The Age of the Earth - Can it be trusted?

a reply to: puzzlesphere

I second this notion. OP, let's get your agenda down on the table. How old do you think the earth is?

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

the location where the rock was found is a known ancient site with many other artifacts besides this stone chopping block here.

It was a settlement they dug up. As crude as it is.

a reply to: IndependentAgent

Except it is, as it dictates the tone of your op. So, enough "I'm just asking questions" smokescreen, how old do you think it is?

originally posted by: AnuTyr
a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

the location where the rock was found is a known ancient site with many other artifacts besides this stone chopping block here.

It was a settlement they dug up. As crude as it is.

Again, it shows that we had early ancestors who were starting to show some cleverness, and it shows they lived in groups. That is still a far cry from "1.2 million year old human civilization".

I would be surprised if the primate species along the human evolutionary tree did NOT begin to exhibit some intelligence 1 or 2 million years ago, or if they did not live together in groups. Apes today live in groups (quite hierarchical societies, for that matter), and those 1 or 2 million year old relatives of ours would have been more intelligent/clever than today's apes.

I mean, Homo Habilis lived about 1.8 million years ago, and they are known as tool makers. Their name even means "Handy man". Another early ancestor species of man -- Australopithecus sediba -- is though to possibly even have developed tool making even prior to Homo Habilis. However, neither of these are a former "human civilization", at least not in the way we define human or civilization.

a reply to: IndependentAgent

The term "absolute" might be confusing.

Absolute dating is the process of determining an approximate computed age in archaeology and geology. Some scientists prefer the terms chronometric or calendar dating, as use of the word "absolute" implies an unwarranted certainty and precision.[1][2] Absolute dating provides a computed numerical age in contrast with relative dating which provides only an order of events.

en.wikipedia.org...

But yes one might wonder how it is possible to know how many times a certain heavenly body orbited a certain star.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

That's why i find the difference. We are similar to apes but different in everyway.

Apes can't modulate words, We are more aken to parrots or ravens in that sense.

they have great night vision. We seemed to take a leap back on that. Their bone density is also higher on he mose scale.
Apes are among the strongest mammals on the planet.

No one wants to relate themselves to whales or dauphins ( I'm sure some people do tho)

We don't look like a bear, We are genetically similar to pigs but no one wants to relate us to boars.

People pick the strongest and smartest animal on the planet and assume we came from them via procreation.
I think apes did evolve into a hominid. That's where sasquatch comes from. And neanderthals? Human and sasquatch hybrids.
Sassy in myths has been known to kidnap people and rape them. As far as lore goes.

Humans have been around for a million years, That's plenty of time to leave some highly dense hybrid bones around.
I however think that if humans did branch off sasquatch that it was done with alien technology.

Given the fact. What would mate with a sasquatch in order to create a human? You don't just jump from rib throat head navel, rearangement of the thumb and as well as the toes. If you compared a human to an ape footprint the difference is quite striking. Tho they are most similar animals on this planet to us. We are clearly different. And don't forget about the neck.

Primates don't have a neck like we do, They do have a neck but it sits on their shouldiers. The closest primate to our neck is a chimp. And even then it's stil iffy. Some of the other monkies such as howler monkies would have a better similarty.

Dinosaurs existed for a while. It's like some giant hominid ape downgraded and survived as well. Just like how the dinosaurs downgraded in order to become birds because of the change in atmosphere, the drop in oxygen really cut off the complexity in life that existed in those times.

Humans probably wern't around during those times, But then again it would be hard to estimate the time of things since impacts from asteroids can increase the age of the area around it. Likewise if a supposed superadvanced society (Human or alien) Decided to nuke the entire planet it would most certainly leave layers of decaying material. if such a scenario did happen it would really mess with out system of calculation. In such a scenario we would just assume some cataklysmic event took place. With a large presence of decaying particles.

