Some Observers Perceive the Universe To Be Much Younger Than We Do

StartsWithABang writes: It's been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang for us, and when we look out at a distant object in the Universe, we're seeing it as it was in the past. Its age — as it appears — is determined only by how long the light took for it to travel from that object to our eyes, but to someone living there, it will also appear that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old. But it is actually possible for an observer living on another planet, star or galaxy to perceive that significantly less time has passed since the Big Bang, so long as they were moving close to the speed of light relative to the CMB. Paradoxically, if they slowed their speed, they'd find that they themselves were very young, but living in a 13.8 billion year-old Universe.

Comments

Re: Inaccurate Summary

[ScentCone]

You must be a hit at parties

He probably is, because he goes to parties full of intellectually curious people. If you think that's annoying, your baseline for normal must be binge drinking at the Alpha Omega Dementia frat house.

Re:Okay.

[Ol Olsoc]

Man, don't even defend that strawman. The ratio of actual Christian fundamentalists espousing young Earth, to those that use their existence to justify their modern progressive liberalism, is at least one in a thousand.

Here's what I notice: Generally, those fundie Christians (you have to go find them) will keep their ideas to themselves, unless pressed.

psst, trying to bust a strawman with a strawman. Cute

They've had a persecution complex forever, and now in my old age, I'm having doubts that it is totally unfounded.

They also have a surprisingly strong grip on one of the US' main political parties. To the point where when you ask that parties candidates if they say believe in evolution, they'll tend to answer you something like "Well, I'm not a scientist", or "There are controversies.

Back to your premise....

Well, all I have to go on is personal experience. I grew up in a town where fundamentalists held sway. Until the early 70's no stores were allowed to open on Sunday. You want the Sunday paper? You drive to another town, Eventually, they allowed newsstands to open for a couple hours so people could get papers on the way home from church. Eventually it went to normal as they lost their iron grip on the town. That was mainly a nuisance, amusing not to think back on.

School - Mandated sex education was 1 - 1 hour class saying if you have sex before marriage, you'll get VD and die.

No evolution was taught, and can you imagine - anything that might allow someone to divine an age of the universe younger than 6000 years old was not allowed. I made it the entire way through grades 1-12 without hearing the word dinosaur.

Grandparents were fundies Ever wake up in the middle of the night with your grams praying at the foot of your bed, or forced to listen to her rail on about how you are going to go to hell all day on Sunday and an hour or so every day?

My experience of all intrusive and rather scary fundies is in opposition to your apparent shy creatures, only wanting to be alloed to live the lives they choose model.

On the other hand, the people that seem to have in in for them, 'progressives' I guess, will take every opportunity to loudly proclaim the fundies' ignorance, and stupidity, and mean-spiritedness, and so on.

You don't have to be progressive (another nice strawman) to find the fundamentalists quite repulsive. Having been raised among them, ignorance and stupidity, and mean spritedness are not unreasonable assessments of their activities.

Can't even have a thread on science without the big pile-on.

If I'm forced to take a side, which in itself seems weird to me in a modern society; well, the choice seems clear.

That statement isn't completely clear. Does that mean you're aligning yourself with science, or that you're going to be trying to force schools to teach religion in science class, agitate for legislation to ban same sex marriage, declare the US a Christian nation, and tell us all that Darwin was the Devil?

Time to campaign to get the Duggars back on TV.