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So when people claim the world has been around for trillions of years, which I can only imagine is quite a long time, how do they explain that it took us trillions of years only to invent an iPhone? I mean wouldn’t the world have been super advanced by now if the world was around for that long including human beings? Whoever thinks we are so advanced technologically look again. Technology is still very clumsy at times and we still use very physical machines for everything. It’s not hologram screens which are portrayed in secret agent movies.
When you think about it even for 5778 years we are not that advanced. People have been living pretty much the same primitive/simple way for many many years up to less than 100 years ago. So if scientists claim the world is as old as they say, if ancient Egypt was so ancient and was only a few thousand years ago, imagine how ancient people were “trillions” of years ago!When people say that the world is trillion years old, they don’t mean that people existed back then, let alone humankind as we know it today.
When you are discussing the age of the universe you are dealing with matters of kaballah, not appropriate for YWN.
But as for the “smartphone”, perhaps it is due to our generation being dumbed down to such an extent that they need mechanical devices to communicate, something previous generations could accomplish unaided.
Most of technological progress was made fairly recently, even by young Earth standards.
It’s important to know the information that scientists are presenting in order to properly debate them. For starters, according to scientists, the age of the Universe is around 14 billion years old, Earth around 4.5 billion. Modern humans (Homo Sapiens) according to them started between 200,000 – 300,000 years ago. Our Rabbonim and Frum Scientists should figure out a way to challenge their conclusions.
Two simple points. Torah deals with ABSOLUTE truths. Conversely, science is the endless study of the universe that is always progressing from one layer of knowledge to the next, hence nothing absolute can be derived about phenomena that happened thousands of years ago. Second, Just as Adam Harishon was created mature it’s very possible that the the universe was created mature. I don’t think technological advancement or the lack of it provides any indication into the age of the world for obvious reasons.
400,000 is relatively recently… we’re talking about half a million years… and again, they do not mean humans like we know today
According to scientists in this field, generally speaking, the claim is that “[o]ur own ancestors migrated out of Africa some time roughly 50,000 years ago, before establishing ourselves across the globe” (Science Alert).
According to Chabad Rabbi Manis Friedman, as far as I understood his explanation in a lecture he had at a local Chabad back in 2016, Hashem put those bones there and made the Earth appear old because science can only tell us how “aged” something is, but just because it fits the definition of “aged” does not mean that the world or fossils have been sitting there for that long… in other words, the Earth is still under 6000 years old, with aged relics that are no older than stated in the Torah.
When was time created? When was space created? Is time always linear? Is the rate the time progresses constant or variable? Is there only one universe or multiple universes, and are they truely separate or entangled?
Am I discussing science fiction? Am I discussing modern physics? Am I discussing matters addressed in kaballah.
Someone is hung up on the idea of 5778 years, but if time is neither constant nor linear, the concept of a “year” become meaningless.
@litvishechossid. I don’t think anyone here is interested in advocating for the theory of evolution. If you want to understand their point of view, i suggest you ask a scientist that believes in evolution. I just wanted to point out that technology or the lack of it is no indication of a young or old earth. Scientists have totally different methods(and rightly so) in measuring the age of the earth. That’s it.
@apukerma. The definition of time is a different discussion. Everyone knows what a day is and knows how to mark the end of a year. I think everyone can agree that time started in it’s complete expression when Adam was created. The question is how was time experienced in the five days before that. But the time as we know it is 5778 years old. It’s not a random guy that got “hung up” on it. It’s the calculation of the Torah.
Also, each generation builds on the next. Humans until recently didn’t live to 80+, and it’s not like every 80-year-old is out there in the same technology-creating capacity as he or she maybe was in his 40’s to 60’s.
Modern agriculture and literature have been great feats.
Not in chronological order, but: Housing, farming, electricity, heating and cooling, sewage systems, fire codes, governments, medicine, antibiotics, outer space travel, horse and buggies, cars, roads, trains, airplanes… technology builds upon itself, and sometimes replaces itself… evolution of technology is relevant here
Agriculture took time to domesticate land and animals.
For most of these years, populations were smaller and more remote. Globalization has allowed us to communicate broadly and share our technological advances, or copy them.
Anyway… my point is that you’re expecting a lot from humanity when people were struggling to survive… and most of their lives, many people were living under some ruler and invested their resources in not getting killed, killing, family for the sake of survival, and what you might consider more mundane affairs…
Litvishechossid, I mean like past ten years, not past thousand years.
Wait… who was it that lived 900 years or something?
That’s also a point… the fact rhat our maybe 80+ year lifespan is a small fraction of the lifespan of the Torah greats generation. So maybe also more time passed by from one generation to the next generation
@litvishechossid. I was responding to a poster who said that Rabbonim need to reconcile Torah with science. It wasn’t originally meant as a response to your starting post. And once again, I reiterate that advancement of technology or the lack thereof displays no indication with regards to the age of the earth. Educated people have different methods of measuring the age of the earth.
I was just giving you an eitzah tovah not to mention lack of advancement of technology if you ever get into a discussion with a semi educated non affiliated Jew. That’s all.
I am sorry for so rudely invading your thread and pointing out a fallacy in your post.😊
Might I remind everyone that Chazal say that the Ribbono shel Olam created and destroyed many worlds before ours? This would seem to defuse the entire issue.
Happy ChanukaWhat would be interesting is to calculate how many generations or years it would take to reach the current world population.
Litvishechossid, in fact the Zohar predicted that the gates of wisdom would open up in 5600. Apparently it was not time beforehand. As for the age of the world, it depends on when you start the count. Onkelos says that after Hashem created Adam HaRishon he gave him the power of speech. The earliest writings found date back to about 5,100 years ago. It stands to reason that language did not start until not long before (in historical terms).
