Wednesday, October 20, 2010

How much longer can these two last in politics?

Here's a poster I made.  You like?


These bible-thumpers both believe the Earth is around 6,000 years old.   Really??   
Apparently dinosaurs, evolution and astronomy are conspiracies?? 

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The current consensus among scientists is that the Earth (and our solar system) is approximately 4.5 billion years old.   (The universe is approximately 13.5 billion years old.)  One of the main ways to come to this conclusion is carbon dating.   Another useful way of measuring the age is using the constant variable of light speed.   Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.   The term light-year comes from the distance light travels in one Earth calendar year.  For example, our solar system is one star system among billions in the Milky Way galaxy.  So, if you had a space shuttle that could travel the speed of light, 
it would take over 4 years to get to the star system nearest to our sun (The Centauri star system).   Now, if you wanted to travel from one end of our Milky Way to the other--that's 100,000 light years.   Galaxy to galaxy is millions of light years.  (By the way, there are billions of galaxies.)   
The light from distant galaxies have traveled billions of years to reach us, so therefore the universe has been around for billions of years.
Look forward to more astronomical facts in a future blog.

So, should we believe what ancient people wrote down, 
who didn't have any understanding of science or the universe,
 or should we believe what current scientific discoveries have shown us?

1 comment:

  1. Carbon dating is only accurately good to about 12,000 years. To get to the age of the earth you will have to use one of the other forms of radioactive dating such as potassium-argon.

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