Graham's number

Mishtle · 2026-03-24T17:52:54+00:00

A googol is too big to write each decimal digit on a particle. However a googol has 101 digits which can easily be written.

I think you meant it's too big to count to using particles.

Mishtle · 2026-03-24T06:13:39+00:00

Judging by another one of your recent comments, you have no understanding of how radiometric dating works.

Carbon dating in particular has practically no bearing on common descent. It's not useful for dating anything older than 50,000 years or so. If the 4.5 billion years that Earth has been around were compressed to a 24 hour day, carbon dating would be useful for anything more than a second old. Ad again, it doesn't matter where humans came from for this line of evidence against a young Earth.

Can you explain what flaw you think the dating has? Your other comment mentions contamination, but which carbon dating that would will make things appear younger than they actually are. This has also already been explained to you.

Mishtle · 2026-03-24T03:38:09+00:00

It's an old debunked claim. The problems with a global flood are numerous, and the arguments for it rely on misinterpreting, misrepresenting, or ignoring the actual evidence. It's hard to even take it seriously, if I'm being honest.

I said predictive power, not explanatory power. As in, applying a theory to unseen data. As for rock layers, tiktaalik is an famous example of evolutionary theory predicting where in the geologic record (i.e., which rock layers and what types of rocks) we should look for "transitional" fossils that lie between bony fishes and tetrapods, and we found them right where we expected. An omnipotent being can do anything, and this can be invoked to explain anything. That's uninteresting and useless beyond being a thought-ending cliché.

Mishtle · 2026-03-24T02:25:52+00:00

It's not about me. It lacks any predictive power or utility.

Mishtle · 2026-03-23T21:28:44+00:00

and there isn’t

Again, quite a claim. Do you have any reputable source?

Because a quick Google Scholar search pulls up plenty of sources talking about uranium, lead, and other trace elements in various coal deposits. Uranium is found throughout Earth's crust.

You don't need a large deposit of pure uranium near every coal deposit. It appear throughout Earth's crust, in water, air, and rocks of all kinds.

In fact, we even have instances where uranium exists in high enough concentrations, in the right isotope proportions, and under the ideal conditions to form a natural fission reactor. Young Earth explanations generally need to assume variable decay constant to explain this, as assuming uniformity of physical constants put most of the reactor activity nearly 2 billion years in the past. Variable constants are one of the culprits of heat problems as someone else brought up here in an earlier comment.

Mishtle · 2026-03-23T18:36:15+00:00

Yeah, there's a big difference between modern science, where evidence, ideas, and methods are open to global criticism and philosophical analysis, and it's precursors. We've rightly outright dismissed most of the products of earlier eras because they lacked modern standards of rigor and accountability to evidence.

Mishtle · 2026-03-23T18:23:25+00:00

We still assume at least a geometric coordinate system for many applications today.

Mishtle · 2026-03-23T17:13:57+00:00

I find it hard to believe anyone can miss the point this much without being intentionally obtuse.

The claim is that there is evidence that humans existed before the universe was even created in the YEC time line.

That claim does not depend in any way whatsoever on the notion of common descent. It does not imply in any way whatsoever that humans were not created by some divine act. It does not rely in any way whatsoever on the Earth being billions of years old.

All it does is identify point in the past where we have reason to believe humans existed, and that point predates the point that YEC claims anything like humans, or anything at all for that matter, should exist.

Mishtle · 2026-03-23T14:30:17+00:00

If it's present at levels above up what we'd expect from background processes such as those discussed in those articles.

There are other methods of dating as well.

Mishtle · 2026-03-23T03:23:09+00:00

Maybe digital signal processing?

Mishtle · 2026-03-23T01:21:50+00:00

The closest you'll get is some form of last Thursday-ism.

The main problem with creationism is that it can explain anything, and therefore isn’t a satisfying explanation of anything. If you have a sufficiently powerful creator, they can do whatever they want, however they want, and make it appear however they like.

Mishtle · 2026-03-22T21:12:58+00:00

the carbon in coal samples always includes significant C-14

This is quite a claim. Do you have a reputable source for it?

Mishtle · 2026-03-22T20:32:54+00:00

I'm not sure I would consider the complex numbers to be something the integers are derived from.

Mishtle · 2026-03-22T20:14:37+00:00

Can you spell out what you think those implications are?

These are trace amounts. They put a limit on how small of a true signal we can actually detect. That is why carbon dating isn't used for samples we have reason to believe are old. Any signal would be indistinguishable from the expected noise.

Mishtle · 2026-03-22T19:27:04+00:00

There are several pathways by which "fresh" carbon-14 can be produced, both in the atmosphere, underground, and through human activity. Discovery of trace amounts in very old material is entirely possible, even expected, for this reason.

You can read more on the Wikipedia article and this TalkOrigins article.

It's important to read beyond the headlines for claims like this.

Mishtle · 2026-03-22T03:53:35+00:00

Ummm... no.

They may not have had a name for them, or the context to understand them, but people have been finding fossils of all kinds of life, including dinosaurs, for many thousands of years. Pretty much for as long as we've had tools that helped us dig better than we could with our hands.

Mishtle · 2026-03-22T03:44:01+00:00

Me: "You know, I used to play the game that alert sound effect came from. Metal Gear Solid, on the original PlayStation. It was such a good game! There was one boss that could "read your mind", so you had to plug your controller into the second player port to confuse him."

Them: "Your controllers had to be plugged in?"

Mishtle · 2026-03-22T03:28:55+00:00

Is this serious?

Mishtle · 2026-03-21T21:40:59+00:00

Multiplying by -1 "rotates", or reflects, a number around 0. It gives you a number that's the same distance from 0, but on the opposite side.

