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."

Re: was-it-on-a-monday dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it was. Even then, everything crashed on Mondays.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And then came Patch Tuesday...

Re:

[dougisfunny]

It has had a pretty good uptime since then.

Re:

[Chris Burke]

It has had a pretty good uptime since then.

Bah, that's easy when the majority of your system is just running their idle loops! Out of the whole dang system only one core has any active clients, and it's been starting to look a little flakey lately as the client process is gobbling up all the resources.

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.

So many gifts..!

[Empiric]

...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.

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:So many gifts..!

[powerlinekid]

Honestly I think the problem is in the way it was expressed. The margin of error looks better if they had stated:
"...to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2 million years"
or
"...to 4,568,000,000 years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years"

Its easier to quickly compare the numbers against each other that way.

Re:

[RachaelB]

Very useful, thank you.

I hadn't considered myself inumerate, but even I was bamboozled by the big numbers. Thanks for the clarification.

Rachael

Re:

[gnuman99]

Furthermore, someone that didn't pass his/her science class wrote the article.

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

So, measure the age of the solar system to 1 million years, but then state the error to few orders of magnitude more precise! 2.08 million years. The real error was either 2 million years or some percentage of the original measurement. The real error must not be more accurate than the measurement, so,

4568 +- 2 million years, or
4568.0 +- 2

Re:

[gnuman99]

Urgh! Just read the abstract and it is as sloppy as the the article!

    +0.91 to 1.17 Myr at 4568 Myr ago

Sad. So, they either exaggerated their accuracy of their error measurement or someone removed the stuff after decimal for 4568. As stated, the relative errors are meaningless since the accuracy of the real value is *not* stated.

Re:

[rucs_hack]

Being charitable, they may have just donkeyed the abstract, and the article might be written by someone who made notes based on the abstract when they didn't change when they read the paper.

You don't usually get to be a post-doc without having some experience in writing papers, and the peer reviewers must have thought it was ok. Abstracts are a bugger to write, and so very easy to screw up, especially if a word limit is strictly enforced, which is usually the case in my experience.

I've read stuff that was i

Re:

[coolGuyZak]

I thought significant figures [wikipedia.org] were what mattered in science, not orders of magnitude. (In which case, compare 2.080 million years to 4568 million years).

Re:

[4D6963]

its really about 4 parts in 10000

Is it me or did everyone mistake a period of time for an error margin? I seemed to understand that what it means is that 4,568 million years ago, microscopic interstellar dust started to coalesce into mountain-sized chunks of rock, and this during 2,080,000 years, and then these mountain-sized masses quickly grew into about 20 Mars-sized planets, and so on..

That's really what what I'm reading seems to say, but then it implies that I must be right and anyone else is wrong.

Re:

[Torvaun]

Dark matter? ::Waits for all the people who haven't read His Dark Materials to mod him down.::

Re:

[Empiric]

I wasn't suggesting it wasn't "acceptable". But if we're calling it a "date of birth", mmm... July is party-time.

Profound...(All we are is dust in the wind)

[nebaz]

To think that the span of a human life is at best about 1/250 millionth of that cycle. Light from distant stars does eventually get here, it just happens on timescales that are beyond imagination.
Such a shame that we occupy such a small blink in the process, and can't witness cosmic events on any larger a level.

Re:Profound...(All we are is dust in the wind)

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, you have it backwards. It is not a shame that our lives are short. I find it inspiring that we have come so far despite this shortness, and we have built instruments that let us actually see all those cosmic events, and even put them in perspective ;)

Re:

[spleen_blender]

Imagine what we may be capable of, what is just over the event horizon.

Harumph, I mean science is serious business that can have no spiritual value whatsoever.

Re:

[CheshireCatCO]

We might argue that we've come this far *because* our lives are short. If we lived a long, long time, I think we'd stagnate, set in our ways. New ideas would be almost always rejected or suppressed. (There's an old half-true joke that new theories aren't accepted, the resistance just dies -- and not figuratively.)

