Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHow long has the Universe been cooking, and how do we know?
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Hey, Jorge, I've been meaning to ask you a really important question.
Yeah, go ahead?
How old are you?
How old am I?
That?
Isn't that a rude question?
It's a little bit rude, but I want to mask it by saying that I'm interested scientifically. I just want to know, like, how did the Jorge begin? Did you start with a big bang?
Well, I'm not sure how my mom would describe it. Am I getting better with age? Is that kind of way you're asking?
Yeah? Is Jorge life a fine wine that just gets better and better and more valuable or sort of like yesterday's banana?
I have been working on my earthy bouquet and undertones of cherry and oak.
I can give you ninety points on the wine scale.
Did you think we should focus on bigger topics perhaps?
Yeah, I think asking the age of stuff is a really good way to figure out like where it came from and why it's important, and you know where it's going to go and the whole context of everything. Yeah. So yeah, I'm interested in how old you are, but I'm also interested in how old the Earth is, or how old the Solar system is, or how old the galaxy is, or even how old is like everything.
You want to be rude to everything?
Yeah, I want to ask your mom if she was around during the Big Bang and so she can tell us all about it.
Your mom is so old she witnessed the Big Bang.
Hey, look, you're the one who brought your mom into this. Hi am Wortant, and I'm Daniel.
I'm about forty two years old.
Forty two years is the perfect age, actually, since that's the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Yeah, that's why I brought it up, because you know, I'm the answer to everything. They did notice you slyly avoided stating your age. I thought I was Did you think that was sly? I just kind of avoid that, didn't I? Yeah, and now you're that's double double sly. Oh my goodness, can can you go for a triple sly?
Well, let me tell you from the advanced age of forty three that forty two is a good year. You should enjoy yourself while you're young. You should go out there and you know, enjoy your fitness and your your flexibility, because when forty three comes around, everything changes.
Really, forty two is peak life jokes aside.
For me, every year has been better than the last, so so far, forty three is the best year I've ever had.
Yeah, awesome? Oh what are we talking about? This is our podcast Daniel and Jorhez explain the universe.
This is not just us chatting about random stuff. This is our podcast where we try to explain the whole universe to you, from front to back, from start to finish.
Today's topic how old is the universe?
How long has all of creation been around this amazing, beautiful, crazy, chaotic mess that we find ourselves in. How long has this party been going on?
Yeah? Are we at the beginning of the party? Is the party ending?
We're the best moments of the party in the very early evening, and we've missed it already.
Yeah, is the universe the equivalent of forty two? Or is it all downhill from here?
That's right. Let's hope that, like my life, every year in the universe just gets better than the last. Right, that would be pretty nice. But I think it's a really important question. It's interesting not just from a you know, academic physics point of view, like can we figure this out? But I think it's one of these great questions that touches on something I think everybody wants to know the answer to, right, like how did it all start? And where's it going to go?
Yeah, it's pretty amazing to imagine not knowing how old you are. Can you imagine not knowing how old you are?
That is kind of hard to imagine. I think actually a lot of people in the world used to not know like when they were born or how old they were, and their parents would just tell them, oh, you were born in the summer, it was several years ago. And you know, I think a lot of people don't keep track of their age. But you're right, for most modern people, we know exactly how old we are, and that is a big part of our identity.
Yeah, I wonder if you could figure it out. Like you if I went into your brain and erase that little bit of neurons that store how old you are, if you could piece it together just from your memories.
I think if you slice my brain open, yeah, you would find rings and probably be able to count them and figure out how old that was. Don't recommend doing that at home.
By the way, people that were oo q comes from them.
Yeah. If I was a fine wine, I think I would be. I would taste a sassy but unpretentious. Yeah.
And I'm a little nerdy, just a little bit of dirty, just a little PhD in physics, nerdy but not over the just enough in its undertones. Yeah. But yeah, I imagine how disorienting it would be not to know how old you are. Absolutely, I guess what I'm trying to say. It's that it's important to our identity to know how old we are.
