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."

Margin of Error

[richdun]

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.

Re:Margin of Error

[CensorshipDonkey]

-- to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years. And i was born 22 years ago, within a range of 10 years Pretty big error (almost 50%)

Incorrect. 2 million years is less than 0.05% of 4.5 billion years. Pretty damn precise, relatively speaking. Read the units on the text you cited.

Re:Margin of Error

[QuantumG]

Do you not know what "million" means or can you just not read?

4,568,000,000 years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years.

That's an error margin of about 0.046%.

Re:So many gifts..!

[xPsi]

...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.

At a glance it might seem like a crude measurement, but its really about 4 parts in 10000, which is really quite good. This would be like knowing your birthday to within 4 hours during the year (better than I know my own birthday off the top of my head, to be honest).

Re:According to to Huckabee, 5000 BC.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny - where in the Word is there mention of a flat earth? It actually talks a lot about stars and worlds. About our sins tossed from God as far as East is from West (hint - eternally distant from God). There's actually nothing in there that refutes evolving critters, and nothing in there that stipulates six 24 hour days for creation with the seventh for rest, and certainly nothing in there that says that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Ironically, the Scriptures even talks against those who crunch numbers and bicker over words. The conflict is not from God or from the Scriptures - it's from preconceived and erroneous notions of people who claim to align themselves with God and the Scriptures and from those who follow cultural notions rather than the essence of the Word. These same people who charged Galileo for heresy were the true heretics against the Scriptures. Creation is a process. When you plant a seed, you have created a tree. But it achieves the status of tree over time. Ditto with everything... Big Bang - Light Be!

Re:Move Right Along

[GaryPatterson]

You need to understand that radiocarbon dating [wikipedia.org] and isochron dating [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:According to to Huckabee, 5000 BC.

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Odd Unit of time.. thousands of millions of yea

[cbrichar]

Because a billion means different things [reference.com] depending on where you live.

Re:MAD is very scary.

[UnrefinedLayman]

two fried cities were substituted for the years of war that had been expected to be necessary to end the Japan part of WWII

Except that the myth of a protracted war with Japan if Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn't been bombed is only a myth.

• "During the days before that fateful August 6, 1945 [bustingbinaries.com], General Douglas MacArthur learned that Japan had asked Russia to negotiate a surrender. "We expected acceptance of the Japanese surrender daily," one of his staff members recalled."
• "The bomb had not been necessary either to end the war quickly or to avoid an invasion of the Japanese home islands [jstor.org]; morever, 'Truman and his advisers knew it.'"
• "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender [doug-long.com] because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." (as stated by Dwight Eisenhower)
• "From April to August 1945 the Japanese made a number of official attempts to secure a negotiated peace settlement and an end to the war. [lewrockwell.com]"

...and on and on and on.