Litvishe…..you are assuming that the metric with which we measure humanity’s “advancement” technology. As if we needed to reach “iPhone” status, and it took us X amount of years when it should have taken us only Y amount of years. That entire premise is erroneous. You can’t take an existing new accomplishment and use it as the basis to measure the accomplishment itself. For example: say you are an inventor, and you discover diodes, wildly helpful in shrinking electronics to handheld size. They’ve never been known before, you are the first to have ever done it. You can’t be asked why it took so long because there’s no one else who has done it. How long should it have taken? Discovery and invention cannot be compared to itself. The only possible way to ask that question would be if there was an exact replica of our world and circumstances down to the last grain of sand, and THEY came up with all of this much faster than us…..but that doesn’t exist. So using “well it took only 25 years for an iPhone to be made, if the world is trillions of years old we should be much farther” as some sort of proof of a young earth , falls short.
some possible answers from an evolutionary point of view, since that is what you are asking:
Each progression in the evolutionary sense is supposed to advance the species so that it is better adapted for survival and/or reproduction. You are assuming that the advancements in technology of the recent past accomplish that. I would argue that they are more likely to bring the species to disaster. Look how successfully humans have used all that technology to kill itself out during the past century, not to mention how smartphones etc are destroying relationships. So perhaps the simple, primitive life was more on track.
there is a concept that evolution happened in bursts, as opposed to a continual, slow process- there were times when things speeded up, and times when nothing happened.
Of course the true answer is along the lines that AviK was saying- that as we approach the times of Moshiach (year 6000, see the other thread), everything gets speeded up, the world is coming closer to perfection. I once heard a speaker express the idea that we have experienced such advances in understanding of biology, physics, etc to compensate for the hester panim- these can be means to draw us closer to an understanding of Hashem thru the Beriya.
Not sure if above was coherent, rather tired right now.The state of our technological advancement is a very relative thing. Our current technology is not at all clumsy compared to previous times. Science fiction movies portray holographic screens and suchlike because by definition they are always a step or two ahead and portray the filmmakers’ imagination of what future technology could be like.
In perhaps another few years holographic screens might be a reality, and the science fiction movies of the time would portray some even more advanced idea that we can’t even imagine yet (perhaps direct thought control of matter via some kind of exotic waves), and the OP would be asking why our technology has “only” managed to come up with “clumsy” holographic screens!
Litvishechossid –
Your asking a very odd question – you seem to have an assumption that there is a preset specific level of technology a society “should” achieve at a certain point- but why should that be the case in the first place?
Technological progress is also not always specifically linear – there have been periods of time when technological advances have been forgotten by generations after the ones that made the advances, there have been countries at one time that were significantly more advanced then the others in the same time.
Furthermore, technology builds on itself. Especially (in my opinion) technologies that facilitate better communication. It’s why in the current time something invented in Japan (for example) can quickly spread around the world, whereas new advances made 400, or 1000, or 10,000 years ago would have taken much longer to spread (assuming they did at all). Inventions like the printing press, the telephone, and the internet; policies like standardized public education and increased admission to higher education, have helped increase the general level of knowledge of a large part of society far more then societies without those technologies or policies had,. With the result that we have now far more competent people working on new technologies then ever before. Furthermore, with the industrial revolution and similar “events,” vaccinations and general lifespan extension (including much reduced infant mortality rates, which is a major factor when looking at average lifespans of then versus now) decreasing the amount of people solely focused on survival or things like food production, there is an exponentially increasing amount of people working on technologies now then there were before.
Technology and advances build on themselves, it’s a large part of why things seem to advance technologically speaking so much faster now then they used to. The exponential growth of the human population, and the increased growth of people who survive infancy/childhood and go on to pursue higher education is a large part of it (as well as an increasing weight being placed on scientific, rational discovery – the peer review system comes to mind).
Also, you mention some examples of how you think technology now is bad and how you could improve it – the problem is, that’s all relative. It’s based on what you know and what you can imagine. Many technologies (for example) from sci fi shows in the 1950s (to name a few: cellphones/smartphones, tablets, bluetooth, video calling) have actually become normative features of every day life now, and as technology increases and time goes on, that pattern will repeat. Technologies we found futuristic just 60 years ago will seem normal and possibly even backwards now, while new ides will keep coming of how things can be better. I don’t imagine any point at which that will stop, when we say “ok, everything we can ever imagine is now existing.” There will always be some way to think of things as being more advanced – and that’s a good thing, because that itself is what leads to advancement.
If you look at technological advances and how they affected society, dramatically changed things, then the following would be huge achievements, huge leaps forward, relative to their times (pre-20th century), perhaps made even greater changes in society than the technological advances of our time.
harnessing fire
domesticating animals
using metals to make tools
invention of the wheel
invention of paper, then printing press
discovery/use of electricitytoday these things seem simple, but only because we are so used to them being around. But arguably, these were more important than video calls, even if the latter is way more sophisticated. And as pointed out above, technology of today would not exist if these earlier advances had not happened.
Here’s something I always wondered about- with today’s rapid pace of advancement, how come air travel is more expensive, less comfortable and no faster than it was 40 years ago? In all that time, no one could come up with a cheaper (i.e. not dependent on oil prices), faster way to fly people from one place to another?According to science, there has been a lot of evolutionary progress over all of the time life has existed, and most of the organisms had no thumbs. The dinosaurs, for example, are thought to have been doing just fine with no thumbs and no technology until the extinction event that killed them. Even apes, which have thumbs, haven’t adopted technology even though we’ve invented it for them.
It says in the Torah that the world was created looking old
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