Basic Facts

1. One such example are extreme Christians who believe the world is only about 6000 years old. This kind of nonsense is in direct contradiction to observable facts, e.g. tree ring counts (the field is called Dendrochronology). Fully anchored chronologies from tree rings now exist for more than 12000 years (see e.g. Friedrich et al.). Of course there are other ways of dating e.g. Radiocrabon dating (up to about 60000 years back), or ice core dating (up to 800000 years back).

   

   There are however yet other ways how one can see that in makes no sense whatsoever to assume that the universe is only about 6000 old. If that were true the furthest light source in the sky we could observe would be about 6000 lightyears away (i.e. the distance that light can travel in 6000 years). Yet our own milky way galaxy is already about ten times larger that! This means we could not see all the stars in our galaxy, nor could we see any other galaxies at all! This is in direct contradiction to observations such as the many beautiful images of far away galaxies we have from the Hubble space telescope.

2. There are still people who think that global temperatures are not rising, and that the entire climate change discussion is a hoax. If you want to learn a few basic facts about our climate click here.