Yeah, it is. And it's important to identity to know how old, like human civilization is, like what is our history? How long have people been crawling along this planet? How long have people been people? Right? That tells you you know of something about the context and of your own life. And I think even more interesting is how long our lives are compared to how long the world has been around, you know, like we live one hundred years? Is that long ampared to the life span of the Earth or in the universe? Is the universe two hundred years old and I'm going to live one hundred or is it a tiny flicker in this vast, incredibly old universe? Right? I think that helps us understand like whether we mean anything spoiler we don't.
Yeah, kind of like where does where do our lives fit in the history of everything else?
Yeah? And even more interesting, I think, though unanswerable, is not just a question of how long are our lives compared to the history of the universe so far, but how much history is left in the universe? Right? Are we in the very very beginning stages of the universe? Is the universe a baby or is it middle age? Right? We have a whole other podcast about that, So these questions are important, I think.
Yeah, I feel like we're going through puberty right now, at least the United States.
Maybe your voice is already pretty low for going through puberty. And I'm not going to ask you if you're growing hair in any new places. I don't want to know.
Is the universe growing hair in new places. I hear that things are pretty hairy in Mars.
Black holes are growing hair. People talk about hairy black holes these days. That's totally a physics topic.
Oh really, are black holes black haired or blonde?
Well? That's the question, is like how many characteristics can a black hole have? You know? Because in a sense it's just a collection of matter compressed down to a tiny scale. I we know black holes can rotate, we know they have mass, and the question is, you know, basically can they have other attributes? You know?
Okay, so this is a really interesting and important question how old is the universe?
And we were.
Wondering how many people out there know how old the universe is?
Yeah, which is interesting from two points of view. One is do people care, how they spend any time thinking about it? Is it important to people? And two, if they do care, do they know the right answer or are they operating under completely false pretenses for how old the creation is? Yeah?
So, as usual, Daniel went out there to his university and asked the question how old do you think the universe is? Here's what people had to say.
I think thirteen billion years?
And do you know how we know that number.
Uh. I believe we look way out as far as we can and detect the early gases from the universe, and then we extrapolate based on the distance we're looking.
I think something like that. It's BT one fifty one years, fifty one years, billion years? Oh wait, bit world or university the universe? Universe? About the university? You know? The universe? Two billion? Two billion? And do you know how we know the age of the universe by the Big Bang?
Yeah?
Big Bang theory and looking at how far the stars are right? Fifty two not the university, the whole universe.
Oh, I'm sorry?
One billion?
All right?
And do you know how we know the age of the universe? How do we measure it?
Stars?
Six billion years? Okay? And do you know how we measure the age of the universe.
I'm guessing it has to do with some type of carbon dating materials.
I don't know, all right, cools, thanks, ten billion years? Ten billions? Are your best guest's older than twenty six years old? And you know how we measure the age of the universe? Any idea or how would you figure it out if you had to? I don't know, Grab any ripples.
I'm a biologist.
Not all right, thanks very much.
All right, so pretty good. A lot of pretty good guesses, right.
Yeah, A lot of people guess sort of in the range of billions of years, right, which is totally respectable. I think my favorite answers were the people who misunderstood my question and they thought I was asking them how old is the university? Huh, and which it just turned fifty and had a big party, et cetera. But when they said fifty, I didn't really understand they misunderstood. I thought for a moment that they thought the universe was fifty years old, and I thought, my god, I've met some really young earth creation is how do I respond, you know, like to keep a straight face. I'm trying to be respectful, you know. Yeah, And then I understood, Oh no, they just missed her, miss heard the question.
Well, when you're young and you're in college, the university is your universe in a way, right.
Yeah, exactly, that is their whole life.
Yeah.