Our lifespans mean that there's always a fresh crop of people with new ideas and wanting to find better ways to do things ready to replace us and it also makes sure we feel some healthy pressure

Re:

[rucs_hack]

If we lived a long, long time, I think we'd stagnate, set in our ways

To be precise, we'd all end up with arthritis, well almost all of us. There has never been a way for evolution to remove that particuler flaw in our genes, because firstly, humans didn't live that long when our species first appeared, and secondly, in virtually all cases it occurs after child rearing age, making it irrellevent to survival, and thus not a factor in natural selection.

Since there is no cure for arthritis at this time, I'll ta

Re:

[Chuck Chunder]

Such a shame that we occupy such a small blink in the process, and can't witness cosmic events on any larger a level

I dunno, the first few years sound pretty boring.

Re:

[Oligonicella]

Beyond yours, perhaps. You want to witness the expansion of a dust cloud why?

small lives, big is vulnerable

[wikinerd]

Such a shame that we occupy such a small blink in the process

In some sense the smaller the are the most likely we are to survive and the less resources we are going to need to maintain ourselves. So maybe small size is a virtue (and ants or small microorganisms have more evolutionary potential to survive from a supernova or asteroid, maybe).

Re:

[Fractal Dice]

"Such a shame that we occupy such a small blink in the process, and can't witness cosmic events on any larger a level."

Patience grasshopper.

Wait...fur?! Oh blast, what have you mortals gone and evolved yourselves into now?

Re:

[shokk]

You mean to say it's a good thing we only occupy such a blink. God help the universe once we spread. What other lifeforms will we make endangered or extinct?

Re:

[huckamania]

I don't know if it is a good thing or a bad thing or what the op means, but I don't think the universe will need any help if we ever spread. We've made and continue to make mistakes when it comes to the environment, but we're the only lifeform that can recognize mistakes and try to amend for them. It should also be mentioned that there are plenty of animals that have benefited from the Human Race and not just pets.

We are both a part of nature and responsible for nature. No other lifeform on this planet

Re:

[Mr. Underbridge]

To think that the span of a human life is at best about 1/250 millionth of that cycle.

On nth other hand, consider that by living well into old age, one can have lived through almost 2% of recorded human history. That's a lot, really. So if you chose correctly, it would only take about 50 people to have lived at the time that everything happened.

Just shows in how short a time humans have become what we are.

4,568 million years divided by 7 days

[JustCallMeRich]

Can we break those intermediate steps into seven phases or so and declare each of those a "day", get a copy to the Pope, and settle this whole religion versus science mess now? Or at least build some bridges for the Bible folks and the Science folks to agree to something that makes a little more sense?

Re:

[SpaceLifeForm]

I doubt the Pope would like the news. It was a Wednesday.

Re:

[GrpA]

It depends on the timescale actually... If you assume God has a galactic presence, then the days are each about 210 million years (one trip around the Milky Way), so assuming those sort of timescales, we're about into the 22nd day (21.7 days).

Of course, I'm assuming God uses non-union labour, or we'd still have a solar system that was full of rubble and dust...

Ummm, then again...

GrpA

Re:4,568 million years divided by 7 days

[Rude Turnip]

Psst...it's all the offshoots (I'm looking at you, Baptists) that are causing problems. The Catholic church is rather keen on astronomy an evolution nowadays. Not so much on the gays and condoms, but it's a start.

Re:4,568 million years divided by 7 days

[Anonymous Coward]

One man says "it is right to protect the children." The other says "it is right to kill three a day." We should clearly compromise - no more then one child a day, two on weekends!

But seriously. No, we can't. We don't compromise between a fiction and hard fact just because lots of people happen to believe the fiction.

Re:

[Empiric]

Yeah, especially the formally-invalid fiction of a false dichotomy.

So, I'll call it "allegory" and...

(waits 200 years)

I win.

No compromises, just facts, remember.

Re:

[Colin Smith]

Or at least build some bridges for the Bible folks and the Science folks to agree to something that makes a little more sense?

WTF?

Bible thumpers: Big imaginary fairy created the world 4,000 years ago.
Science folk: You're insane, it's all in your head, and I have proof.

You think those two views can be reconciled?

What I find bizarre is that religion is not considered a form of mental illness in the US. The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing.

MAD is very scary.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing.

