History of the future

Is happening now.

We have created life.

Dark Side of the Ocean

Bill Gurfein’s wonderful sync of Dark Side of the Moon and Planet Earth: Ocean Deep is finally up on the tubes.

To the 6,000-years set:

Light travels 299,792,458 meters in one second, making one light-second equal to the distance of 299,792,458 meters. Multiply that by the number of seconds in a year and you get a light-year.

The scale on the above map is 10,000 light years. If the universe were 6,000 years old, nothing outside a sphere of a 6,000 ly radius–i.e., most of our galaxy and any of the 170 billion+ galaxies that have been observed–would not be visible. One of these galaxies is Andromeda, which is visible with the naked eye. If the universe were 6,000 years old, we would not be able to see the Andromeda Galaxy. This is because the light from Andromeda, having taken only 2,500,000 years to get here, is still too far away to be visible in a universe created only 6,000 years ago. The universe described in Genesis should have a cosmic horizon at 6,000 light years–a point beyond which we cannot see, because we are looking back in time to a point before time and the Universe as we know it existed. The real universe has a cosmic horizon, and it is about 13.7 billion light years away. Not six thousand. Thirteen point seven billion.

In other words, one can disprove young Earth creationism just by looking at the sky at night.

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, give or take. Anyone who tells you otherwise believes something that is not true. Not only that, they believe something much less magnificent than the truth. Watch the video below, and have a religious experience.

Scientists still surprised by life’s abundance

Shrimp unexpectedly discovered below Antarctic ice. If we keep being so surprised by complex life living in trifling places like Antarctica, how are we going to react when that robot burrows into the oceans of Europa twenty years down the line?