How old is the universe creationism

It is also important to understand that being able to determine the life-span of a star does not mean that we can look at a star and tell how old it is. We know of course that a blue star must be relatively young since it doesn't live very long. A red main-sequence star, on the other hand, can be practically any age. We are now ready to consider the clusters. If they were created only about 10, years ago we would expect all the main-sequence types to be represented since even the short-lived ones live longer than 10, years.

Some clusters do in fact have the short-lived stars well represented, indicating that they are less than a few million years old and conceivably only 10, years. In the case of most clusters, however, the shorter-lived stars above some point on the main sequence are missing, while the longer-lived ones below are present. The location of this point is different for different clusters. All the clusters have the longest-lived stars represented and never do we find a cluster which has the large blue, shortlived main-sequence stars but not the small red, long-lived ones.

Again we are stuck with two alternatives. The first is that. The second is, of course, again the Gosse Hypothesis; by never leaving out the long-lived stars, but frequently omitting the short-lived ones, our creator has again deceived astronomers into concluding that the universe has existed for several billion years!

An old argument against the creationist notion that the universe is only 10, years old is the following. Given such a short time, how is it that the light from stars and galaxies, millions of light-years distant, has been able to reach us?

At one time, creationists were less concerned with appearing as bona fide scientists, and their "simple" explanation was that the creator placed the photons in positions already well on their paths from the sources toward the earth, thus giving the universe the appearance of being much older than it actually is.

A straight-forward and rather refreshing admission of adherence to the Gosse Hypothesis! Today, creationists have a seemingly much more sophisticated way of dealing with this problem.

As it happens, creationists do in general strongly disapprove of relativity. A basic tenet of relativity is that the speed of light is a relativistic invariant; i. The celebrated Michelson-Morley experiment actually does not exclude the possibility of light being dependent on the movement of the source, and the theory that it is had quite a few adherents for a while. However, on the assumption that this theory was correct, it was expected that certain binary stars would show double images, which in fact they do not.

As is almost always possible, Moon and Spencer managed to come up with an "explanation" which would get around this difficulty. They proposed that while material objects exist in Euclidian flat space, light travels in Riemannian curved space! It is somewhat ironic that Riemannian space with a radius of curvature of billions of light-years, in which everything exists and travels, is used in General Relativity.

Perhaps the most sidesplitting assumption in the theory of Moon and Spencer is the size of their radius: 5 light-years. Why 5 light-years? Because this is large enough so that the curvature can not be detected by any experiments performed in the solar system, yet small enough to take care of all the binary stars studied! What we have here is nothing more than a mathematical trick specifically designed to make things appear just the way Moon and Spencer wanted them.

One has to entertain the possibility that the article was written and published as a joke. But creationists certainly don't take it as a joke; to them it must seem like a godsend. With light traveling in a Riemannian space having a radius of only 5 light-years, the time it would take to reach us from any source no matter how distant would never exceed 16 years!

Again we see the Gosse Hypothesis in all its glory. The creator decreed that light, and only light, should travel in a Riemannian space with a 5-light-year radius, again for the purpose of making the universe appear to be much older than the actual 10, years.

As an added bonus, it made us poor fools accept the preposterous notion of relativity! Although somewhat off the subject, a brief note here will vividly illustrate the sorry state of creationist "science. He apparently doesn't know that the unreliability of this evidence has been recognized at least since the early 's, although for a completely different reason. My final argument is not astronomical but involves physical observations right here on earth, except for one made on the moon.

The different atoms constituting the elements and all their isotopes are referred to collectively as the nuclides. Some of these are stable, the rest are radioactive with half-lives ranging from a small fraction of a second to tens of billions of years. The half-life is the time it takes for one half of the atoms of a particular kind to decay. There are 47 nuclides with half-lives between 1. If the earth were only 10, years old, then there should be detectable amounts of all 47 in nature because 10, years is not enough time for them to decay totally.

However, only 7 of these are actually found, and that is only because they are continually being generated: 4 of them are members of natural decay series; C is generated by cosmic rays acting on nitrogen nuclei; Np is produced by cosmic rays on the moon; and the 7th, U, is generated by slow neutron capture in uranium ore where neutrons are available.