It's supposed to be.

The MAD doctrine deters nuclear war by threatening a retaliation that would likely bring down civilization and possibly end the human race and much of life on Earth.

For it to work, US presidents have to put on a show, looking crazy enough that they'd actually do it - but sane enough that the won't shoot first and can be reasoned with on issues that otherwise would have been "solved" by the outcome of a war. (IMHO it's likely the term "Mutually Assured Destruction" was chosen at least partly for the acronym, to help put on this show. Psych warfare was pretty well developed by the start of the Cold War.)

MAD is pretty terrifying. But it reversed the ongoing escalation of wars right after the bombs were proven to work under battle conditions (and two fried cities were substituted for the years of war that had been expected to be necessary to end the Japan part of WWII). It's been over half a century and no nukes have been used in war since those two.

Re:

[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 e [jstor.org]

Re:

[RuBLed]

What I find bizarre is that religion is not considered a form of mental illness in the US. The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing.

It could very well be that religion is part of human nature (in one way or another) and not a mental illness as you percieve. Otherwise we would not have most of our written/recorded history full of it.

Re:

[Belial6]

I don't think it's the "The best guess I can make with the information I have is that the bright object in the sky is a fiery chariot" when there was very little information about the make up of the sun, that is the problem. It's the, "even though all evidence points to dinosaurs having existed on earth, I'm going to assume that it is a giant hoax, the likes of which has never before been seen on the planet earth", that makes someone sound crazy.

FSM

[wikinerd]

Big imaginary fairy created the world 4,000 years ago.

Come on, we all know everything was created by a flying spaghetti monster [venganza.org], not a freaking fairy!

Re:

[4D6963]

What I find bizarre is that religion is not considered a form of mental illness in the US.

Yeah, me too. I wish anyone who thinks or acts differently from me in a way I disapprove would be considered mentally ill, just like the homosexuals back in the day [wikipedia.org].

Tolerance? What the fuck is that?! I brainwash a Jesus-freak and go get a six-pack. On an unrelated note, why do some many people in this country don't like atheists like me? I don't get it..

Re:4,568 million years divided by 7 days

[ajs318]

The problem is not that people "think or act differently from me in a way I disapprove". The problem is that people "think or act differently from me" in a way that can be actually harmful to me.

Of course they can be reconciled

[Chuck Chunder]

There are plenty of examples of mainstream religious doctrine changing to accommodate scientific discovery. It doesn't happen fast but it is more or less inevitable.

Unfortunately it isn't all progress because there are people making up new religious bullshit all the time.

Re:

[turing_m]

"The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing."

Do you really think that Bush (or Clinton, for that matter, or any president) actually believes in God (as opposed to just saying so), particularly a God as specified in the Bible?

Re:

[Empiric]

Nice that Beethoven finished that Ninth before they grabbed him.

Duke Nukem Forever

[owlman17]

Its coming out [slashdot.org] I tell ya! Better believe it!

It won't work

[Opportunist]

I know what you try to do.

1. Announce DNF time and again.
2. ???
3. Prophet.

Re:

[Colin Smith]

Could I get some clarification?

I was trolling wildly. Quite successfully I might add.

Religion is for the intellectually challenged, believers deserve to be pitied as the deluded fools they are, or despised when they attempt to foist their bizarre views on the rest of us, not locked up as a danger to society.

 

Re:

[Opportunist]

Hey, could we declare the current 600something million years a Sunday? Should enable me to finally sleep in sensibly.

Re:

[wizardforce]

they've [fundamentalists] already decided it was 7 literal days and nothing will convince them otherwise. The belief in biblical "days" being symolic of being "eras" of several hundred million year spans doesn't fit in with their literal reading of their holy books. Once that literal context disappears the entire framework of their belief system collapses.

Re:

[Stephen Samuel]

The Catholic church has already apologized to Galileo [wikipedia.org] ('bout 400 years too late) and declared that Darwinism doesn't clash with Genesis [city-data.com] (which should be looked at as more of a parable than written history).

There are, however other religious nuts who insist on ignoring both science and the pope.

Can we break those intermediate steps into seven phases or so and declare each of those a "day", get a copy to the Pope, and ....?