I like the guy who said, I don't know at least twenty six years old, right, which is tells you a little bit how self centered some college students are. But you know, everybody gave it their shot.
He's like, Yeah, the universe was here when I was born, so obviously at least twenty six years old.
That's right, And maybe that's the only information that matters to that guy, you know, like who cares as long as it was around for me, nothing else is important.
Yeah, I guess his universe started twenty six years ago.
Yeah exactly. But you know, he's actually using a strategy to measure the universe which scientists use, which is how old is stuff in the universe. The universe has to be at least as old as that. So while his you know, focus on himself, isn't that helpful in determining the age of the actual universe. He's got a good idea there about how to figure it out.
Oh, how old is the oldest thing that I know about? That should give give you at least like a minimum age of the universe.
Yeah exactly, So he even though he's a biologist, he sort of invented that strategy on the fly.
Well, I think it's important. Let's start first of all talking about what it means to ask how old the universe is, Like, what is the age? What is the term the age of the universe?
Mean?
Yeah, that's right. That's the kind of answer somebody would give it. They're trying to evade a question, right, how old do you well, what do you mean by age? I mean, do you mean the conception moment of birth? Right? But there's actually a really good analogy there, because human age is a little fuzzy. Like if you're conceived on a certain day and then you're born premature, you know you are older than you otherwise would have been, right, Whereas if you stayed in your mother's womb longer, you're technically younger, even though you know it doesn't really matter.
Which is kind of arbitrary, right, because technically your body and your brain, all your parts started earlier than your birth.
Yeah, and we're not taking a position here a fetus alive and maybe that's why, maybe that's why we do that. But you know, actually I heard that in other cultures they define age a little differently. In some like in the US, when you're born, you're zero, right, and the clock starts then. But in other cultures, when you're born you're one. Your age increases in the new year, and everybody goes up one year in the new year, where the concept of age is like how many years have you been around in not exactly how many years since your moment of birth. So the age of the universe is sort of a similar question, right, like, how do you define the zeroth moment of the universe? T equals zero, T equals zero.
Yeah, let's talk about what it means t qul zero. So what do physicists mean usually when they say T equals zero.
Well, it's not terribly well defined. As the problem. What we can do is we can say we know when now is, and we can walk backwards from now to what we know to be a very hot and dense state in the very early moments of the universe, right, like a big primordial hot plasma which is nasty and wet and all sorts of stuff is happening right.
Like a baby when it's born.
Like a baby, exactly, a big hot, nasty mess. It probably wasn't as loud or I don't know. Maybe we actually there was baryon acoustic oscillations, so it could have been a lot of screaming going on. And we understand that very well, Like we can propagate that forward to get to our universe. We can go backwards. But the problem is that just before that is very fuzzy for us, like we can't see past that. For those of you who heard our episode about the baby Universe, we can't see earlier than like three hundred and eighty thousand years after the Big Bang, And so we don't exactly know what happened then, and so exactly how to define it is not clear. Like you'd like to say t equal zero is the Big Bang? Right? Yeah?
Isn't that what they usually mean, that the universe started with the Big Bang?
Or we don't know, right, except that we don't really have a great definition of what the Big Bang is, right, Like, we don't know what was the Big Bang? Was it a singularity that then exploded, Was it, you know, some weird quantum blob? Was it inflantons? Like that whole process is still very mysterious to us. So we don't know exactly what happened and exactly how long it took.
So what we can do you just blew my mind. Yeah, scientists think Teco zero is the moment possibly of the Big Band, but you're saying it's possibly, like we don't really know what happened around the time of Tequo zero.
Yeah, And I mean the whole definition of the Big Bang is still a tiny bit fuzzy, Like some people think the Big Bang is sort of still happening. Like what was the Big Bang? It was this inflation of a dense amount of matter into a hot primordial gas that was on a macroscopic scale, right, really fast. Inflation took less than ten to the minus thirty seconds, and that ever since then things have been expanding. But things are still expanding, they're still inflating, like we have dark energy, which is just like a modern day analogy of inflation. So from some point of view, you could say, like the Big Bang is still banging. So then when do you put T equals zero from the beginning of the Big Bang? Like, we don't really understand very well the physics of what happened in the early days, so it's hard to define what T equal zero is.
