[ChainOfFools]

Even at double the previous estimate the thing that always floors me about the age of the universe is that it's a number that's approachable by human minds at all.

it could have been anything, trillions upon trillions of years, or subject to some nonlinear behavior that made it impossible to estimate at all in terms of current parameterizations of time.

And yet here it is a number we can almost see to the end of,conceptually, at the fringes of human scale reckoning.

Somewhat loosely related is the equally arbitrary-seeming and surprisingly small number of chemical elements, vs, say the uncountable number of living species.

[ChatGTP]

My suspicion is there is a lot of things like this.

I’m surprised it’s already shifted from what felt like a fact, 13.7 billion to double that. It’s not an insignificant change.

What is amusing is now all the arguments that reference the 13.7 billion years start to sound kind of exaggerated.

I mean did it now take 26 billion years for life to evolve ? It sounds absurd to my little mind.

Personally I don’t think time and evolution are really worth comparing. I don’t think it matters how long or how little something takes to evolve. For me this news just makes that more concrete.

[manzanarama]

I don't really buy this. That is like 819900000000000000 seconds.

Squaring this number gets you 672236010000000000000000000000000000 seconds.

I feel like my mind doesn't really appreciate either of these numbers or the difference between them. I feel like we just use units that we are comfortable with to make the number readable but there is not easy intuition here.

[pantulis]

>That is like 819900000000000000 seconds.

This should fit in a modern 64bit CPU register right? I find it amazing that our CPUs can model the estimated age of the universe in such a simple way.