Notice: Fredric Rice may have removed segments of the replies given to questions if they contained copyrighted materials. After a very short while, Scientology "experts" refused to answer questions and started cut-and-pasting copyrighted cult propaganda. Additionally I removed URLs in some of the replies, and left them in others. And it's also important to note that eventually the unfortunate "Greg Churilov" cultist was ejected from askme.com for his typical Scientological behavior.

FredricRice asked this question on 5/15/2000:

Greetings!

I have a question about L. Ron Hubbard's book "A History of Man." I suspect that only current Scientologists would be able to help me with this question but I'll toss it out for all the other experts, too, to see if they might know.

The book starts out with Hubbard writing, "This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years."

Since the age of the universe is something around 15 billion years, is it possible that this is a type-o and that the editor of "A History of Man" needs to fix it to read "million years" instead of "trillian years?"

I can't imagine that L. Ron Hubbard made such an obvious mistake in his cosmology but one never knows.

Thanks!

formerscientologist gave this response on 5/15/2000:

I never studied cosmology, nor do I know anything about it.

Aren't there a number of theories about the creation, size, and age of the universe?

Regardless I know that when I was a Scientologist, I believed I existed for all eternity; it's just that no one had been able to remember anything before 60,000,000,000,000,000 years ago.

I'm sure he meant trillions, but he may have been referring to us thetans (not a part of the physical universe).

The average rating for this answer is 4.7.

You rated this answer a 5.

Interesting. While there are certainly various closely-aligned cosmologies, due to the 3 degree Kelvin background radiation and galactic redshifting, the age of the Universe (that we can detect, any way) is around 14 to 16 billion years by best estimate. Had the Universe been expanding for 60 _trillion_ years, the Universe wouldn't have any stars in it -- certainly none within which fusion or fission takes place. They would all have passed through their main sequence long ago, their Nova fragments recombining for third-generation up through several thousand generation stars. After 60 trillion years, all that could possibly be left would be neutron stars and even then, the evaporation half life of hadrons would have removed a percentage of what's left.

I suppose that Hubbard actually did mean _trillion_ rather than _million_ since, as you say, he made people believe in past lives that many years ago.

Amazing.

Further facts about this criminal empire may be found at Operation Clambake and FACTNet.

Return to The Skeptic Tank's main Index page.