Thread: Our Cosmos, 14/15 billion years old?

What is the current concensus on the age of our Cosmos? It is one of my firm beliefs at this time in my life that older Cosmos are out there beyond our present technology to find them, let alone start to construct their age. Why do I think this? I cannot accept that there has been enough time elapsed for evolution, evolution without the Earthly wipe outs we have experienced from Asteroid impacts, planetary impacts, ice ages, enough time for all the biological and chemical and neuron connections that go to make up some of the present Specie living at this time. In fact, at the big risk of receiving derisive and unbecoming comment from those members who accept beyond doubt current Science Research, my estimate at the ages of other Cosmos is not finite, it's ongoing, and, in my opinion, has been forever ongoing. Creation creating Creation.

Originally Posted by westwind

What is the current concensus on the age of our Cosmos? It is one of my firm beliefs at this time in my life that older Cosmos are out there beyond our present technology to find them, let alone start to construct their age. Why do I think this? I cannot accept that there has been enough time elapsed for evolution, evolution without the Earthly wipe outs we have experienced from Asteroid impacts, planetary impacts, ice ages, enough time for all the biological and chemical and neuron connections that go to make up some of the present Specie living at this time. In fact, at the big risk of receiving derisive and unbecoming comment from those members who accept beyond doubt current Science Research, my estimate at the ages of other Cosmos is not finite, it's ongoing, and, in my opinion, has been forever ongoing. Creation creating Creation.

The 14/15 Billion year old thing does not add up to well, right? At least to me it has never made much sense. I just cant imagine our own milky way galaxy having enough time to move, come together, collide with another galaxy (at least one we know about and are colliding with now) and then form its current flat spherical/spiral shape by only completely rotating about 30-40 times (if that).

Galaxy's that are much bigger than our own, would have had to have achieved their flat spherical/spiral shapes, according to the 14/15 billion year thing, by only completely rotating about 5-10 times.

Perhaps it could be possible for galaxies to have done it, I could be wrong, I just have a problem with diving in and believing that a lot of galaxies have formed these flat spherical/spiral shapes within such a short amount of revolutions.

Maybe someone can explain it to me.

Originally Posted by westwind

What is the current concensus on the age of our Cosmos? It is one of my firm beliefs at this time in my life that older Cosmos are out there beyond our present technology to find them, let alone start to construct their age. Why do I think this? I cannot accept that there has been enough time elapsed for evolution, evolution without the Earthly wipe outs we have experienced from Asteroid impacts, planetary impacts, ice ages, enough time for all the biological and chemical and neuron connections that go to make up some of the present Specie living at this time. In fact, at the big risk of receiving derisive and unbecoming comment from those members who accept beyond doubt current Science Research, my estimate at the ages of other Cosmos is not finite, it's ongoing, and, in my opinion, has been forever ongoing. Creation creating Creation.

The curresnt best estimate of the age of the Universe, based on multiple lines of evidence is 13.75 +/- 0.11 billion years.

The Universe doesn't really care if it nakes intuitive sense tiy you or not. Science involves measurements...

westwind, the traditional answer to a post like your OP is this: the universe doesn't really giving a flying aardvark what you find difficult to believe. It will proceed in its own way while wholly disregarding your opinion.

I will add to that. You anticipate "derisive and unbecoming comment". Well anticipated. May I ask you how you acquired the arrogance, the sublime, universe embracing arrogance, to think that your uninformed opinion was worth more than the life work of thousands, indeed tens of thousands of scientists, compiling the results of experimental, observational and theoretical work into a cohesive, well validated, self supporting thesis?

Then, you add to that a classic strawman argument with this phrase: " those members who accept beyond doubt current Science Research". I shall be hugely surprised if any of the active members of the forum, who comment on cosmology, accept beyond doubt current theory. What they accept is that Big Bang theory, which places an age of around 13.5 billion years on the universe, is the best explanation currently available to us for the observations we have made. No one has come up with a superior explanation. No one has come up with even a passable second place. When evidence or excplanation is offered to call the current theory in to question I am confident most interested members will not onl;y be open to it, but will be excited by the possibilities a new paradigm opens up. That's why the **** most of us are interested in science - because of its novelty ane excitement, not because we are close minded, dogmatic, conservative sheep.

Now I have suspicion that there may not have been enough time for abiogenesis to occur on the Earth - that some form of pan spermia may need to be invoked. But this is not based upon 'a feeling', but a critical examination of the facts, and I simply keep an open mind in two directions: evidence for mechanisms that could enable rapid abiogenesis; evidence for pan spermia. I do not conclude that pan spermia must be a reality.

As far as the pace of evolution, I also suspect that there may be mechanisms as yet unidentified, or incompletely understood, that foster macro evolution. There are grounds for such a view. But that is quite different from having an opinion on the matter and thinking it counts for something. I urge you to rethink your approach.

