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Secondly, specifying a single year of formation BCE (Before the Common Era) is an amusingly precise choice. It takes [https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/how-do-planets-form/ tens or hundreds of millions of years] for a planet to form. Picking a year would require some specific definition of when a gradually-coalescing mass of proto-planet dust and gas could be considered a planet, as well as the impossible ability to determine when that mass met the definition.
 
Secondly, specifying a single year of formation BCE (Before the Common Era) is an amusingly precise choice. It takes [https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/how-do-planets-form/ tens or hundreds of millions of years] for a planet to form. Picking a year would require some specific definition of when a gradually-coalescing mass of proto-planet dust and gas could be considered a planet, as well as the impossible ability to determine when that mass met the definition.
  
If the precise year was knowable, the probability of the number actually ending in seven consecutive zeros would be on the order of one-in-ten-million.
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If the precise year was knowable, it’s somewhat improbable the number would end in seven consecutive zeros. As in literally a one-in-ten-million chance, ''assuming'' that the actual possible spread of years is widely enough distributed; though we do not have enough information to establish this, and the statistics for last-number(s) frequency is different from those of {{w|Benford's law|first-number frequency}}, so it might well be only one-in-a-million, thus [https://wiki.lspace.org/Million-to-one_chance far more likely].
  
 
The topic of what precisely makes a planet — related to the 2006 redefinition of a planet and the subsequent reclassification of Pluto from the solar system's ninth planet to a dwarf planet — has been covered before in [[473: Still Raw]] and referenced in other XKCD comics.
 
The topic of what precisely makes a planet — related to the 2006 redefinition of a planet and the subsequent reclassification of Pluto from the solar system's ninth planet to a dwarf planet — has been covered before in [[473: Still Raw]] and referenced in other XKCD comics.
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There is some poetry in the idea that there was a precise year, some 4.45 billion years ago, that was the first true year, the first Earth orbit around the sun. By definition, the Earth is the same age as the number of Earth orbits that have ever taken place.
 
There is some poetry in the idea that there was a precise year, some 4.45 billion years ago, that was the first true year, the first Earth orbit around the sun. By definition, the Earth is the same age as the number of Earth orbits that have ever taken place.
  
Note: The date shown for the formation of the Earth, 4.45 billion years ago, also differs from the commonly accepted date, [https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html 4.54 (±0.05) billion years]. The difference lies in the transposition of two digits, 5 and 4, potentially a mistake, as is common in historical markers.
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Note: The date shown for the formation of the Earth, 4.45 billion years ago, also differs from the commonly accepted date, [https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html 4.54 (±0.05) billion years]. The difference lies in the transposition of two digits, 5 and 4, potentially a mistake.
  
 
'''#3: Historical markers typically refer to events within the past several centuries'''
 
'''#3: Historical markers typically refer to events within the past several centuries'''

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