So you mean, we can look back in our history and you get to a point where you can look beyond and you just assume that there's some sort of event beyond that, but we can't see That's right. You don't have records of yourself beyond pictures of you when you were one year old, Like, you don't you have no idea what you look like before you were one years.
Old exactly, And so what you can do is you can extrapolate. You can say, like, well, I know what happened when I went from one to two and two to three and three to four, and I understand the biology of it, So I can extrapolate backwards from one and think about what zero must have been like and when zero was right right, how long it took to get to one, which is really the.
Question when you were conceived?
Probably yeah, exactly. But if you suspect that the physics happening down there between zero and one, you know, just after the moments the Big Bang were different, were interesting, or maybe not typical of what happened the rest of your life, then there's a lot of uncertainty how to do that extrapolation right. You can't just blindly extrapolate.
Like what if the physics before I was one years old were totally different, which means I could be older than one year old when I think I'm one year old.
Yeah exactly. And it's not that we think the laws of physics were different, but you don't just different of stuff was happening, stuff we haven't seen stuff we haven't had a chance to understand. So you know, we're extrapolating down, down, down, down down. But we get to a region where we have don't really have a lot of data to extrapolate into, and so we're skeptical of that extrapolation. But this is a very technical discussion of like exactly when tequal zero is. The good news is it doesn't really matter.
What do you mean, It doesn't matter. We just talk about how important it was.
It doesn't really matter exactly when you define tequals zero because this uncertainty is a small number compared to the age of the universe. Like we can extrapolate all the way from now back to you know, less than a million years after the Big bang whatever, that was, right, and so there's an uncertainty there of like you know, a million years, a couple of million years whatever for what happened before the part we can extrapolate beyond. But that's a small fraction we think of the age of the universe. So if you want to say how old is the universe, you can sort of sweep that question under the rug. You can say, well, you know, how old is it? How far back can we see and that's really ninety nine point nine to nine percent of the age of the universe.
I see. So if I said, Daniel, I hear you're forty three years old plus or minus a million years, you would just sweep that under the rug.
I would say, no, that's an accurate statement. Or hey, it's a correct statement.
Oh that's right. Technically you are forty three yeah, plus or minus.
Us or minus a million. Yeah, more plus than minus, but yeah, exactly. But I think a better analogy would be, like, you know, I'm forty three plus or minus a day, you know, or a second. Right, These are details on the scale of the times we're talking about. But you know, we want our listeners to really understand the nitty gritty, and so the exact definition of the age of the universe is a little bit fuzzy because those first few fractions of a second, especially are not well understood.
Okay, so when we say the age of the universe, we really mean how old the universe is since some mysterious thing happened called the Big dam.
That's right, exactly, and even deeper. Right, we don't know what happened before that, So it's just an arbitrary thing to call that tequal zero, right. It could have been that before the Big Bang, there was another universe which had like a big bang of its own and a big crunch. It's not really a different universe. It's just like part another cycle. And this could have been happening forever. So when you talk about the age of the universe, you really can only talk about the age since this early state that we understand. What happened before that is a total question mark. The universe could have just started before that. It could have gone on forever before that.
Okay, let's get into how we know all this stuff, but first let's take a quick break.
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Okay, Daniels Well settle this for us, how old do physicists think the universe is?
Forty three years old? I mean, that's how long. So what else is important? You know, the most accurate age of the universe currently is thirteen point eight billion years. That's how long we think the universe has been expanding since that hot, dense, nasty mess at the very beginning.
Okay. And just to put that into perspective, the Solar system is four point five billion years old.
