It still blows my mind how simultaneously old and young the Earth actually is
WinterWitch
I always love this. From like, a philosophical standpoint. Everything you see is in the past... The sunlight on my face is 8 minutes old. When I look at the moon, I am actually seeing the moon from 1 second ago. If I were to find Alpha Centauri with a telescope, I would be looking at Alpha Centauri from 4 years ago. When I am walking to work and I see my friend, I am seeing them from a fraction of a nanosecond ago (or however long it takes for light to move that short distance). Our eyes can only see the past, never the present, and never the future. There's a Vlogbrothers video in here somewhere...
michaele
I was going thru my day as an old person, turns out I’m not so old after all. Science is awesome and so is Hank. Thanks Hank!!
abbynormal
My favorite wild fact is that, although the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, we can see galaxies that are 47 billion light years away (due to the Hubble expansion of the universe).
wolfbd
There was a mathematician, Paul Erdős, who would say he was about a 3 billion years old. When he was born, the estimate age of the universe was around a billion years. In his later years, the new estimate was around 4 billion.
larmoejr
When I was a kid, cosmologists disagreed about the age by a factor of 2. Now they've got it to about three significant figures.
MattMcIrvin
I just had to explain this concept to my son the other day... when telescopes see a planet that is 10 million light years away we aren't seeing the planet as it is today BUT how it looked 10 million years ago because that's how long it takes the light to get to us!!! that's a mind boggling fact that he was trying to grasp!
toymomofthree
I’m always so fascinated by how much we know and how much we’ve yet to learn
Rubbish_
If you are old enough to have experienced TV static, that is from the cosmic microwave background...
jaspermaster
Hank, you forgot to tell how old it is, how old is it!
conwaytwittyer
Is it possible that sentient civilization with telescopes that may arise in the future would find themselves in a universe so old they won't be able to notice any cosmic background radiation? And would not be able to determine how old the universe is?
donatodiniccolodibettobardi
Hubble's constant is still my favorite calculation in Year 12 Physics class, it's just really satisfying and makes so much sense logically.
Nic_Bloody
The real question is why is always midnight on New Years at Hank's place.
TheInselaffen
This guy makes any topic so incredibly interesting! He inspires me to get out of my funk
keepmovingforward
Hank, give me a book recommendation for soil. As cannabis is closing in on being legal to grow in my state this summer I've been studying and researching. Soil is quite fascinating, as you put it in one of your videos before "all of the known life is on a very very thin part of the earth" the soil underneath giving us the chance to thrive
runescapeppl
And considering that what we understand as time came to be with (or after?) Big Bang, this is actually how old the universe is, measured in units of what we understand as time. Because _"before_ the Big Bang" doesn't have the same meaning as we understand 'before' within space-time, with causes and effects (although in Minute Physics they call both "levers", physics is weird), , neither does the "space" that could've existed "before" spaciousness as we know it existed. So, even if the universe "was" in some other states "before" the Big Bang we have no language for it, we have no physics for it and we have no idea where to get the data from.
So, this is indeed roughly how old the Universe – as we know it – is.
donatodiniccolodibettobardi
Since you brought up microwave background radiation, I remember hearing years ago that CRT TV static is caused by the presence of that radiation while the TV isn't actively displaying something.
angeleaterstudios
Cosmic Microwave Background is a good band name
toothpastehombre
The deniers would say "I can't do the math, therfore it doesn't exist " spoke to one guy who said "carbon halflife doesn't go back 4 billion years. Therefore the earth can't be that old" he couldn't comprehend that carbon dating is an umbrella term for radioactive dating.
matthewedwards
I took a cosmology class and we spent like a month going over the different iterations of the equation that led to our understanding of the age and expansion rate. The prof considered it pretty important that we understand that he and his colleagues worked really damn hard to figure this out for us.
