1
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:06,080
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks

2
00:00:06,120 --> 00:00:14,160
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, are you welcome to step to Blow

3
00:00:14,160 --> 00:00:17,000
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.

4
00:00:17,040 --> 00:00:20,000
Speaker 1: And this is part two of our two part exploration

5
00:00:20,560 --> 00:00:22,720
Speaker 1: of the Age of the Earth. If you have not

6
00:00:22,880 --> 00:00:25,680
Speaker 1: heard part one of this episode, you should go back

7
00:00:25,720 --> 00:00:27,760
Speaker 1: and listen to that first. That's really gonna lay the

8
00:00:27,760 --> 00:00:31,200
Speaker 1: groundwork for everything we're talking about today. In the last episode,

9
00:00:31,240 --> 00:00:34,279
Speaker 1: we talked about why we're addressing this topic even though

10
00:00:34,320 --> 00:00:38,600
Speaker 1: it's a topic that there is not legitimate scientific controversy about.

11
00:00:38,840 --> 00:00:42,720
Speaker 1: There's no real scientific argument about whether the Earth is

12
00:00:42,800 --> 00:00:46,159
Speaker 1: billions of years old or younger. Uh, it is billions

13
00:00:46,159 --> 00:00:49,600
Speaker 1: of years old. But we are addressing it because we've

14
00:00:49,680 --> 00:00:52,960
Speaker 1: we've frequently gotten mail from listeners asking us to help

15
00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:56,600
Speaker 1: them sort out and understand the differences in claims about

16
00:00:56,600 --> 00:01:00,000
Speaker 1: the age of the Earth. So we're on that adventure now. Yeah,

17
00:01:00,040 --> 00:01:02,280
Speaker 1: and if you listen to the first episode, I don't

18
00:01:02,520 --> 00:01:05,320
Speaker 1: I do want to just tell everybody this one is

19
00:01:05,319 --> 00:01:07,880
Speaker 1: is definitely worth listening to as well. It's not all

20
00:01:07,920 --> 00:01:10,759
Speaker 1: gonna be elements and isotopes. There's gonna be some cool

21
00:01:10,800 --> 00:01:14,399
Speaker 1: history in here. There's gonna be some some other dynamic

22
00:01:14,720 --> 00:01:17,520
Speaker 1: geologic examples. So there's a there's a lot of cool

23
00:01:17,560 --> 00:01:20,600
Speaker 1: stuff in this episode. Even if you don't need convincing

24
00:01:20,640 --> 00:01:23,080
Speaker 1: about the scientific consensus about the age of the Earth,

25
00:01:23,360 --> 00:01:27,240
Speaker 1: or you don't need uh ammunition for arguments with people

26
00:01:27,240 --> 00:01:29,760
Speaker 1: who do hold onto a some sort of a h

27
00:01:30,040 --> 00:01:32,800
Speaker 1: a young Earth view. Uh, there's gonna be a lot

28
00:01:32,840 --> 00:01:35,920
Speaker 1: of fun in this episode regardless. Robert, I say, we

29
00:01:35,959 --> 00:01:39,360
Speaker 1: should meet a scientist named Claire c. Patterson, who I

30
00:01:39,400 --> 00:01:42,440
Speaker 1: will hereafter call the Lord of Lead. Lord of lad

31
00:01:42,480 --> 00:01:46,520
Speaker 1: does sound a lot more metal, I will say, well,

32
00:01:46,560 --> 00:01:49,160
Speaker 1: Claire Claire was a Lord of lad He. Claire Cameron

33
00:01:49,160 --> 00:01:53,040
Speaker 1: Patterson lived nineteen twenty two to nineteen and he was

34
00:01:53,080 --> 00:01:55,960
Speaker 1: a geochemist on the faculty at cal Tech and a

35
00:01:56,000 --> 00:01:58,880
Speaker 1: member of the National Academy of Sciences. According to his

36
00:01:58,920 --> 00:02:01,520
Speaker 1: New York Times A Bitch Worry by William Dick, he

37
00:02:01,560 --> 00:02:03,880
Speaker 1: had something of a reputation as sort of a rebel

38
00:02:04,000 --> 00:02:07,960
Speaker 1: and an outlier in his field, and Barclay cam who

39
00:02:08,040 --> 00:02:11,520
Speaker 1: was provost at Caltech in the nineteen eighties, once said

40
00:02:11,560 --> 00:02:15,440
Speaker 1: that Patterson's thinking and imagination were quote so far ahead