Re:

[khallow]

Wouldn't work. As I see it, the whole point of having a belief like that is so that you disagree with "Science" and other commonly held beliefs of society. The myth is that you are right and the society is blind in some way to this truth.Ultimately, the point is to disagree. What you disagree about isn't so important.

Yeah, but what day?

[FauxReal]

I need to know the calendar date so I can convince my boss it's a holiday. In fact, why don't we make it an international paid holiday?

Why does the universe appear empty?

[Dr_Banzai]

Have you ever wondered why we haven't encountered intelligent life forms other than ourselves? An advanced race with regular slower-than-light starships would be able to colonize an entire galaxy within a few million years (barely an instant on a geological timescale). One possible explanation for our apparent solitude in the universe is that the number of planets with the proper conditions for developing life is vanishingly small. (Read about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox [wikipedia.org] for other possibilities)

For example Earth's moon creates tides (and tide pools) and stabilizes the earth's seasons and axial tilt. According to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis [wikipedia.org] the Moon was created as a result of a chance collision between the proto-earth and a Mars-sized object. Without the presence of the Moon the conditions might have been too harsh to support life.

As we learn more about how the solar system formed we will be better able to predict which stars might have life-bearing planets, so we can begin our own colonization of the galaxy (assuming humans can survive long enough to overcome war, disease and ecological destruction).

Re:

[QuantumG]

The the vast majority of our galaxy (let alone the rest of the universe) our planet appears empty.

Re:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Have you ever wondered why we haven't encountered intelligent life forms other than ourselves? An advanced race with regular slower-than-light starships would be able to colonize an entire galaxy within a few million years (barely an instant on a geological timescale).

My preferred answer to the Fermi paradox is a corollary of that:

Somebody had to be first. Looks like it's us.

(For this galaxy at least.)

Re:

[ZeroPly]

Let's examine the first sentence of your post in detail:

Have you ever wondered why we haven't

encountered

You are assuming you would recognize another "intelligent" being if you saw one. More further down.

intelligent

What do you mean by intelligent? Would developing an elaborate system of tunneling through rock be considered that? Please - no "I understand undergrad math" tangents - just because you understand prime numbers doesn't necessarily mean you're going to transmit them via radio.

life forms

what do you mean by life? Are crystalline structures alive? Do you believe i

Re:

[Urkki]

Colonization is not even a concept understood or appreciated by YOUR whole planet, not to mention a totally alien one. Us Xenians like to stay close to home. Why would we want to go to a marginally hospitable planet?

You are propagating a false stereotype of us Xenians. There are some of us who will colonize the galaxy! You evolutionarily doomed rejects will be left behind, or annihilated if you try to stop us! We'll have to rule the galaxy before the still puny humans can do it, or they will surely make us go the way of the dodo.

Re:

[Opportunist]

If that civilisation is anything like ours (and I see no good reason why it should not be), there will be no global endeavour like generation seed ships if there is no compelling need. Such things are VERY tough on the resources of a planet, and, well, I mean, look around, we currently don't even want to "waste" the resources necessary to keep our planet in halfway decent shape. Nothing like that would be done unless there is no other option than to leave the planet.

Now, there are only two reasons why somet

Re:

[Opportunist]

Again, the question is necessity. Like I said, in our civilisation, necessity is the engine that creates and promotes changes and developments, and makes them possible altogether. It's maybe not the best reason to do anything, but that's simply how we work. There is of course no need to develop such a seed ship, so there is none. We'd first of all have to have a reason to build one. And given that I do believe Darwin's theory of the species, I dare say that any kind of evolutionary development would have to

creationism

[bcrowell]

It's been amusing over the past 10 years to see young-earth creationists squirm about the fact that cosmology has become a high-precision science, with the age of the universe going from having 50% error bars to 1.5% error bars. Now these folks have apparently measured the age of the solar system to within .05%. For a long time, young-earth creationists (YECs) were trying to say that the science was all very uncertain, so you couldn't trust the science. Hmm...now it appears that Archbishop Ussher's date for

Re:

[totally bogus dude]

As a California taxpayer, is it too unreasonable of me to expect research funded by my tax money to be available freely?

