Originally posted by luckee
If no one exactly knows how far the universe stretches, than how would they really know this info?
I guess they could make a reasonable estimate taking the outermost star clusters into consideration and the rate of which the universe expands, etc. etc. I\'m not a scientist, but I don\'t think it\'s completely impossible.
Originally posted by ##RaCeR##
I personally feel that both the entire universe and the human race is around 10000 years old.
Ok... that\'s certainly a way\'s off from what I believe.

I respect your opinion nontheless. But here\'s what I believe:
- the universe is ~14 billions years old (give or take a few billion years)
- the Earth is ~4-5 billions years old
- the oldest found species of homo sapiens are 50,000 - 100,000 years old.
How do I figure this? Well, the universe thing can be estimated by various calculations. But recently an international team of astronomers performed a unique measurement. They measured for the first time the amount of the radioactive isotope Uranium-238 in a star that was born when the Milky Way was still forming. It is the first measurement ever of uranium outside the Solar System. This method works in a way similar to the well-known Carbon-14 dating in archaeology, but over much longer times. Ever since the star was born, the Uranium "clock" has ticked away over the eons, unaffected by the turbulent history of the Milky Way. It now reads 12.5 billion years. Since the star obviously cannot be older than the Universe, it means that the Universe must be older than that (
http://www.eso.org).
The Earth thing... again it can be measured in different ways. One way is to look at the oldest formations of rocks and minerals. There have been found rocks as old as almost 4 billion years. Hence the world would be at least 4 billion years old...
The human race age... one way of finding out could be looking at the oldest known bones found. These go about 100,000 years back.
So that\'s how I figure what I do.