How do the effects of dark energy change the calculated age of the universe
If the rate of expansion is increasing that means the universe was expanding slower in the past and is therefore older.
Or does it just make the universe larger at the end of inflation

This should answer all your questions. The effect of DE has already been factored into the calculated age of 13.72 billion years.The Age of the Universe

For John Galt. Prepared to understand when I have the confidence in the source of information. Being pig- headed and blinkered in my observational thinking, it will take some doingto convince me that we understand it all at this point in time. With your reservations noted. John, I'm not a believer in a singular Big Bang Theory. If someone can convince me that that in fact is how our Cosmos came into existance then I will immediately exclaim, "" so all the other Cosmos out beyond our present capacity to detect them also had their Big Bangs. Multiple Big Bangs out there in the Creation going on all the time. And being of all ages. I'll leave it there at the moment though I'm prepared to debate this one from a Philisophical point of view because, as you know, I'm not trained in the Science Discipline. Just a rider on that. I never, when I'm serious, disrespect intelligent researched knowledge, either individually or collectivly accumulated over any given time. So you annoyed me on that score....westwind.

Originally Posted by MeteorWayne

The curresnt best estimate of the age of the Universe, based on multiple lines of evidence is 13.75 +/- 0.11 billion years.

What are these "multiple lines" of evidence?

The strongest is the CMBR. (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation). The second is a simple backwards extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe.

Originally Posted by gonzales56

Originally Posted by MeteorWayne

The curresnt best estimate of the age of the Universe, based on multiple lines of evidence is 13.75 +/- 0.11 billion years.

What are these "multiple lines" of evidence?

See the link in Arch2008's post. It is a good summary of most of them.

Originally Posted by Arch2008

This should answer all your questions. The effect of DE has already been factored into the calculated age of 13.72 billion years.The Age of the Universe

http://astro.berkeley.edu/~dperley/univage/univage.html

But MeteorWayne, Quote, '' The second is a simple backwards extrapolation of the expansion of the universe '' END QUOTE. MW your universe is my singular Cosmos, ( all that presently we can detect by whatever means at out disposal ). As we have not defined the extent of our Universe/Cosmos as yet, the further we look the more Galixies and dark matter we find, then the backwards extrapolation cannot be calculated as a means of defining the age of the Cosmos we live in. westwind.

Originally Posted by westwind

What is the current consensus on the age of our Cosmos? It is one of my firm beliefs at this time in my life that older Cosmos are out there beyond our present technology to find them, let alone start to construct their age. Why do I think this? I cannot accept that there has been enough time elapsed for evolution, evolution without the Earthly wipe outs we have experienced from Asteroid impacts, planetary impacts, ice ages, enough time for all the biological and chemical and neuron connections that go to make up some of the present Specie living at this time. In fact, at the big risk of receiving derisive and unbecoming comment from those members who accept beyond doubt current Science Research, my estimate at the ages of other Cosmos is not finite, it's ongoing, and, in my opinion, has been forever ongoing. Creation creating Creation.

Although your ideas are not within the preferred BB models of today, there probably still are BB theorists and proponents of an older universe than the present 13.7 billion year age consensus. There are also alternative mainstream proposals, some of which propose a cycling universe like the Big Crunch model and other less dramatic cycling models which might fit into your scheme. There are time continuum BB models concerning interacting and non-interacting multiverses like proposed by Hawking and Sean Carroll, et al.

After the James Webb goes up about 2018, and if we keep seeing old appearing galaxies at the farthest extensions of the observable universe, then I would expect the BB age consensus to steadily increase to maybe 20 billion years or older. Using a Hubble variable instead of a constant, and by theoretical addendums to dark energy, the cosmological constant becoming a variable, with changes to the Inflation hypothesis, I think they could readily come up with a a great number of BB versions that might fit such observations. This still might not provide for as old a universe needed to accommodate your ideas. If not then maybe your best bet will be some kind of cycling universe (mainstream or not), many of which you can find online. Just put "cycling universe models" (or some variation thereof) into a search engine and you will find several mainstream and non-mainstream models. For non-mainstream websites or any websites that you want to check credibility, you might first check to see if the site has a "quackometer" rating. The Quackometer website shown below, pride themselves on ferreting out websites, webpages, organizations, individuals, psudonyms, or pen names, that provide misinformation on the net concerning primarily medical science and medicine, but also rates many science and technology sites, science theory without basis, whether supposedly mainstream or not.

The Quackometer -

If the BB model(s) starts increasing the age of the universe the problem for these BB models will then be that most of the known possible alternative cosmological models have always predicted a much older or infinitely old universe. If BB theorists are forced into making such theoretical changes/ "concessions" then the door seemingly would be open to many other known but thought to be discredited cosmological models, as well as almost countless other lesser known or generally unknown models.

Whatever happens, observations will lead and theory must follow. Confirmed observations in the long run, whether cosmological or experimental, will eventually trump theory (by pointing in another direction).

[QUOTE=forrest noble;319783]

Originally Posted by westwind

. Confirmed observations in the long run, whether cosmological or experimental, will eventually trump theory.

Quite true.

And so far, observations support the BB theory, in quite a lot of detail.

science can only go with what the current observations/data provide with the current technology. i can believe the universe is 100+ billion years old, but i can't prove it.
so if one day new technologies and new findings would prove the universe to be at least 100+ billion years old, doesn't mean i was right all along and science got beat by me, but that then science can provide answers to back up that claim.

science is not about right or wrong, but to give an explanation about how things seem to work by observing things and finding a match.

This is very long time for the Cosmos life.

Originally Posted by oliverclay

This is very long time for the Cosmos life.

There are still infinite-age universe proponents. The Steady State models of Hoyle et. al. were a couple of them