That's right. So solar system has only been around for the last third of this party. There was ten billion years almost when we didn't even have our star.
Right, wow, So the two thirds of the universe there was nothing where we are.
Oh, there might have been stuff, right, There might have been other stars, there might have been globular clusters or gas or whatever. But our star took ten billion years to even form. Wow.
Okay. And by that, by the same account, the Earth itself is about four billion years old.
That's right. Yeah, it took less than a billion years for life to start on Earth. Wow. Yeah. And then to put that in scale, my fabulous university you see, Irvine is fifty years old. Right, So now the party has started.
Well, the United States is only about it always blows in my mind a little bit. In the United States, it's only like two hundred and fifty years old, less than two hundred and fifty years old.
I know. My brother keeps reminding me of that because his university is like three times as old as our country. Right. He's at Oxford, so they have traditions, they have, like probably have silverware over there that's older than our country.
So he's a younger brother and he's like trying to find something to get to tab over.
You aren't always aren't younger brothers always doing that? No, he is an academic rock star at Oxford, and so he gets to he gets to look down and the rest of us at fairly new universities.
Okay, so thirteen point eight billion years old, that's how old the universe we think it is. And so how do we know that. How do we know are there is there a birth certificate? Is there like DNA evidence?
Well, I've been asking your mom, but she claims to not been around then, so we have to figure it out for ourselves. There's basically two ways that we know the age of the universe, and this is really classic science strategy. Is like find two completely separate, independent ways of asking the same question, and then if they agree, then awesome, you think probably you have it figured out. And if they don't agree, then you know something's wrong.
Like two independent experts, yeah.
Or two suspects more like like if you're a detective you're trying to figure out, you know, who did something, you find two suspects, you separate them, You ask them questions separately. If they tell you all the same details, they probably tell them the truth. Right. If they give you totally different stories than you know, they're lying. So science is sort of like that.
Okay, so what's the first way that we know how old the universe is?
The first way is just looking for old stuff. Like if you find something in the universe that's fifty billion years old, then you know the universe is at least fifty billion years old. Right, It's not very complicated. So you just look around and you try to figure out how old is the stuff around us, and that's that's sort of a lower limit on the age of the universe.
So if you find a rock that's sixty billion years old, then you know the universe must be at least sixty billion years old.
That's right, Yeah. Or if you find an unpaid bill from fourteen billion years ago, right, then you know.
You know your universe is about to end.
That's right, you know exactly they're coming for you. Yeah, but that's a tricky thing to do, right, how do you know the age of stuff? Right? We've changed one question how do you know the age of the universe into another question, which is how do you know the age of stuff we see around us? Right?
Yeah, Well, what's the oldest stuff that we know about?
Then? Yeah, the oldestuff we know about is stars basically, I mean there's a caveat there with the cosmic microwave background, which we know is a little bit older, but that's more difficult to age. But direct stuff that we can see that we can ask the question how old is it? Are stars? And we look around and we look for really really old stars And this is a tricky thing to do. But what you can do is you can look for blobs of stars. They're called globular clusters. These are collections of stars. They're sort of like mini galaxies. I mean, they have a whole different name from them because of the size distinction, but they're called globular clusters.
He didn't like mini galaxies galaxinos.
I thought that would have been good galaxinis. Yeah, exactly. That sounds like a nice pasta. I'll have the galaxyinis with anchovies, please. Yeah. So you look at these globular clusters and you ask how old are they? How old are the stars in these globular clusters? And it's hard to know how old an individual star is, but you can look at a group them and you can figure out how old that is, really, yeah, based on which ones are still there and which ones are not there anymore. And the reason is that stars have different life spans. Right, So you form a bunch of stars and they form out of gas and dust, they coalesce with gravity, and you get some really big ones and you get some really little ones. Now, the big ones burn really fast and they don't last very long, and the little ones they burn a long time. They're like saving their fuel. And remember stars burned by compressing hydrogen, right, and then they glow and they burn its fusion. And you can listen to our podcast episode about that if you're curious about that. But the big ones burn out pretty quickly, So if you're looking at a population of stars, really really far away, and you notice that they still have a bunch of big ones in them, you know it's pretty young because those ones would have burned out already if it was.