What are you, some kind of communist?

Seriously though, I find it fascinating that they can be so sure the age of the solar system is within such a small (relatively speaking) margin of error. But I'm still a bit sceptical that at some point the theories they've based this on will be disproven. OTOH, IANAA and have no idea how they came up with this age, but even if it seems sound now every so often we discover we didn't actually know something we were sure we knew.

Re:

[Ramze]

I've heard this "theory" presented time and again in various ways... such as the Dinosaurs were already created fossilized... and craters from impacts millions of years ago were just made that way -- to look like impacts. It's a ridiculous argument that a creator would not only create everything at once, but make it appear WITH A HISTORY to its creation. Why create a fossilized dead animal that only appeared to have existed, left fossilized footprints, fossilized stomach contents from food it never actua

Genesis 2:2

[4D6963]

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

And on the seven hundred fifty-nine million seven hundred three thousand seven hundred seventy-third day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seven hundred fifty-nine million seven hundred three thousand seven hundred seventy-third day from all his work which he had made.

shit

[ucblockhead]

It's a fucking *long* time until Sunday then.

Re:

[Anarchitect_in_oz]

Nar God is having sunday off as we speak, is about 4000 years in to his/her sunday apparently.

So s/he has about 761 million years of sunday left.

oh Wait then it's monday agian!!!!!!

You weren't going to church anyway

[Nimey]

you commie.

OK, So What's Its Sign?

[Doc Ruby]

It's written in the stars...

Maybe "slippery when wet"?

Proof of Birthdate Required

[DavidD_CA]

This is good news! The Solar System has been bummed out lately 'cause it couldn't prove it's birthday to anyone. All of the other solar systems could get into the cool clubs, but not ours.

Now it's PARTY TIME and the drinks are on Sol!

well if you know the exact date

[meeya]

if you know the exact date' we can have a public holiday!

± 2,080,000 years?

[Pig Hogger]

± 2,080,000 years? I thought they'd say something like "March 12, 4,568,422,12 BC"...

20-into-9

[Tablizer]

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.

Another slashdot article about a month ago suggested that the type of collisions needed to create our moon were relatively rare, based on dust analysis of new systems. However, 20 Mars-sized proto-planets seems like it would create pretty good chances for moon-creating collisions. (Although gas

And the solar system says...

[turing_m]

"Get off my lawn!"

01-01-1980

[qcs-rf.com]

You mean the universe didn't start on 01-01-1980?

Re:

[ianezz]

You mean the universe didn't start on 01-01-1980?

No.

$ perl -MPOSIX -e 'print ctime(0)'
Thu Jan 1 01:00:00 1970
$

Odd Unit of time.. thousands of millions of years?

[tyrione]

Whatever happened to just using billions of years? If they are attempting to keep the years and tolerance in equivalent units they could have just said, 4.568 billion years within a range [tolerance] of 0.00208 billion years and let people do the math.

It's a Shame They Can't Give Us an Exact Date :-)

[Taliesan999]

It's a shame they can't give us an exact date. That would be one hell of a birthday cake :-)

Literalist Christian interpretation...

[argStyopa]

....isn't that far off then?

4568 million years vs. somewhere around 6000 yrs. That's only 6 orders of magnitude, I mean, really they're just ZEROES.

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:

[glwtta]

Read it again, it's 0.045%

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:Margin of Error - Give him a break!

[Al_Lapalme]

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's French-Canadian. For us, the comma is the decimal separator, so 4,568 million actually looks like "4.568" million -- whereas it actually is "4.568" billion.

Of course, the next sentence shows 2,080,000 and that just completely ruins this ...

Nevermind.

Re:

[QuantumG]

Wow, seems you can't use a "parent" link.

The guy who I was replying to has been modded into the ground.

Re:

[Empiric]

...I'm drunk? ;)

Or, we have reached a confluence of realities where "threaded" and "flat" become one...

Probably the first.

Re:

[QuantumG]

If you're drunk I sure hope you're coding. That's the only way to go. Check in some 1000+ line changes and then come in tomorrow and have people ask you why you did what you did and have no idea. Awesome.

