, in spite of the book being fiction, the Catholic Church is "hiding the real truth". Kind of like the 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theorists.
I'm not sure why people like to trot out the 6,000 year old theory every time someone mentions the age of the Universe. Perhaps it is because they're seeking an opportunity to tar the faiths of the world with the brush of ignorance. Perhaps their ignorance of religion allows them to believe that all believers think this way. Regardless, it is getting a little old, and quite frankly, pedantic.
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Except that Scientists don't want to accept that and Zealot, fundamentalist religionsists do not want to acknoledge this.
I don't think there are many scientists who would have a problem with God creating the universe, so long as the God explaination is in accordance with observable evidence. Hence, not 6000 years ago.
Now many scientists would also say that the God explaination doesn't add any value - as in "who created God". But don't read too much into that.
Scientists aren't opposed to God, en masse, but they *are* opposed to ignorant zealots who don't understand the principles of evidence, and spew their crap on society through political action groups. But that's a larger issue than just intelligent design and young-earthers. There's also global-warming deniers too.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It is entirely possible our universe was created by a supreme being.
Then you will also grant that it's entirely possible that our universe was created by a mediocre being. Or any one of an infinite number of possible alternative mediocre beings. Or any one of an infinite number of possible supreme beings, each one distinguished from all the others by the arbitrary standard used to define "supreme." Or perhaps a committee of beings, some supreme, some not so supreme.
Now, why you would believe any of this is possible is something of a mystery, particularly with regard to your use of the word "being", which is normally understood to mean "a thing that exists in an entirely ordinary sense within our universe." Obviously, this use of the term "being" can't possible apply to whatever it is that created the universe, so you must be using "being" in a completely non-standard and totally misleading way.
Whatever completely novel meaning you want to give the word "being", the concept of "possibility" only applies to things that exist in the aforesaid entirely ordinary sense, and as your supreme "being" manifestly cannot exist in that sense, there is no possibility that it exists at all, that being the only sense of existence there is.
Because the universe is everything that exists, the belief that beings outside the universe exist is not even self-consistent.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't creationists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Saying there is too much order in the universe for it to be random chance is like a puddle remarking at how well a pot hole conforms to its shape.
strawmen are so easy to knock down, aren't they? I am an atheist, and do not claim it has existed forever or had some supernatural causation. I will claim that "The data is insufficient for a determination" and you can quote me on that. On the other hand, the bible tells me nothing useful about creation, it's evolution or the conditions that existed beforehand. In otherwords, it is a totally worthless hypothesis.
Unfortunately for your position, the current mainstream scientific theory is that the universe was created at a specific time in the past. In fact, the whole point of this article is that time just got even more specific.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Two problems, dear arminw,
Firstly, evolution is no belief, but a theory. A very well-rounded and largely complete theory that explains how we came to be. It is possible, despite the evidence in its favor, that evolution is wrong. That possibility is currently thought to be vanishingly small, due to the preponderance of evidence favoring evolution.
Secondly, "faith" cannot be correct, and it also cannot be wrong. Your faith, whatever it must be, is irrational. Pretending to be rational about faith is infantile and ridiculous. There is no proof of anything in any holy book that isn't in common with history texts, and in fact there is a great deal of evidence opposing these books. Pretending to look at the evidence and deciding that "ghost man inna sky did it!" is an immature thought process that by the year 2008 we should ALL have progressed far beyond.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
An atheist is just someone who does not believe in the hundreds of gods a given "theist" does not believe in PLUS one or more extra.
Religion is a rounding error, almost. Especially the monotheistic faiths.
Faith, by its very nature, depends on, well, faith. If you could prove the existance of god, you needn't believe. I think it was in the Constantine movie where Gabriel told him it's hopeless for him to repent, because he knows there is heaven. He wouldn't believe, he would know.
So if anything could destroy a faith, it's a prove of the existance of God. (Un)Fortunately, that's quite impossible. We will maybe eventually prove that there is no need for a God to explain the existance of our universe and ourselves, but I doubt that this could end the discussion whether God (or a god) exists or not.
And, frankly, I don't consider that question so important to waste too much valuable time on it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.