I think Earth has a rather interesting history.
And i am not saying that evolution does not occure because it does, But the circumstances in how we came about may not be natural. Given the leap backwards when suposedly sasquatch is alive to this day.

I think at some point they will even get smarter, and when that happens they will realize what we are and fight to reclaim their planet.

Full on planet of the apes. Assuming we don't nuke the planet by then. Or aliens either lol. But who knows maybe one day they will have their revenge.

originally posted by: AnuTyr
a reply to: IndependentAgent

depends when they were formed.

You could be looking at a layer that has lots of carbon-14 and a layer above or below that is seemingly absent of it.

An anomoly like that means something violent occured to spread that layer of decaying material.

Of course you have citations to support the statements you're making in regards to 14C testing, right? Because everything you are saying completely contradicts the known science. Especially the intimation that ratios of 14c are going to vary in the way you seem to misunderstand it to. You are only going to date specific, organic objects. Not geologic layers.

So carbon dating rock dirt columns would be extremely hard unless of course you knew when those events occured. Then you can estimate how long ago it occured and the percentage of c-14 within that specific event. Compared to layers showing calming times. However, It is impossible to know the time of when such an event occured using c-14. Because you need a sample of the original untainted material (Before the event) and the material forged shortly after.
Which is impossible because you would need a time machine to do it.

Carbon dating rock/dirt columns is absolutely impossible. 14c can only be used to test organic material, not rocks, not dirt and not minerals. Your statements about estimating how much 14c was in a related event are completely off track and not at all how this dating method works. 14c decays at a constant rate based on the ratios of the matter you are dating. 14c is absorbed at a comstant rate while the organism is alive, there are no massive influx or loss of 14c due to outside events. The only calculation you need to make is based on the amount in the material being tested multiplied by the constant rate of decay( this is a drastic over simplification) to discern when that material originally died +/- the margin of error

Of course we can estimate C-14 from events that happen on Earth well we are still alive.

Take mount ST.Helans. When it erupted a couple years ago within hours of errupting it had dumped layers upon layers of sedimentary rock surrounding the volcano. One day the ridge was normal, the next. Layers upon layers of sediment from the eruption had settled.

When tested with carbon dating. The ammount of C-14 in the sediment suggested that the sediment was hundreds of thousands of years old.

Since we know the time of the event, We know that. The minerals may be 100 thousand said years old. But what we do know is even those its 100 thousand years old it can still layer itself in a day or 2. If we had missed this event, no one would of been the wiser....

Not sure where you're coming across this terribly erroneous information but the tests done on the material from the '86 St. Helens eruption was based on K-Ar, potassium/argon dating. 14c played no role in this whatsoever. On top of that, when you have a legitimate organic sample for testing, the uppermost limits of 14c dating is 50-60KYA. nowehere in the realm of the hundreds of thousands of years you imply.

its a totally different thing to say a rock is 100 thousand years and another to have it land in piles around you seemlingly having been there *forever* when it showed up in a day or less.

If that were actually what happened, yes I would agree. However, Dr. Austin who conducted the testing that gave incorrect argon levels(the only questionable dating associated w/ Mt St. Helens I could find) was using a machine that was optimally used in instances with high levels of argon present. As this was not the case, he technically ignored the manufacturers protocols in order to make a hasty rush to judgement.

Here is a decent overview of the case in question

skeptoid.com...

Another interesting thing to note is, Despite how much procreation we do. Humans don't change morphologically.

Take dogs or cats for instance.

a couple thousand years of selective breeding and we have gone from wolves to the Pomeranian, the poodle, to a pug.

Yet people have been intermingling for many thousands of years. And we havn't changed at all compared to the animals we alter around us.

Some species just don't change very well under a selective breeding program. Canines and felines are part of a very similar family and so their morphology is quite expendable.

But as for us?
Has racial intermingling really turned us into midgets that are 10 times smaller than the original? I haven't seen any evidence of this. Sure we have dwarfs who are inflicted with a disease that can be debilitating and even cut their life expectancy dramatically.