Creationists have to explain why the other 40 are missing. What makes this significant is that all 17 nuclides with half-lives longer than 50 million years are found in nature. Simple calculations show that this division between nuclides which are absent and those that are present is exactly what would be expected if all the nuclides were generated probably in some star about 4.

The longest-lived one among the 40 absentees is Sm with a half-life of 50 million years. Kofahl and Segraves p. Now, any such calculations must be based on data.

In this case, the creationist's data source is a Scientific American article by H. Working before we had actual space dust measurements from satellites, Pettersson measured atmospheric dust filtered from the air atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii and then attempted to estimate how much of that dust came from space.

He knew that only a tiny fraction of the dust he collected came from space. To estimate how much meteoritic dust there was, Pettersson used the fact that nickel is much rarer in terrestrial dust than in meteorites. He made reasonable assumptions that meteorites averaged about 2. Then he simply weighed the nickel in his samples and divided by.

With an uncertain assumption about how fast dust settled out of the atmosphere, Pettersson figured that 14 million tons of space dust settled on earth each year. Because this figure was much higher than estimates based on other data, Pettersson said five million tons per year was plausible.

Like any reputable scientist, he presented his assumptions and warned that unknowns made his estimate very speculative. Astrophysicists were aware of Pettersson's estimate and there was some speculation that space craft sent to the moon might sink into a thick layer of fine dust. None were terribly surprised when that did not happen. Nevertheless, creationists took Pettersson's 14 million ton estimate as fact, plugged it into their equations and "proved" that the cosmos was less than 10, years old.

Now we have another standard creationist charge; that evolutionists and their allies suppress evidence unfavorable to evolution. The facts tell a different story. Astrophysicists are vitally interested in cosmic dust calculations because micrometeorites are potentially hazardous to satellites and other space craft. Therefore, Pettersson's method for determining cosmic dust abundance in the earth's vicinity is only one of many different indirect methods being used.

Others include zodiacal light refraction, photographic recording of light streaks from meteors entering the atmosphere, and measurement of concentrations in atmospheric dust, deep-sea bottom sediments, and Antarctic ice cores of elements, such as iridium and osmium, that are rare on earth but common in some meteors.

One of the earliest priorities of the space program was to make direct measurements of particulates in space in order to calibrate the indirect methods. By , a year before the first man stepped onto the moon, a wide variety of data was available, and, in , J. Dohnanyi reviewed an extensive literature on space dust influx. Uncertainties still existed, but those making indirect estimates then had to make many fewer assumptions than Pettersson did. Dohnanyi discusses several of these estimates.

A recent estimate by Ganapathy, based on iridium in ice cores, is that thousand tons of space dust fall on the earth each year. In contrast with the uncertainties associated with earth-based methods of estimating cosmic dust concentration, satellites in space can measure it directly. Assuming a constant influx rate even though it certainly wasn't the earth would collect a layer of dust only 60 millimeters 2.

This does not take into account the contribution to earth of larger meteoroids, such as the Tunguska object Ganapathy , that break up on entering the atmosphere. Given the extreme irregularity of such objects, both in size and arrival, the actual dust influx certainly lies somewhere between 23 thousand and thousand tons per year.

None of these figures is in any way inconsistent with the concentrations of cobalt, nickel, osmium or iridium in the earth's crust nor, as he pointed out, was Pettersson's estimate , in spite of the numerical shenanigans and semantic trickery creationists use e.

Once again, a close look at the facts shows that creationists are wrong. That the claim of a conspiracy of silence among supporters of evolution is a patent falsehood should be apparent to all by now. A glance at the references cited by Dohnanyi and Ganapathy shows clearly that, far from being suppressed, these data and the calculations made from them were available and widely discussed in the open scientific literature for at least six years before the creationists began publishing their claim that moon dust calculations provide scientific evidence supporting "a relatively recent creation.

As far as the creationist's followers know, Pettersson's article still represents the latest word on the subject. One would think that after data had been available for at least 15 years, any creationists doing research on a subject so important to them would surely have run across the information, especially now that computer searches of the literature are cheap and accessible to all.

Amazingly, in the June ICR Impact article, Bliss proffers cosmic dust and several other discredited ideas as support for creationism, proving mainly the author's ignorance of the "true facts of nature. The antiquity of the solar system should be obvious to anyone who has thought about the pictures and moon rocks brought back by the Apollo program. Before anyone had actually been to the moon's surface, scientists had predicted how it should look.

