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From: James Kuyper <jameskuyper@alumni.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "A diagram of C23 basic types"
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 10:06:55 -0400
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On 4/15/25 00:11, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Apr 2025 23:25:26 -0400, James Kuyper wrote:
> 
>> On 4/14/25 19:41, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, 14 Apr 2025 15:56:56 -0700, Keith Thompson wrote:
>> ...
>>>> That would not be practical or useful.  The timing of the Big Bang is
>>>> not known with great precision ...
>>>
>>> Neither is that of some fictional religious entity.
>>
>> Not true. While his divinity is fictional, there might have been a
>> person who was the inspiration for those stories. Whether or not he was
>> real, the stories of his life are only consistent with a very specific
>> time period ...
> 
> Unfortunately, whoever threw in references to historical details to try to 
> make the stories seem more plausible didn’t try very hard to keep them 
> consistent.

That's why there's a range of possible dates, rather than one specific
date. Note that such inconsistencies can be expected, even if he's real.
Most historical figures of his era who were not of high rank had poorly
recorded births.

> Remember that there was no “Year 1”. It was a few centuries before 
> somebody decided something like “let’s call this year 615 A.D., and number 
> backwards and forwards from there”.

No, Dionysius Exiguus didn't just randomly decide which year it was, he
did his best to determine how many years it had been since the birth of
Christ. The method he used to reach that conclusion are unknown, and are
inconsistent with the range of dates currently considered reasonable by
experts. If Jesus was a real person, the current best guess as to the
date of his birth is somewhere between 6 and 4 BCE. See
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus> for more detail.

The point is, the uncertainty in the date of his birth, whether
fictional or real, is far less than the 59 million year uncertainty in
the date of the Big Bang. In order for it to be comparably uncertain, we
would have to be unsure whether he was incarnated in the Mesozoic or
Cenozoic eras.

Are you uncertain as to whether or not King Herod ruled during the
Cretaceous?