Despite this fact, many felines and canines live typically around the same ages. Both dogs and cats can live to be over 20 years old. But find a 20 year old lion that doesn't have arthritis and that will be somewhat difficult. They have been known to live up to 29 years. But who here hasn't heard about a 29 year old house cat that just won't die?

I know by that point they are very frail and weak owners tend to put them down before they even reach that age.

The Egyptian Serval has really changed from its savanah livestyle to the house cat we have today.
The first tamed felines were as big as medium sized dogs. Selective breeding has reduced their size.

Now if we get into selective breeding with humans. We get into issues like eugenics in ww2 when Hitler was using *selective* breeding to spawn blond hair and blue eyes individuals. The problem with this tho is humans cannot be selectively bred.

If it was so, Is there any evidence? Because as is i don't see any on the table.

a reply to: peter vlar

What do you think the micro-organisms floating in the air are made of? Methane? Hydrogen?

Almost all life on Earth (except subterrainian, and the odd microbes in isolated lakes) is carbon based.

Unless you are digging in the desert, if there is moisture there is life and where there is life on Earth there is Carbon.

Richly dense areas of vegitation, plant animal and insect life would have lots of carbon 14 develop there. However should a blast incinerate a landscape, all that ash is going to have carbon in it as well as the other elements and compounds. Which rains down as ash and layers across the surface. Which later can be read as a high percentage of C-14.

But it dosn't last for long, There are other elements that would be decaying under such circumstances. Cabon dating is only good up to 80,000 years. Thus anything older than that, which would have a small ammount of c-14 would be older then 80,000 years old.

We may not beable to read C-14 from explosions of the like which killed the dinosaurs. but we can read other decaying material that may have formed during such an event.

I guess i got confused over the different measurements they read in order to tell time apart. But i'v read so many posts where people call a measured reading c-14 even if the study wasn't even about carbon. Such as posts saying they can carbon date a fossile to millions of years lol. When there is hardly if any carbon left at all.



radio carbon reading

Yet samples of material analysis of rocks believed to be millions of years old, do contain tiny (microscopic) fragments of shells, bone, graphite (wood) and other organic materials. Marble is metamorphosed limestone (calcium carbonate) and has been studied for other reasons many times. The compositional analysis of its contents from these studies have been published in many scientific journals. These studies always show some amount of C-14 in the details ( that should not be there), but it is recorded – just not commented on in the publications.

And that's some interesting information about the guy who did the Argon reading.

I think i might of sped through some of the material as i learned about the issues with mt st helen quite a while ago. But thanks for pinpointing my error with accuracy.

originally posted by: AnuTyr
a reply to: peter vlar

What do you think the micro-organisms floating in the air are made of? Methane? Hydrogen?

Almost all life on Earth (except subterrainian, and the odd microbes in isolated lakes) is carbon based.

Unless you are digging in the desert, if there is moisture there is life and where there is life on Earth there is Carbon.

Richly dense areas of vegitation, plant animal and insect life would have lots of carbon 14 develop there. However should a blast incinerate a landscape, all that ash is going to have carbon in it as well as the other elements and compounds. Which rains down as ash and layers across the surface. Which later can be read as a high percentage of C-14.

No, that's not how it works at all. Yes, all life on earth is carbon based. Where you're going off course is in that there are 3 naturally occurring isotopes of Carbon on Earth.C-12,C-13 & C-14. C12 is 99% of all the carbon on Earth. C-13 is another 1% and C-14 is in scant trace amounts in the atmosphere. The concentration of 14c in the atmosphere is approx. 0000000001% or 1 part per trillion. The fact that there are such small amounts in the atmosphere and that it has a co stat rate of decay makes it excellent as a baseline and measurement factor. Either way, you're rumination of c14 samples from Mt. St. Helens dating to hundreds of thousands of years is an outright lie. If you can't be bothered to get such basic aspects of the dating methodology correct and then use that for the basis of your other claims, you dont really have any ground to stand on.

