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Is it strange that it’s a round human number like one billion? Why not 883,259,631 years?
by mrfusion 9y ago
Is it strange that it’s a round human number like one billion? Why not 883,259,631 years?
- ralusek 9y agoTo be clear it's not a human number, because a year is not arbitrary, like an hour or a minute. It is still weird that it would be a clean decimal (arbitrary) figure based off of our solar system's year.
- samstave 9y agoThe universe breathes at a set rate
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoWell a year is still a human-centric number, because it is related to the planet humans live on. However, it is not weird and most likely it means nothing but a simple coincidence. When you look at the number of time units that it could be a power of n multiple of, then such a coincidence becomes less surprising.
- 8note 9y agothe article say "about one billion years" humans probably rounded it to one billion so they can talk about it more easily
- ben509 9y agoBenford's law shows that leading digits of measured values are not evenly distributed, and tend to be smaller.
- Retra 9y agoHow is that relevant? A bias in a distribution does nothing to prohibit the existence of outliers.
- JoBrad 9y agoFTA > "It’s not Swiss watch precision," said Gerhardt Meurer, an astronomer from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), in a press release. "But regardless of whether a galaxy is very big or very small, if you could sit on the extreme edge of its disk as it spins, it would take you about a billion years to go all the way round."