Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Calculate the Moon To Be 4.51 Billion Years Old (go.com)
Scientists used rocks and soil collected by the Apollo 14 moonwalkers in 1971 to calculate the age of the moon. It turns out that it is much older than scientists suspected, coming in at 4.51 billion years old. ABC News reports: A research team reported Wednesday that the moon formed within 60 million years of the birth of the solar system. Previous estimates ranged within 100 million years, all the way out to 200 million years after the solar system's creation, not quite 4.6 billion years ago. The scientists conducted uranium-lead dating on fragments of the mineral zircon extracted from Apollo 14 lunar samples. The pieces of zircon were minuscule -- no bigger than a grain of sand. The moon was created from debris knocked off from Earth, which itself is thought to be roughly 4.54 billion years old. Some of the eight zircon samples were used in a previous study, also conducted at UCLA, that utilized more limited techniques. Melanie Barboni, lead author of the study from the University of California, Los Angeles, said she is studying more zircons from Apollo 14 samples, but doesn't expect it to change her estimate of 4.51 billion years for the moon's age, possibly 4.52 billion years at the most. The study was published today in the journal Science.
Giant impact theory gets bonus points.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
This will probably get me downvoted as a troll but I've begun to drown out the following: 1. New Moon Formation/Age Theory 2. New Dinosaur Extinction Theory 3. New Asteroid On Possible Future Collision with Earth Estimations 4. New Solid State Physics Miracle that Promises Amazing Possibilities 100 Years in the Future. They just seem to disappear and are never heard from again or become part of the background noise of science.
This is going to confuse the hell out of poor old Ken Ham
Couldn't the 4.6 billion years old stuff just have come from a 4.6 billion years old original source (say, Earth), while the moon still came into existence only, say, several hundred million years ago, having been formed out of something which perchance included that stuff?
Read THE book!
FTFY.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If it asks, I say it doesn't look a day over 4 billion. After all, the moon is a harsh mistress.
Clearly it is said that God created man in his own image. Women were simply an afterthought taken from a left over spare rib. Perhaps He ran out of BBQ sauce?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Trump wants to make gay marriage illegal, I expect he will make Uranium-lead dating illegal too.
Well the God of the Bible is clearly an egomaniac, thankfully He is not the only one man has invented.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Wow! I'll sleep better at night!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I think we should probably think about getting a new one some time about now.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
On one side we have someone looking at the sky and saying "Ghhhhaaaaaa. Must have been created magically by an invisible sky wizard"
On the other side we have someone who measures the isotopic ratios in zircon crystal and then apply the current knowledge about crystal formation and radioactive decay to figure out an age that is consistent with the observed values.
One of them is clearly making a guess. The other is not. I let you figure out which one is which.
You look at this planet and question his incompetence?
But I can already see how it was, any engineer knows. God was building the Earth and he saw it was faulty and not ready for shipping and someone up in management said "We got a schedule to keep, just ship it and we'll patch the rest with some miracles".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Basically he comes across as a ADHD child in the terrible twos. I mean, look at him. When his toys didn't behave like he wanted them to, he tried to flush them. What's left was treated with unfairness and cruelty, arbitrary punishment and reward.
It's like handing a child an ant farm and that little asshole poking at the poor creatures, putting them under a magnifying glass and dumping a glass of water onto them, just for the sake of watching them suffer.
Asshole.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Do Islamic colleges taste like hummus?
I'm asking for a friend.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You sure he gets paid for that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The one measuring stuff. The other one doesn't even guess, he merely believes someone who guessed a long time ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Clearly it is said that God created man in his own image. Women were simply an afterthought taken from a left over spare rib. Perhaps He ran out of BBQ sauce?
He was thinking, I like this design but it needs more tits and the danglies get in the way so we'll just put them inside and jobs a goodun.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
I thought moon dust built up at 1mm/1000 years , thus 4.5B years would 4500m thick??
What gives?
46137
Genesis 1:27: So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Coincidence? You decide!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, he created the *earth* 6000 years ago. Before that, the moon was mysteriously orbiting around a non-existent planet!