Old, Like the cluster itself is young.
Like the cluster itself is young, exactly. And if you find a group of stars the globular cluster that only has little stars in it left, then you know it's pretty old because there's been time for all the bigger stars to burnout.
Okay, so what's the oldest star that we know about, or how old are the oldest stars that we know about?
Well, this is really fascinating. It's been controversial because this is a hard thing to do. You have to know how far these things are away. You have to measure their light. There's a connection between the color of the star and its size, so it's a lot of intermediate steps. Right you see the color that tells you the size that you can make a distribution of the sizes. There's a lot of steps that go along, and there's a lot of uncertainty, and things happen very quickly in the beginning of a life cycle of a globular cluster, like the big bright stars burnout fast. Near the end, things happen more slowly, which means for really old stuff, the uncertainties are pretty large. Like it's hard to tell the difference between a ten billion year old globular cluster and an eleven billion year old, but between one and two billion is easier. So people have been looking at these things for a while, and the oldest ones we found are something like thirteen billion years old. That's a very recent estimate. Up till like twenty years ago, people thought they had found globular clusters that were like twenty billion years old or even thirty billion years old.
Did you say thirty thirty? Yeah, they think so, maybe the universe is thirty billion years old.
Well that's what they thought. For a while. They had this one measurement from the stars that was saying like twenty or thirty billion years old, and they thought, well, let's compare that to the measure to other ways we can measure the age of the universe, now the most current one. In the end, they found some mistakes and they updated it, and they weren't like, you know, somebody goofed by adding one plus one making three. You know, we just got a better understanding of how stars evolve and how they burn and how to do these calibrations. And now the more recent updates are like thirteen billion years old. But for a while it seemed like those globular clusters were suggesting the universe is older than twenty billion years.
So there are things out there in the universe that were there when the universe started that are still around today.
Well not quite. When the universe started, right, we're looking at stars, and you know the universe started, there was the Big Bang. There's a hot mess of plasma that things spread out and cool off, and then stars formed from that gas and dust. Those are called the first generation stars. None of those stars are still around. We can't see those stars. Nobody's ever seen those. We're looking for them. It's people want to understand it, but nobody's seen those O G stars, the OG stars exactly. Back when stars were cool, man, back when they were hot, the nineties. Yeah, and then those didn't last very long and then they you know, they burn, they cool, they exploded supernova's and you have this they gather their back together. You have the second generation of stars. So remember stars are in this cycle, right, they burn, they then they explode and their fuel gets spread out into the universe. Then they gather back together and make another cycle. And so the second or third generation the sort of the oldest stars that we can see so far, and that's why it's the lower limit, Right, we see something super old. We don't know if the universe is old, how much older than that the universe is. We just know it's at least that old.
It's like finding a relic from an ancient civilization. You know that the use civilization is at least at all, but it could have been around for much longer. Just because you haven't found something older, it doesn't mean that it wasn't older.
That's right, exactly. It it's a lower limit, and currently that lower limit is about thirteen billion years old. That's the oldest thing that we found. So we're seeing things from the very very early universe. Not exactly from the beginning, right, but from very very early on, which is pretty awesome, right, that's like the ancient history of the universe. It's I think that's super cool.
Yeah. Imagine like coming up to these clusters and you're staring at something that's been around for thirteen billion years old. Yeah, that'd be pretty amazing.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm already just flabbergasted looking down at the Earth. Right. The Earth has been around for five billion years. It's such an ancient rock. It's seen so much history. I think about that when I you know, we just walk across the planet, I wonder like, who else has stepped here. That's one of the things that makes me love those footprints, Right, you can see like footprints of dinosaurs from hundreds of millions of years ago, like they were just like walking along boop. You know, so much has happened on this planet we're not even aware of. There's so much history that's just been lost that we'll never know.