Plants fix atmospheric carbon during photosynthesis, so the level of 14C in plants and animals when they die approximately equals the level of 14C in the atmosphere at that time. However, it decreases thereafter from radioactive decay, allowing the date of death or fixation to be estimated. The initial 14C level for the calculation can either be estimated, or else directly compared with known year-by-year data from tree-ring data (dendrochronology) up to 10,000 years ago (using overlapping data from live and dead trees in a given area), or else from cave deposits (speleothems), back to about 45,000 years before the present. A calculation or (more accurately) a direct comparison of carbon-14 levels in a sample, with tree ring or cave-deposit carbon-14 levels of a known age, then gives the wood or animal sample age-since-formation.

originally posted by: AnuTyr

Take dogs or cats for instance.

a couple thousand years of selective breeding and we have gone from wolves to the Pomeranian, the poodle, to a pug.

Yet people have been intermingling for many thousands of years. And we havn't changed at all compared to the animals we alter around us.

Some species just don't change very well under a selective breeding program. Canines and felines are part of a very similar family and so their morphology is quite expendable.

But as for us?
Has racial intermingling really turned us into midgets that are 10 times smaller than the original? I haven't seen any evidence of this. Sure we have dwarfs who are inflicted with a disease that can be debilitating and even cut their life expectancy dramatically....

I'm not sure what you are getting at, because humans are not (for the most part) selectively bred like dogs are.

We can create a breed of small white dogs by selectively breeding the smallest and whitest dogs from each litter. Similarly, if several humans dwarfs were separated from the rest of society into their own society, and then selectively bred, creating a concerted effort to breed dwarfs with dwarfs for several generations, you would end up with a society of dwarfs that was selectively bred.

We can breed 10 generations of dogs in 25 or 30 years to make them smaller. If the Nazis were allowed to continue their eugenics program for 10 generations (say 200 or 250 years), then maybe they would have had their society of blond-haired blue-eyed Aryans.

But as it is, humans mix. Taller humans marry shorter humans; blond-haired humans breed with deark-haired humans. Gingers from Great Britain marry olive-skinned Sicilians.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Actually you are wrong. And sorta right. The chances of getting another dwarf baby are high. However its not a garentee.

Tho this does not apply to dogs because if you breed small dogs you will only get small dogs. I have yet to see a small dog give birth to a dobermane. But Dwarfs have procreated together, and made a normal sized humans.

The thing about small dogs is, its not a disease its an adaptation. Where as dwarfism is considered a disease.

Pigmes are probably the closest thing to selective human we can get, And the difference is not much from Asians to them. The pigmies were within the 4.2-5 foot range where as the white traveller would of been a foot or 2 taller then them. However if they keep breeding they won't get any smaller. I guess you could try putting a dwarf and a pigmy together and see what happens. I just havn't seen any evidence of such yet lol and as far as i know. This topic is now getting pretty offensive. Dwarfs. Pigmys. I have no hate or distaine towards you. I envy your ability to fully enjoy a cake.

originally posted by: AnuTyr
a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Actually you are wrong. And sorta right. The chances of getting another dwarf baby are high. However its not a garentee.

Tho this does not apply to dogs because if you breed small dogs you will only get small dogs. I have yet to see a small dog give birth to a dobermane. But Dwarfs have procreated together, and made a normal sized humans.

For small dogs, it has been many, many generations since their last "big dog" ancestor, so the genes for "big dog" are buried very very deep in their genome. I bet the first few generations at trying to breed the dogs that would eventually become toy poodles yielded some large poodles as part of the litters.

Drawfs, on the other hand, may have had normal sized ancestors just a couple generations back. If some evil scientist developed a 25-generation/500-year breeding program for dwarfs on some secluded island, I suspect that after 25 generations and 500 years, the probability of a normal sized person being born would be close to nil. After the first three generations of that breeding program, the probability would have been higher.

