From: Rob Harris (rob@hbinternet.co.uk)
Date: Fri Nov 26 1999 - 08:20:56 MST
>>Um, since when is outward-lying the same as ancient? Outward lying
>>from what, anyway?
>I think maybe he means "outward-lying (ancient)" as in "farthest out on
>the age curve". Or not.
Not. I had some duff knowledge in my head if you two are correct. I was
certain that I'd heard from some trustworthy source that the galaxies that
lie farthest from the point of origin of the universe are the oldest. I'll
check that now.....
>Our own galaxy is the *most* ancient galaxy that
>we can observe, because we are looking into the past at younger
>and younger galaxies as we look further away.
So my Gran IS only 2 months old because the only way I can look at her is in
an old photo? The photons from the galaxies we detect with these photons are
millions of years old, but the galaxies themselves ARE quite different at
this moment in time.
>We simply do not yet know how improbable the spontaneous origin of
>self-reproducing molecules is. Perhaps it is extraordinarily
>improbable. Perhaps not. Given all the actual evidence we have at
>the moment, we can say that it has happened at least once in Universe
>to date.
Fair enough - I think that particular post was far too assumption laden -
must be too much coffee !
>I don't see any basis there for making any estimates of
>probability or improbability. I haven't studied Bayesian
>techniques very much yet, but you certainly can't tackle this
>one with resampling.
>So, you state that the odds written in standard form would be a
>very large number of digits. But this is no reason to believe
>that those aren't what the odds actually are.
Totally. Anyone got any ketchup for these words?
Rob.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:51 MST