The moon has no atmosphere and no free water, therefore it has no weather. Its surface is cratered, implying volcanic activity and meteorite impacts. Without weather, there could be no erosion, so any mountains, lava formations, and impact debris should remain forever as sharp and jagged as the day they were formed.

Based on this reasoning, the famous paintings produced in the 's and 50's by Chesley Bonestell, which were based on the best scientific guesses of the moon's appearance at the time, all showed extremely jagged mountains, rocks and craters. Figure 1 is an artist's rendition of how the scene in the lunar highlands photographed by the astronauts of Apollo 17 was originally expected to look. Figure 2 is how it actually looked. The boulder is well rounded, as are the mountains and the crater edges.

Without weather, what could account for such profound erosion? Figure 1: Artist's rendition of how Apollo 13 site in lunar highlands should have appeared according to best information available before actual pictures from the surface were available. With no atmosphere, and hence no weather to erode them, all rocks, craters, and lava formations would remain unaltered indefinitely. Figure 2: Artist's drawing from Apollo 13 photograph of scene in figure 1.

Note that all exposed surfaces have been worn and rounded by erosion. Exposed surfaces of the boulder in the foreground have a substantial cover of dirt. Figure 3: NASA moon rock This rock was found partially buried on the moon's surface where it had lain since being broken off a larger rock. The surfaces that were buried are angular and unmarked. The exposed surface, in contrast, is covered with many small pits that were made by small space dust particles striking at speeds up to 10 kilometers per second 11, miles per hour.

This slow process, which has rounded the exposed surface, accounts for nearly all lunar erosion. Nearly all meteorites have the same radiometric age, 4. What about the ages of stars and galaxies, and the age of the whole universe? One way to measure these ages is with the travel time of light.

Light travels incredibly fast — , kilometers per second, or , miles per second. On Earth, the delay due to light travel time is a tiny fraction of a second. But in space, the distances are so vast that the light takes a substantial amount of time to travel to us: 8.

The calculation of the light travel time is simple once you know the speed of light and have a measurement of the distance. The speed of light is well known from experiments on Earth, and various astronomical observations confirm that the speed of light has not changed over the history of the universe. Instead, astronomers use several interlocking methods to determine the distances, such as geometric calculations and brightness measurements.

For example, some galaxies look much smaller and fainter than other galaxies of the same kind, showing they are much further away. The Andromeda galaxy, a near neighbor to our own Milky Way galaxy, is 2. That is, we are seeing it as it was 2. But that is just our local neighborhood. In recent decades, astronomers have detected galaxies located several billion light years away.

If the light has been traveling billions of years to reach us, then the universe must be at least that old. This is completely independent of radiometric dating of the solar system, but both methods point to an age of billions of years, not thousands. Not only can astronomers measure the distance of galaxies, they can measure how galaxies are moving. Galaxies are not holding still in space, nor are they moving randomly.

Some galaxies are moving towards their neighbors, attracted by their mutual gravity. But the biggest pattern we see is that galaxies are moving apart from one another. This motion apart is not all at the same speed; instead it follows a pattern where galaxies that are further apart are moving more quickly.

This particular pattern indicates the whole universe is expanding. To see why, consider a loaf of raisin bread. The raisins are like galaxies and the dough is like the fabric of space in the universe.

As the dough rises, it carries the raisins along, pulling them apart from each other. Raisins that started out on opposite sides of the loaf will be a few inches farther apart after the dough rises, while raisins that started out near each other may only move half an inch.

So, the speed of their motion is proportional to the separation between them. In the same way, the space of the universe pulls galaxies further apart as the universe expands. When a galaxy is carried away by the expansion of space, its light waves are stretched out, making it appear redder.

From the measurements of many galaxies, astronomers can accurately measure the expansion rate of the universe as a whole. In the past the galaxies must have been closer together, and in the distant past they would have been packed together in a tiny point. If we assume that the expansion rate is constant over time, the age for the universe as a whole is about 10 billion years.

However, astronomers have been working over the last 20 years to determine how the expansion rate changes with time. We now know that early in the universe the expansion was slowing down, but now it is speeding up.