Okay, So that's one way we know how old the universe is. What's the other way we know?
The other way is by looking at the expansion of the universe. We know that the universe is spreading out. Things are moving away from us, and they're moving away from us faster and faster every year. And we can measure that. We look out in the universe and we see how fast things are moving away from us. We can measure that by looking at how the light from them is stretched. Things that are moving away from you have their light waves stretched out longer, they turn more red. Things that are moving towards you have their light waves squeezed, they turn more blue. This is the Doppler effect. It's the same effect that makes like a police siren sound different as it's approaching you and leaving you. Right, So we can use that to measure how fast things are moving away from us. And if you remember our podcast episode about dark energy and the expansion of the universe, we have these really cool standard candles. They're called super nova type one a supernova, and we know how bright they should be and we can look at them, we can measure their velocity, we know how far away they are, so use that to measure how fast the universe is expanding. That's important because remember we talked about the definition of the start was really what we're doing when we're measuring the age of the universe is we're saying how long has the universe been expanding since that hot date? And if you know the expansion rate, then you can extrapolate backwards.
So we hit the rewind button from what how fast we think the universe is expanding, and that makes the universe, if you watch it in reverse, makes the universe go down, down, down, down down into a very small blob.
Yeah, exactly, So everybody starts talking funny because of words.
Yeah.
And the critical thing is you have to measure the rate, right, We have to know the expansion rate to know how fast to rewind. And we have to know the expansion rate now and the expansion rate of billion years ago and ten billion years ago. And we can do all that because remember, the further we look out into space, the further we're looking back into history. So we can see the expansion rate now, We can see it a while ago, you can see it a long time ago.
Like the history of the universe is written out there in the stars, like you can tell yeah, exactly, well how fastenings were expanding throughout the history of the universe.
Yeah, and our history is out there also. You know, light left the Earth when you were ten and you did something embarrassing at your cousin's birthday party. Light from that event left the Earth and is still out there, and somebody could capture it and see that, right, even though it happened twenty thirty forty years ago, So all that information is still out there.
Yeah, so watch out, So watch out alien light that come back and expose your ten year old antics.
That's right. Well, when the aliens come, they'll have seen it, right, so they'll know who's been naughty and who's been nice.
Sanda is an alien?
What?
Oh dude, I just reveal that on the air. Oops. Yes, Santa is an alien. I mean Santa can do a whole bunch of stuff that nobody else can do, right. I think having him be an alien with super tech is really the only reasonable.
Experts I would explain it.
Yeah, Santa myth Yeah boom, we just solved that mystery right there.
Well, this is a perfect point to take a break.
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So if you know the expansion rate of the universe, you can rewind back. And we actually measure the expansion rate two different ways. One is just by looking at how things are moving right right at these stars. The other is by looking at the cosmic microwave background. This is the light from the very early moments of the universe.
That also tells us how old the universe is.
Yeah, it contains an incredible amount of information about what was going on in the early universe, how much dark matter there was, how much normal matter there was, how dense it was. All of that stuff and all that information in the end can tell you about the expansion rate of the universe. But you can extract the expansion rate directly from that. That's actually the most precise way to do it. And then once you know the expansion rate, you can rewind the universe to figure out how old it is. And that's the measurement that tells us it's thirteen point eight billion years, and the uncertainty on that is about twenty one million years, so.
It's pretty accurate plus or minus twenty one million.
Years, depends on your scale.
Yeah, yeah, but it's kind of interesting that, you know, scientists hit the rewind button, right, we look at into the stars, we press the rewind button, We see it all compress, and then we sort of stop once it gets really small, right because we a we can't rewind further, but also kind of conceptually right, like we can't imagine there being anything before that, or we can't imagine anything surviving being that small.