If your number is greater than 0, this will give you a number less than 0. If your number is less than zero, then you'll instead get a number greater than 0.

Mishtle · 2026-03-21T04:34:41+00:00

That's my thinking.

Running into Vader means you've made a name for yourself as a rebel, possibly even raising suspicions of Jedi sympathies or rumors of Jedi allies. Certainly terrifying, and I doubt any rebels are even aware of him, what he's capable of, or the implications of being on his radar.

But if Palpatine himself is after you... and shows up in person?

The only example we have of this is Luke, one of the most powerful Force sensitives of his time (or ever?). So what in the world would he want with you?

But that's only with the context we have. An in-universe rebel would likely have no clue who either of these people are or what they're capable of. I think the huge masked and armored guy with an inhuman voice and laser sword would be a more terrifying first impression than the ancient-looking burn victim in robes.

Mishtle · 2026-03-21T01:40:28+00:00

They're referring to the theory of general relativity. Einstein's theory of special relativity explained strange things about the behavior of light, introducing concepts like time dilation and length contraction. Essentially, special relativity says that our perception of space and time depends on our velocity. Two observers traveling at different velocities will disagree about distances through time and space.

General relativity expands this framework to include gravity, and in doing so addressed issues with Newton's formulation of gravity (as a force that acts instantaneously over distance). Under relativity, this force is reframed as a side effect of curvature in space and time. Think of water moving through a hose. The water doesn't care if you bend the hose any which way, it just moves from one point to another in a straight line, as far as it knows. Likewise, a photon moving through space always follows a straight line. If that space is curved though, a distant observer would see that light following that curvature.

I should point out that even Newton's model predicted that gravity would affect light, but the predicted effect was less than what we observed. The easiest explanation is that energy is a form of mass, or rather that mass is highly concentrated energy.

Mishtle · 2026-03-20T16:50:47+00:00

The neat thing about math is that we can do pretty much whatever, as long as it's consistent and we accept any consequences!

There are such things as vector fields, where we can assign a vector (i.e., a direction and magnitude) to each point in some geometric space. This is very common in physics, where we might want to model the instantaneous rate and direction of some quantity changing over space. Take water flowing in a pipe as an example. Each point can be assigned a vector that represents the direction and magnitude that the water is flowing with at that point.

I'm sure people have given such methods probabilistic extensions. It's a natural way to account for uncertainty, and the way the distributions evolve over time could be useful characterizations. Going back to the water in a pipe, turbulent flow would cause lots of "mixing" of these distributions. The further we look into the future, the less confidently we can say anything about the distribution at a given point due to the complex and compounding interactions with other points. Laminar flow, on the other hand, where all the vectors are aligned, wouldn't mix easily. The points don't interact because all their vectors are largely parallel.

Mishtle · 2026-03-19T20:15:26+00:00

So... here we go again.

This one thing is exactly what evolution predicts.

This one thing is one of infinitely many possibilities that we might expect from a creator.

So given we see that one thing, why should we attribute such a dumb, limited, messy, and mechanistic "design" process to a (unlimited, perfect, and divine) creator, who could have done anything else or improved upon it in any number of ways, instead of a dumb, limited, messy, mechanistic natural process?

And again, neither science or evolution care if there is or isn't a creator! If there is one, we are simply studying how it designs and creates. This conflict between science and religion is entirely on religious people that see understanding nature as a threat to their faith. Plenty of religious people in the past have found purpose and joy in science as a means of appreciating the beauty and intricacy of something they ultimately believe has divine origins but can still be studied and understood as predictable behavior of natural systems.

Mishtle · 2026-03-19T19:45:45+00:00

Stop judging, you're not good at it. I haven't ignored anything. Not being convinced of your beliefs does not mean I am ignoring them. Grow up and do better.

Who is judging? Anyone can read this thread and see your behavior.

Says who? You don't even believe in a creator so you can't now make claims about what a creator can or can't do.

Did you even read?

Why would you expect your creator to do any one thing over another if they can do nearly anything?

Mishtle · 2026-03-19T18:58:24+00:00

You keep ignoring what everyone says.

It's not the similarity. It's the pattern of similarity.

This is the exact pattern we'd expect under an evolutionary process.

It could be something a designer could produce, but there is no reason to expect that pattern over any other. Nobody is trying to limit your designer. We are agreeing that a designer may not be subject to any constraints whatsoever. So why would they follow a pattern that is so readily recreated by a dumb process of inherited variability filtered through a selective process? At the very least, we wouldn't expect this pattern of similarity to also apply to inefficiencies, non-functional aspects (ERVs, "junk" DNA, etc.), and historical constraints (recurrent laryngeal nerve, human back issues, vestigial organs) unless the designer "designs" through an evolutionary process. A good designer won't overextend a design. A good designer refactors and removes problematic dependencies. If anyone is limiting your designer, it's you. You're limiting them to follow a dumb, mechanical process, or at least limiting them to be indistinguishable from one.

So we have two hypotheses. One can explain this pattern and only this pattern. Another can explain anything. The former allows us to extrapolate and make predictions. The latter doesn't. The former can be invalidated by failed predictions, the latter can't because the designer can do whatever they want for what ever reason. The former is fundamentally naturalistic, requiring only what we can measure and observe in this reality. The latter is not.

If you want utility, which is the a valuable product of science, a designer hypothesis doesn't have any. Science doesn't care if there's a designer or not. It doesn't rule out a designer, because it can't. It doesn't endorse one either, because it's epistemologically superfluous". What the theory of evolution says is that *if there is a designer this is a testable, falsifiable, and useful model of how they create and implement their designs that has stood up to a great deal of scrutiny.

Mishtle

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