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Pardon my ignorance, but the Earth is 1/3 the age of the Universe?
by keyle 7y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but the Earth is 1/3 the age of the Universe?
- tmoravec 7y agoAs far as our current understanding goes, yes. But it looked very different in the first billion years.
- marcosdumay 7y agoAbout that. The first stars appeared very early, and lasted for a very short time, so this may be a huge timespan.
- rjurney 7y agoThey would have produced metals pretty quickly given that most of them would be massive and emit stellar wind and/or supernova?
- marcosdumay 7y agoThat's what I understand, but I'm not an astronomer.
- saalweachter 7y agoYes, but it is projected to last for < ~0.1% of the overall lifespan.
- flukus 7y agoYep, time is the universes only dimension the earth is not a tiny and insignificant blip on, so far anyway.
- keyle 7y agoYeah this exactly. Today my perspective of the universe changed a little.
- mongol 7y agoWhat did you think it's age was?
- flukus 7y agoI can't answer for them, but it's completely believable they knew the age of the earth and the age of the universe in the abstract sense and never really connected both ludicrously large numbers together. That's why we have tools like Sagan's squeezing it into a year calendar just so humans can understand it in relatable terms.
- drran 7y agoOf course, not. Universe is infinite in size, time, and scale. The farthest object we can see in _visible_ light is at least 32bly away, so it is at least 32by old, or just 13.4by old by mainstream theory called «Big Bang».
- lelima 7y agoYou're getting down voted for a fair assumption, and no explanation. We can see more distance than the age of the universe Because Expansion of the universe Here is a complete explanation https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-is-the-universe-bigger-than-its-age-7a95cd59c605 https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-is-the-universe-bi...
- drran 7y agoThis explanation has lot of weakness. Some scientists disagree with it. For example, if we heat up a metallic sphere, then it will expand in all directions. If we project this expansion backward, then we will see that metallic sphere was created just few hours ago. Do you agree with that? Moreover, why I should accept that Universe is expanded in single whoooping event? IMHO, constant vibration (noise) of gravitation field explains same effect without need for this single event. Vacuum just contracts and expands by tiny bit all the time, because something happens in Universe all the time, so light ages as it travels.
- dnadler 7y agoI won't pick out all of your arguments, but there is an abundance of evidence for the long-term expansion of the universe as measured by redshifted cosmological objects at numerous distances. Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell does a nice job of introducing many of these concepts for those interested.
- drran 7y agoStephen Hawking's book was published in 2001. Please, look at data from 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law#Measured_values_of_the_Hubble_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law#Measured_values...
- bregma 7y agoYes. The universe is approximately 9000 years old.