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World's Oldest Fossils Found In Greenland (washingtonpost.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Washington Post: Scientists probing a newly exposed, formerly snow-covered outcropping in Greenland claim they have discovered the oldest fossils ever seen, the remnants of microbial mats that lived 3.7 billion years ago. It's a stunning announcement in a scientific field that is always contentious. But if confirmed, this would push the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth's early history, and provide support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe. A team of Australian geologists announced their discovery in a paper titled "Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures," published Wednesday in Nature. The report adds: "Subsequent laboratory analysis established that the formation is 3.7 billion years old, and turned up additional chemical signatures consistent with a biological origin for the conical structures, Allen Nutman, a University of Wollongong geologist, said. These scientists determined the age of the rocks through radiometric dating, measuring the abundance of elements created by the steady decay of uranium."
I love Tina Fay quotes! She's snarky, so she must be smart.
...Cowboy Neal.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Stupidity of this magnitude should make you too poor to be able to waste your time on trying to export stupid beliefs like that onto other people.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
That's stupid, everyone knows the Earth isn't flat. The poles are there to hide the entrances to the INSIDE of the earth where the lizard men live. How could the earth have an inside anyway if it was flat? That makes no sense, see.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Panspermia in general is just some side hypothesis without much science behind. Organic compounds are quite aboundant in space, and they form spontaneoulsly if conditions are right, so there is no need to hypotheze that the organic compounds on Earth had some extraterrestical origin. Some of them might actually come from somewhere else, but organic compounds tend to be quite fragile when it comes to the conditions around a meteorite impact, and the few molecules that survive tend to be drown into lakes and puddles with billions of other organic molecules already there.
Doesn't matter how unlikely it is, if the universe is infinite (e.g. eternal inflation exists). Then it really doesn't matter, other than how many universe diameters on average you have to travel before seeing a copy of earth. I've seen figures like ten to the ten to the one-twenty universe diameters. Can't be bothered looking up how to do superscript in this window. ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
There are two trivial ways to do powers of ten in ASCII characters. 10^6 is one way, and can even be written long hand such as: 1.2345 x 10^6. The more compact form uses "e" for exponent and is called "scientific" or "engineering" notation, though some insist that "engineering" notation only allows multiples of 3 for the powers of ten. Anyway, I digress, use exponent notation like this: 1.234e6 or be explicit with the sign 1.234e+6 and for small values use 1.234e-6.
I think you were writing the range: "figures like 10^10 to 10^120 universe diameters"
Read up on it. It's interesting.
Bishop Ussher, along with many others, were curious to know how old the universe was. So he went to The Bible and started figuring things out. We knew dates - the razing the Temple, Babylon Captivity - but how to figure out the beginning.
Go to The Bible and add up the dates. 6 days for creation + one day of rest + this lifetime + that lifetime until you get to a known date. Then, voila, you have the age of the universe.
Simple really.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Oh I've been modded up. Doesn't say why. C'mon slashdot give me an "Informative"!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But the Earth IS flat. Well, locally flat. Sort of. A manifold, at any rate. Except for all of the fractally scaled bumps that extend down to the molecular level.
Come to think of it, the Earth isn't flat. In fact, it doesn't even have a surface. Just a highly irregular atomic-scale semi-fractal zone of Pauli-electrostatic intermolecular repulsion. The best that can be said is that at some particular coarse-grained scale, it is locally highly reminiscent of a truly flat planar surface osculating to a point in the average, sometimes.
Now the 6000 year bit -- yes, the earth has been around for 6000 years. Just like I've been around for 100% of the last two minutes. Unless one gets really serious about quantum fluctuations, where one could argue -- not necessarily perfectly reasonably -- that every elementary particle in my body flickers in and out of existence on the Heisenberg scale where \delta (mc^2) \delta t \approx \hbar. Following that argument, there is a near certainty that you could pick any instant you like and insist that the Earth "came into being" within an teeny bit of that instant...
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Pushing back the evidence of life implies one of the following is true.
1) Life (abiogenesis) is easy to get started and the Universe is full of life.
Well, it shows that it is liklier easier than expected. If it took only a 300 million years to start here then the best guess at the mode is of course 300 million years, say down from 500 million.
That of course implies that the window for life to evolve is likely shorter than we previously expected and naturally the number of places with a short window must be greater than or equal to the number of places with a longer window (in any remotely statistically sane universe, greater).
As the minimum window shortens, the number of opportunities for life to get started expands.
I don't think that proves the universe is full of life.
2) It was an extremely rare event for life to start on Earth.
I don't see how it implies that. We don't know precisely how rare the event was but as the earliest point moves back, the event looks less rare than before.
3) Life started somewhere else and ended up on Earth.
Not really sure how it implies that. No matter what the distribution of life seeds arriving from outside, the narrower the window, the smaller chance life had to arrive from the outside. So it implies this option is less likely, but not by how much.
4) Life had outside help in getting started.
You've just deferred the problem, though to whatever gave rise to the outside helper.
i.e. a supernatural event.
Possibly, but the probability increases from something minute to something marginally less minute. We've never seen any evidence of anything supernatural existing that's held up to scrutiny, so the chance of supernatural things existing is very small at this point.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Evolution implies death before sin. If there was death before sin, then “original sin” and Jesus’ atonment for that sin are meaningless. They’re not going to accept something that breaks their religion, because they have a deathly (no pun intended) fear of not having a life after death. They are also wrapped up in fear over some mythical “moral decline” that they believe is caused by moral relativism that they seem to think evolution implies.
What’s interesting is to uncover the inconsistences in their beliefs. They claim to read the Bible literally or “at face value.” But when it comes to original sin, the Bible is only clear about HUMAN SPIRITUAL death as a result of original sin. They extend this to physical death of all animals. But when pressed, they cannot identify specific Bible verses that speak to this. Rather, they fall back on an assumption they make about the meaning of “very good” which they ASSUME (a tendency they say is a problem with evolutionists) means there could have been no animal death before human sin. They presume too much to know the mind of God and what God may have thought was “very good” beyond what their Bible claims while trying to convince us that the primary source of truth should be the Bible.
They go on to create a subculture where evidence is something we can take or leave as we like as it fits or doesn’t fit our preconceptions. Then they turn around and call evolution a preconception. It was Christians who came up with the idea!