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
That reminds me of this old creationist adage: It walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck but its not a duck because of ... magic.
...I learned from watching "Creature From the Black Lagoon." That movie has surprisingly accurate science for a Universal monster flick. Double-checking fossil age estimates against the surrounding rock. Whoa, I didn't catch that when I was eight! The leading-man "good guy" scientist is searching for additional information about the transition from water-breathers to air-breathers in the evolutionary record for tidbits that could prove useful in adapting the human body for deep-space exploration.
What if the sample were from earth... that would explain why they both have the same age...?
On what grounds? This seems like a pretty reliable observation, unless you think the zircon in the moons soil came from somewhere else.
Which is kind of a weird thing to believe.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Its not just bad science, its bad theology, because its essentially accusing god of being a liar.
Like, why would god plant fake evidence everywhere. Why is he lying. It doesnt say in the bible that gods a liar, and if he is, why assume the evidence is a lie when he could have just made some nonsense up in the bible.
Creationists are a discredit to their own faith.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
"Previous estimates ranged within 100 million years, all the way out to 200 million years after the solar system's creation, not quite 4.6 billion years ago." is misleading. It sounds like before this research we had no clue. Scientific consensus has been that it's roughly 4.5 billion years old for decades now. As a lazy check, the Wikipedia article on the moon has stated the 4.5 billion figure based on a source from NASA since September 2002, and likely wasn't in there previously because Wikipedia was pretty new at that point. This research dials in the precision and provides independent confirmation.
OK, have to step in here. The map is not the territory, and the idea of a thing is not a thing. If you are saying "God is not a thing, it is an idea" I'd agree with you. But ideas are not in any necessary one-to-one correspondence with the Universe of "things that actually exist", and ideas to the very best of our experience a) are highly complex phenomena contingent on all sorts of material stuff and do not just float around like quantum particles that permeate and surround the Universe (h/t to Terry Pratchett); b) cannot and do not "create" anything, ever. In fact there is no evidence that anything, ever, has been created. The laws of physics are all pretty much constrained by conservation principles (consistent with observation) that state that nothing is ever created, it is all just existing stuff changing form and moving around.
The second thing I'd object to is the idea that anyone at all can "reason" about God in a meaningful or useful way. The first step in such a reasoning process is to choose one's premises, or axioms, or postulates -- the basis for one's eventual "consistent" conclusions. This is precisely the same whether one is reasoning about mathematics, the Universe of stuff that actually exists, or the enormous metaphysical space of pure speculation -- reasoning about pink unicorns, trying to decide if Santa likes hot chocolate with or without a splash of peppermint Schnapps on Christmas eve, how many angels can dance on the head of a standard shirt-packing pin. The premises themselves cannot be proven -- they are PREMISES -- so all reasoning contingent upon the premises is Bullshit in the precise sense that there is (as noted) no necessary one-to-one correspondence with the pattern of consistent results on derives with the very best of intentions and the real world.
The second step in USEFUL reasoning is to seek out objective correspondences between those contingent results AND the real world. To the extent that they are discovered to exist, we strengthen our degree of belief in the conclusions, and by Bayesian reasoning, the premises that led to the conclusions in good correspondence. To the extent that they are contradicted, we at least weaken our degree of belief in the conclusions, and again by inheritance in the premises that led to the contradiction. This is a slight oversimplification as multiple premises contribute to most nontrivial conclusions and it is not necessarily clear which one(s) fail, but there is no doubt that REASON requires reduction of belief in the conclusion itself rather than amplification when there is either no evidence supporting it (but there is evidence supporting competing ideas and arguments) or if the evidence contradicts it.