Give him a BREAK!

[gardyloo]

Yeesh, you people are so negative! The hint is right there in his username!

Re:

[Copid]

Nothing to see here. It is not like the radiometric dating methods are completely speculative and saddled with risky assumptions at all. These dates are solid! 4Ma + or - 2Ma... or maybe + or - 4Ma or 40 trillion years, it is not like we are guessing at all.

Hmmm... I would be very interested in knowing your explanation for the nearly perfect straight line found in the first graph here [talkorigins.org]. If what you say is true, well... I wouldn't expect anything resembling a straight line. In fact, I found that graph to

Re:

[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 bo

Re:

[Copid]

Of course it is always good to begin on an insufferably arrogant note.

I apologize. I shouldn't have assumed that you would just be parroting the vague and largely misinformed critiques of anti-evolution fringe cases from the popular press. Now that you've done so, though, I'm going to have to retract that apology.

In it, he outlines the precariousness of the logic underlying radiometric dating, arguing to my satisfaction that the results emitted by such methods don't really mean anything at all, and can

Re:

[gardyloo]

I'd never heard of Richard Milton, so went to look at his website (one of four, actually; the other three are about how to do your own PR, increase google hits, etc.). It seems to be down (and not archived by the Wayback Machine since mid-2007), but the latest incarnation may be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20061205072241/www.alternativescience.com/ [archive.org] .

It's interesting, and he makes some good points, but apparently he's not done much of his research so very well (see esp. the s

Re:

[Copid]

The book is about various aspects relating to the theory of evolution by natural selection through random mutations, but the point of it is not to argue as an apologist towards a religion or towards a bible. Milton is himself irreligious and not a member of any religion.

I appear to be mistaken. Milton just seems to be fond of fringe science. He's a rarity, but they do exist. Why, I'm not sure.

And yet reportedly Milton's summary of Dawkins' review is that it is a hysterical atheistic screed denouncing

Re:

[rucs_hack]

That raises my spider sense

wuh?

my degrees are in engineering (computer) and economics

For that you got Spider Sense? You barstard, all I got was a boring printed degreee certificate and a course transcript.

I'll bet you had an overdraft though, I didn't, neh neh [rasberry blowing sounds..].

having completed my mission to prove that all scientists are mature adults who only ever act sensibly, I depart. :-)

Re:

[blueg3]

"This is the kind of unhelpful response that doesn't win any converts to your way of thinking."

Scientists are frequently arrogant, perhaps because the validity of scientific findings are independent of whether or not you or anyone else agrees with them. Simply put, there's no real need for winning converts -- nor is it accurate to write it off as "a way of thinking".

Re:

[Opportunist]

So god made the earth about the time civilization was making beer

Is it me or does this sound like there's more than a coincidence? I mean, maybe God came into existance when some guys got wasted and one of the sentences babbled was "LOL, dare ya!"

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.

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[Peaker]

Are there any interesting scientific facts that you can deduce from the bible? Or is it all just pseudo-moral stuff and metaphorical mumbo jumbo that cannot be rightfully interpreted in any meaningful way?

Does seem that the writers made it just vague enough that people will fail to directly contradict it with newly discovered truths, but seemingly close enough to saying something that people do try to read meanings into it.

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[Opportunist]

It's not necessarily meant to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The problem is more that with the changes since its conception, people forgot what the various idioms and parables mean. Not to mention that the original text was in Hebrew (OT) or Aramaic (NT), which was translated to Greek, then this translation was used to convert it to Latin, and this finally to English. COULD it be that SOME parts MIGHT have been translated wrongly? Especially since the people who did those translations did the

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[StoatBringer]

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.

I believe it is inferred from certain passages, for example when Satan takes Jesus up to the top of a mountain to tempt him, and shows him the whole world laid out below. On a spherical world, you can't see everything from the top of a mountain but you can if it's fl

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[Opportunist]

Bad example. You take the Devil and Jesus together and then you go and say they couldn't do something. According to the book, either of them could already do what they please, now imagine them together.

And if you take away decimal calculations, which were by no means invented in those times, then yes, Pi=3.

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[ChromeAeonium]

I'm curious, where does it say that?