but the key I should point out is that many are making big assumptions from the start. Suppose you walked into a mess hall and observed a soldier pealing potatoes and you wanted to know how long he has been at work. You could try to figure out how long he has been at work by seeing how long it takes him to peal one potato and then measuring how many pealed potatoes there are already. Sounds pretty straight forward right? Except for the fact that you have to make several assumptions. A) The soldier has been working at the same pace since he started. I mean you have no way of knowing if he is speeding up or slowing down. B) You have to assume that he started with no potatoes already pealed to begin with. C) You have to assume that at no time prior to your arrival did he have any other help. Can you see how such assumptions can lead to faulty measurements?
A) Is it safe for us to assume that the soldier had not earlier been working a million times faster or slower?
B) Is it safe to assume that there were not a million times the number of previously peeled potatoes as a soldier could be expected to peel under what we believe to be normal circumstances?
C) Is it safe to assume that there were a million soldiers peeling potatoes just prior to our arrival having left with no other evidence of their existence?
Would you also suggest that if I were to answer the question "How long have you left the TV on without being in there?" with either 230 years or 7 milliseconds, my mum shouldn't doubt my sincerity?
You are suggesting that we would not notice a million fold error of dating.
You are now a million miles away from where you were in space-time when you started reading this sentence.
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