Arvel Joffi

He was, until the Great Flood pushed the continents all over the place.

Melkor

D'oh! That's right.

Tufted

That picture of the galaxies is so amazing. Looking at our galaxy, the Milky Way, from a dark site is awe inspiring. To know that glow is the combined light of billions of stars...wow. But to see so many galaxies in such a small area of sky, how can one possibly think that we are alone? Of all images to remind me of my place in the Universe, that galaxy picture has been my favorite.

Asha'man

Well then, you may like this picture as well:


(In case you are interested, this is from APOD )

PS: 500th post! Woohoo!

Valentine Pontifex

Two recent new articles that might be relevant:

A supernova that was observed 997 years ago was about 7000 light years away. This supernova was brighter than any object in the sky except for the Sun and the Moon and was seen for three years. Now many similiar supernova like it are observed each year. Now one does not have to accept what the astronomers say about Type 1a supernova all being equally bright to realize that if this thing was so bright 7000 light years away then the other supernova must really be distant.

Planet Going Up in Smoke is about a Hubble observation that one of those huge extra-solar planets that is so close to its sun is loosing a lot of atmosphere. I bet it will not take too long for B.S. "calculations" are used by the YEC to prove that these are "young." (Young by their "timescale" not by the real one. )

Arvel Joffi

Wasn't that supernova what is now the Crab Nebula? I dream of being fortunate enough to happen to be looking at the night sky when a star goes nova. Better chances of winning the lottery...

Valentine Pontifex

No that one was on 1054. A few years later there was one in 1066 which the superstitious people said was the doom of the King of England. That year, of course, was when the Battle of Hastings occured.

lpetrich

This was Philip Gosse's hypothesis of created appearance, how he accounted for how the Earth seems much older than 6000 years -- it was created with the appearance of being MUCH older than that.

He was inspired by the old conundrum of whether or not Adam and Eve had had navels, despite their not having been born in the usual way. He decided that they had been created with navels because that was what they would normally have had, and he expanded on that hypothesis in his book Omphalos, Greek for "navel", published in 1857.

A present-day Omphalos II would have to cover a lot of stuff:

* Radioisotope dating
* Continental drift
* Family trees of organisms from the fossil record
* The distances of the stars and galaxies
* Evidence of stellar evolution (star-cluster HR diagrams, etc.)
* Evidence of galactic chemical evolution (older stars have less of every element heavier than helium)
...

Cipher Girl

I would have asked if it was possible for the world to have been created 5 minutes before with everything in place. Then all of the stuff in the bible would have been made up as well.

RBH

ArvelJoffi wroteHenry Morris, guru of YEC for decades, made exactly that claim in a mid-1970s book I was unfortunate enough to have had to read. He also claimed that when we see the flare of a supernova from what appears to be an astronomical distance, in fact the star that appeared to have gone supernova never really ever existed because the stream of light, including the "blob" (Morris's word) indicating the supernova, was created already in flight.

RBH