How Old Is the Universe

Video Transcript

"Take that Commander Cody! Ok, so they play pretty rough up there on the moon. Now it's time for the time and or temporal evidence. As you may know, it's estimated that our universe is about twenty billion years old. This figure is in debate. But from a nineteen seventy-seven Livermore study from Brown and Burman, using rhenium-osmium decay rates, they determined that that figure, twenty billion years seems to be accurate. Others have pared it down to thirteen point eight billion years. And yet a new study from Ohio State University, indicates that it may be fifteen point eight billion years, or fifteen percent older than they thought. But, the point is, that we on earth are decidedly on the younger side of the cosmological time scale. We're four point five billion years old, so anywhere from sixty-six to seventy-seven percent of all extent planets should be older than we are. Now what does that mean in terms of time? Well if you were to teleport a sixteen-oh-seven Londoner to seventeen-oh-seven, I dare to say he wouldn't see any difference in technological progress. But if you were to teleport a nineteen-oh-seven New Yorker to two thousand and seven New York, he would definitely suffer a severe case of future shock. That's because once you enter the computer era, the atomic era, the nuclear era, progress shoots up exponentially. So that a difference of a hundred years could mean a ten, twenty, or a thirty fold increase in technological progress. And we're talking not just about planets older than us, that are a hundred years older, but perhaps a thousand, ten thousand, even a million years older. For those entities on such planets, everything and anything in terms of inter-planetary , inter-stellar, even inter-galactic space travel might be possible. Now I acknowledge, a planet that's three point five billion years old, might actually be more advanced than we are. One five point five billion years old might be less advanced. But overall, time argues for technological progress. And it certainly argues for the possibility of ancient astronauts visiting our planet, even of the distant past. In fact, they might have been responsible for the demise of the mighty dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. "