41
00:02:15,440 --> 00:02:18,480
Speaker 1: of the times that he has often gone misunderstood and

42
00:02:18,560 --> 00:02:22,480
Speaker 1: unappreciated for years until his colleagues finally caught up and

43
00:02:22,560 --> 00:02:25,720
Speaker 1: realized he was right. Nothing to inflate your ego like

44
00:02:25,800 --> 00:02:31,040
Speaker 1: somebody saying everybody will finally realize he's right. And speaking

45
00:02:31,040 --> 00:02:34,480
Speaker 1: to an article in USA Today, the Caltech geologist John

46
00:02:34,520 --> 00:02:37,920
Speaker 1: Eisler described him as fearless and said quote wherever the

47
00:02:37,960 --> 00:02:41,240
Speaker 1: science took him, he would follow. And so Patterson was

48
00:02:41,320 --> 00:02:44,520
Speaker 1: reportedly sometimes critical of colleagues who he might have referred

49
00:02:44,520 --> 00:02:48,600
Speaker 1: to as ivory tower scientists. His research was definitely not

50
00:02:48,800 --> 00:02:53,520
Speaker 1: confined to arcane academic matters. He got down into the world,

51
00:02:53,639 --> 00:02:56,600
Speaker 1: into stuff that that had an impact on human life

52
00:02:57,160 --> 00:03:01,160
Speaker 1: and for one thing, much of Patterson's important, most important

53
00:03:01,160 --> 00:03:05,240
Speaker 1: work focused on measuring and contrasting levels of lead in

54
00:03:05,320 --> 00:03:09,480
Speaker 1: the atmosphere at various times in history, and as the

55
00:03:09,560 --> 00:03:13,000
Speaker 1: Lord of Lead, Patterson, using a variety of methods, demonstrated

56
00:03:13,040 --> 00:03:15,760
Speaker 1: that people in the twentieth century were taking in these

57
00:03:15,960 --> 00:03:20,480
Speaker 1: enormous doses of lead contamination in their bodies, uh much

58
00:03:20,520 --> 00:03:23,960
Speaker 1: more than their prehistoric ancestors had consumed, and this exposure

59
00:03:23,960 --> 00:03:26,960
Speaker 1: to lead has extreme consequences on the health of humans

60
00:03:26,960 --> 00:03:30,080
Speaker 1: and other organisms. Lead gets in you. It effects everything

61
00:03:30,120 --> 00:03:33,320
Speaker 1: from the brain to the kidneys. Um to quote from

62
00:03:33,320 --> 00:03:36,600
Speaker 1: his New York Times obituary quote, he sampled snow from

63
00:03:36,600 --> 00:03:39,760
Speaker 1: the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica that had fallen

64
00:03:39,840 --> 00:03:42,720
Speaker 1: hundreds or thousands of years earlier, showing there had been

65
00:03:42,760 --> 00:03:46,040
Speaker 1: significant increases in lead in the northern Hemisphere when the

66
00:03:46,040 --> 00:03:50,320
Speaker 1: Greeks and Romans smelted lead in antiquity. He discovered that

67
00:03:50,360 --> 00:03:52,840
Speaker 1: millions of years ago, the amount of lead stored in

68
00:03:52,920 --> 00:03:56,960
Speaker 1: microscopic plant and animal life or plankton in ocean sediments

69
00:03:57,040 --> 00:03:59,960
Speaker 1: was only one tenth to one on the amount now

70
00:04:00,080 --> 00:04:04,440
Speaker 1: flowing into the oceans from the continents. And so Patterson's

71
00:04:04,480 --> 00:04:07,000
Speaker 1: research helped form the basis of the case for the

72
00:04:07,040 --> 00:04:10,120
Speaker 1: Clean Air Act of nineteen seventy and the elimination of

73
00:04:10,200 --> 00:04:13,640
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline, which was the biggest single cause of lead

74
00:04:13,680 --> 00:04:16,440
Speaker 1: pollution in the environment at the time. All right, well,

75
00:04:16,480 --> 00:04:18,240
Speaker 1: this is all, this is all well and good. I mean,

76
00:04:18,240 --> 00:04:21,080
Speaker 1: this is great. Uh, but where does this where does

77
00:04:21,120 --> 00:04:24,240
Speaker 1: he come into our discussion of the age of the Earth. Well,

78
00:04:24,480 --> 00:04:28,600
Speaker 1: Patterson was also the first person to make an accurate

79
00:04:28,720 --> 00:04:31,040
Speaker 1: estimate of the age of the Earth and the Solar System,