And here's the rub. The very first step about any reasoning process about God has to begin with the pure assertion that God exists. This is because we have no direct and usable sensory data, no direct "experience" of God the way we have experience of toast, or things falling down when dropped. We have built powerful apparatus that extends the range and sensitivity of our senses and none of it reveals God. We have conducted careful statistical analyses of human experience contingent on things like belief and prayer and behavior and -- outside of obvious stuff that behaving "well" is more likely to make one happy than being a butt in human society -- no phenomena or statistical anomalies are observed that require supernatural explanation. One cannot predict one single thing about the world and how it behaves or outcomes based on religious belief or the asserted premise "God exists for some useful meaning of the word `exists'". To paraphrase, the rain falls on Saint and Sinner alike.
What we CAN do is examine the consequences of BELIEF ITSELF. Believing in something has an enormous impact on human existence. In a sense, our society (or societies!) are defined by their beliefs, their memetic structure, their history, their evolution -- including religious beliefs. Religious beliefs make an enormous set of
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
This was funny the first 6000 times I read it. Wearing thin now.
Dark Reflection
I'm just trying to help both of you with your stupidity, as this argument is formally, provably, fallacious and stupid.
In the garden of Eden lay Adam,
Complacently stroking his madam
And loud was his mirth
For on all of the earth
There were only two balls and he had 'em
If you make a cake with 4.5 billion candles, and each candle was 1 lumen; it would give off 4.5 Gigalumens.
If the full moon lights the earth with 0.1 lux (I have found several values, but this one will do) then I calculate the moon reflects the equivalent of 50 Gigalumens. This is not quite your classical lumen, which gives off light in all directions, but that's only a factor of 2.
So the cake would be 9% as bright as the full moon.
No no, please don't end that with an ellipsis. Finish your thought there. What is the next thing he should say? Maybe:
Well, guys, we really don't know this. Be a little more humble. We should stop having a scientific debate about it. - said a scientist that should be fired
Well, guys, we really don't know this. Be a little more humble. We should just give up trying to figure it out. - said a scientist that should be fired
Well, guys, we really don't know this. Be a little more humble. We should stop taking data and go with our last answer. - said a scientist that should be fired
Well, guys, we really don't know this. Be a little more humble. We should listen to what our religious leaders say. - said a scientist that should be fired
Well, guys, we really don't know this. Be a little more humble. We're incapable of knowing this at all. - said a scientist that should be fired
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Difference in rational moral objection between God culling bipeds for the improvement in the species, and evolution culling bipeds for the improvement of the species: None
>
Huge difference... one involves alleged intention AND a (logically inconsistent) concept of Being that possess Omni attributes. The other just is without intention nor forethought nor Omnipotence. Not even in the same league.
And, incidentally, you have no basis from your worldview to treat "human" bipeds as in any way morally distinct from any other organism, which, of course, being the hypocrite you are, accept as utterly natural and necessary in every other case.
Nice insult slinging and calling someone else out for hypocrisy when it appears that you possess this quality in excess.
Okay, so we're moving on to the blatantly, directly false. Stalin and Mao, in a couple of decades of the last century, killed more people, as an implementation of an -explicitly- atheistic position of government, that religion has -over all of time-, even allowing -conjectural- notions that the motivation was religion rather than other factors of territorial or economic conquest for the benefit of -political- motivations, -and also in contradiction to the directives of the religion itself-. That is, well, do I do with "absurd characterization" or "direct knowing lie"? I'll leave that up to you.
Wow one long run on sentence... but never the less I would categorize despotic communism as a religion and Stalin and Mao as their replacement gods. Same phenomena. Uncritical irrational worship.
Do you work for free? Why would you advocate for others to work for free?
Scientist don't make tons of money, so I am not sure what you are trying to say.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Ha ha ha! Very TRUE indeed! You take the genome and supress some body substance (the rib), then you get a corporal difference and it is NEARLY the same genetic code! Simple and efficient, same code base, only need the substance(s) supression code to be added, the rest is polymorphism (sic!) and short-circuited logic to extend here, implode there, grow that there, etc.
Evolution doesn't "cull", and most certainly not based on the whim of a childish prude.
Evolution only happens. It has no agenda.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's a bit hard, just 'cause he didn't want to work through the weekend.
But I guess you're right, it's not like he sat down the next Monday and fixed his crap.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I guess it loses a bit in translation...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.