The same for the Nazi Aryans. A not-so-genetically pure blond-haired blue-eyed couple in 1940 could have possibly had a brown-eyed child. However, after 500 years of Nazi's allowing only blond-haired blue-eyed people to mate, you can bet that brown-eyed children would not be likely at all.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

That can be debated lol but as for dating the Earth, it's not going to be easy. There are lot's of veriables and even theories that are made out to be concrete will shift in the future.

originally posted by: stosh64
Could you show me where mythology states the earth is young? Just because some interpret it that way doesn't mean that is what it says.

This clip is about young earth creationism versus science, and mythology that places the Earth's age at 10,000 years old. I'm not an expert in this area but you apparently start with the story of genesis and Adam, and estimate lifespans for all the generations who "begat" other generations, and get something like 6000-10,000 years.

The scientist admits at about 4:30 that the young Earth creationists could be right about the Earth being 10,000 years old, and science can't prove them wrong, if God created the Earth 10,000 years ago but did so to make it appear to be much older. So, he says, it all boils down to whether or not observations about the natural world have meaning. Scientists believe they do. You pretty much have to believe they don't to buy the young Earth creation mythology:

Dr Hazen discussing young earth claims versus science


Personally I think the scientific estimate of plus or minus 50 million years on the age of the Earth is somewhat optimistic in terms of accuracy. If later scientific findings put the age of the Earth at 4.1 or 4.9 billion years old, it wouldn't bother me. I do think between 4-5 billion years old is probably accurate but I'd note that range is 4.5 billion years plus or minus 500 million years, so a much larger range than claimed by science.

I think it's highly unlikely that any future revision of the estimate of Earth's age will fall outside the 4-5 billion years of age range.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
...The scientist admits at about 4:30 that the young Earth creationists could be right about the Earth being 10,000 years old, and science can't prove them wrong, if God created the Earth 10,000 years ago but did so to make it appear to be much older. ...

Well, if they are going to say that, then they may as well say that God created the universe only 150 years ago, and the physical stuff we see and the historical memories we have as a society were all artificially put here by that God to appear much older than 150 years...

...prove me wrong.


Heck -- we could have been put in this brand-new universe that was created only yesterday, and God artificially implanted false memories of the past in our heads.

a reply to: IndependentAgent

On the contrary, as the author, your opinion of the age of the earth is central to this discussion.

By deigning not to answer this simple query your motives for starting this thread appear questionable, and your avoidance tactics are clear.

You have posited that "science" can't be trusted in your OP, which is quite a big statement, and fly's in the face of many brilliant minds and human knowledge that have developed many methodologies for estimating the age of the earth.

Is your question a general question about honesty in "science"?, or specifically about the age of the earth?

If it's about the earth, and we conclude that science isn't to be trusted... ever... then what number do we put on the age of the earth, and how do we arrive at that number?

I think that current techniques that place the age of the earth between 4 to 5 billion years old are correct... if that's wrong, then a good place to further the discussion is your opinion on the age of the earth, then we can examine the merit of both theories and see which ones stand up to scrutiny.

So how old do you think the earth is? And why?

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People
Science can't reject those alternate hypotheses with 100% certainty either. Once you reject observations of the natural world as your source, then anything's possible, be it a literal interpretation of the bible making the Earth 6000 years old, or false memories making it only 150 years old or less, or even the Matrix movie plot where nothing we see is real and it's all a computer simulation. The ideas you mentioned have been used in several plots for science fiction stories, as they aren't scientifically impossible, just very, very, very unlikely.

My agenda? Someone in a different thread said to the the fact that people place to much trust in anything that was said after "Scientists have discovered". I thought that maybe I can use this topic to explore that.

My personal opinion is that the earth is 7000 years old.

a reply to: IndependentAgent

My personal opinion is that the earth is 7000 years old.

That's much more reasonable than 6,000.