Creation myth and "scientific research" program well and truly busted

To be a Young Earth creationist is to hold a truly unique place in the history of wrongness. These religious ideologues don't just deny human evolution; their belief in a universe that is only a few thousand years old commits them to an enormity of other errors, including many beliefs that fly in the face of modern physics. Last weekend's episode of Cosmos, devoted to explaining the nature of space, time, and the speed of light, presented a stunning case in point. For as host Neil deGrasse Tyson explained, if creationists were right about the extreme youth of the universe, then we wouldn't even be able to see the vast majority of the stars in the sky. The Hubble Space Telescope? Not a very worthwhile investment. The logic is unavoidable: light travels at a fixed speed of almost 300,000 km per second (over one billion km/h). Because of this, many objects in the universe are many "light-years" away from us, where a light-year is simply the distance light travels in the space of the year. As an example, Tyson presented one particular object, the Crab Nebula, which just happens to be 6,500 light years from Earth. This means that when you look at it, what you're actually seeing is the nebula as it was 6,500 years ago (pictured). But it wasn't just Young Earth creationism that got put in its place over the last few days - Japan says it is cancelling its annual Antarctic whaling hunt for the first time in more than a quarter of a century in line with a UN court ruling. A “deeply disappointed” Tokyo earlier this week said it would honour Tuesday’s judgment by the United Nations’ Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) that the program was a commercial activity disguised as science. Tokyo, however, did not exclude the possibility of future whaling programs. Officials have stated the next Antarctic hunt, which would have started in late 2014, had been scrapped, just weeks after the most recent one finished. “We have decided to cancel research whaling (in the Antarctic) for the fiscal year starting in April because of the recent ruling,” a fisheries agency official said. But he added that “we plan to go ahead with research whaling in other areas as scheduled”, including the northern Pacific. Japan also has a coastal whaling program that is not covered by a commercial whaling ban, but they should be careful - in fact, Japan should not miss this opportunity to use the ruling as an excuse to fully review its whaling program without losing face. They can start by cutting back on whaling until populations can recover, then put a more sustainable whaling program in place from thereon in.