Yeah, and we have to ask questions like what does it even mean? You know, space and time started at the Big Bang, so can you count before the Big Bang? You get into really really difficult philosophical waters. Absolutely, and you know, it's only recently that we've known this like this seems to be like can be an important piece of information. It tells me something about who I am and how to live my life and how meaningless it is. But it's sort of a new piece of information. You know, Like a hundred years ago, people thought the universe was steady state, right, that there was just a bunch of stars out there and they'd basically always been there, and the universe wasn't expanding or contracting. It didn't have an interesting history or a moment of birth. It has just been around forever.
Right, This was one hundred years ago, right, Only.
Yeah, only one hundred years ago. So for most of human history. First of all, for most of human history, we didn't understand anything about anything, right, So we were basically completely all ignorant, misses.
You just exalted most of humanity, but go ahead, I.
Mean in the best possible way. But yeah, and only about one hundred years ago did we even figure out that there might have been a beginning, that there was this expansion, which suggests you know, that there was that if you rewound it, you got back to a very early hot, nasty state.
So one hundred years ago, we thought the universe had been around forever, right, So yeah, like forever infinity, right, Yeah?
So what was that like to learn that the universe, you know, to go from age of the universe is infinity to ages you know, in the in the billions of years. And it wasn't until the fifties we had any sort of accurate estimate because these things are hard to measure. It's taken decades to get the technology and the math and the physics models. So it was in the fifties that really had the first accurate estimate of the universe's age at about fourteen billion years Wow.
Okay, so the universe is thirteen point eight billion years old plus or minus twenty one million years old. And so what does that mean that? What does that tell us about how the universe came to be or where it's all going?
It tells us something about how far we are along. You know, we know that we've we've been around for long enough for galaxies to form, right, for galaxies to spin for a while, for stars to form and explode and coalesce again and form and explode. Right, We're not in the very first few moments of the universe. But we don't really know much more than that.
Yeah, and more important, we don't even know how old the universe is going to be, right, We don't know how old the universe is going to be around So we could be in a very early part of the universe, or it could be in the late part of the universe. We don't really know.
No, we have no idea exactly. It could be that in a trillion years. There are life forms that are studying the age of the universe and they think about this little this first little bit, the first fifteen billion years as like the big bang, right to them, this could have just been like the engine just getting started, you know, putform feom stars and galaxies. We don't know, and we don't know if this part of the age of the universe is typical, right, Like it could be that things go along and everything turns to black holes and you have like only black holes for a trillion years, right, So we really don't know. Wow, when is the puberty of the universe?
Right?
Things changing? Is it already grown up? We don't know.
So maybe the real question we should be asking, the one that's less rude is how young the universe is?
How young is the universe? Exactly? Hey, universe, how do you feel? You're feeling pretty good? Yeah, got some joint pain. Even planning for your retirement.
Yeah, you know, like, if you knew you were going to live to one thousand years old, you would say things like like, oh, I'm only forty two years young instead of forty two years old.
That's right. If I knew I was going to live to a thousand, I would have started saving for retirement a lot, a lot earlier.
You want to be retired for nine and sixty years?
No, honestly, I'm never going to retire. I mean, I have tenure. Why should I ever retire to sit in my office for the.
Next years and you're already retired.
Mentally mentally retired? No, you do your best work and you have tenure. That's exactly the point. You're free to think and expand and go to crazy places in your career, like recording a podcast with a cartoonist.
Right, yeah, sure, yeah, And the universe is fifty years old.
In the universe is fifty years young? All right? Everyone, So that's the answer to the question how old is the universe and how do we know?
Or how young is the universe?
How young isn't the universe?
Oh?
My god, Universe, you look good.
You're looking sparkly.
That's right, keep burning bright, Universe. You're happy to be around.
See you next time.
Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandorge dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and your cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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