80
00:04:31,240 --> 00:04:34,719
Speaker 1: which he published in the nineteen fifties based on the

81
00:04:34,760 --> 00:04:38,720
Speaker 1: accumulating body of knowledge about radioactive decay. Now, if you

82
00:04:38,800 --> 00:04:41,800
Speaker 1: remember in the previous episode, one of the types of

83
00:04:41,880 --> 00:04:47,080
Speaker 1: radiometric dating we talked about was uranium lead dating, and

84
00:04:47,480 --> 00:04:50,880
Speaker 1: so that studies the decay of a radioactive isotope of

85
00:04:51,000 --> 00:04:55,880
Speaker 1: uranium into lead over millions of years, and so specifically,

86
00:04:55,920 --> 00:04:58,400
Speaker 1: in Patterson's case, the key was to look at the

87
00:04:58,440 --> 00:05:01,400
Speaker 1: Solar system at law to find out how old the

88
00:05:01,400 --> 00:05:04,680
Speaker 1: Earth was. Since the evidence indicated that everything in the

89
00:05:04,680 --> 00:05:08,320
Speaker 1: Solar System was formed around the same time, Patterson and

90
00:05:08,360 --> 00:05:11,400
Speaker 1: others realized they could study the decay of uranium and

91
00:05:11,480 --> 00:05:16,560
Speaker 1: thorium into daughter isotopes of lead in meteorites to determine

92
00:05:16,560 --> 00:05:19,960
Speaker 1: the age of the Solar System objects, including the Earth,

93
00:05:20,160 --> 00:05:22,160
Speaker 1: and so in the nineteen fifties, I think the late

94
00:05:22,160 --> 00:05:25,560
Speaker 1: forties and early late forties and the fifties, Patterson used

95
00:05:25,600 --> 00:05:29,640
Speaker 1: mass spectrometry to study Earth based zircons. Those are these

96
00:05:29,640 --> 00:05:32,640
Speaker 1: little crystals I talked about in the previous episode that

97
00:05:32,760 --> 00:05:36,840
Speaker 1: are usually formed with zirconium atoms in them, but sometimes

98
00:05:36,880 --> 00:05:40,880
Speaker 1: get radioactive uranium atoms lodged into them, and these the

99
00:05:40,960 --> 00:05:46,040
Speaker 1: decay of these radioactive uranium atoms inside the zircon crystals

100
00:05:46,320 --> 00:05:49,560
Speaker 1: can be used to date the crystals. So he was

101
00:05:49,560 --> 00:05:53,279
Speaker 1: studying Earth based zircons and uranium lead decay and meteorite

102
00:05:53,320 --> 00:05:57,160
Speaker 1: material and ultimately Patterson was able to pin the date

103
00:05:57,240 --> 00:06:00,400
Speaker 1: of the solar systems accretion including the Earth to about

104
00:06:00,480 --> 00:06:04,039
Speaker 1: four point five billion years, which is still basically the

105
00:06:04,120 --> 00:06:07,159
Speaker 1: accurate figure. And I love this link between his work

106
00:06:07,240 --> 00:06:11,520
Speaker 1: on like environmental contaminants and and lead in human life,

107
00:06:12,040 --> 00:06:15,160
Speaker 1: uh to to studying the very origin of the Earth.

108
00:06:15,240 --> 00:06:17,640
Speaker 1: That's that's some of the best stuff in science. When

109
00:06:18,080 --> 00:06:20,960
Speaker 1: when knowledge gets applied in such different ways like that,

110
00:06:21,120 --> 00:06:23,560
Speaker 1: it really gets my gears going right at the human

111
00:06:23,640 --> 00:06:27,600
Speaker 1: level and right at the essentially the god level. So

112
00:06:27,640 --> 00:06:30,359
Speaker 1: earlier I mentioned the quote from John Eiler talking to

113
00:06:30,440 --> 00:06:33,560
Speaker 1: USA Today, UH and Eiler makes this case pretty well.

114
00:06:33,600 --> 00:06:36,240
Speaker 1: He says, quote Patterson is a pretty clear example of

115
00:06:36,279 --> 00:06:40,360
Speaker 1: the link between basic science that seems unrelated to everyday life,

116
00:06:40,680 --> 00:06:42,960
Speaker 1: the age of the Earth, and science that makes a

117
00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:46,839
Speaker 1: crucial difference every moment in our everyday lives. There really

118
00:06:46,920 --> 00:06:49,640
Speaker 1: isn't a difference between the skills the methods and the

119
00:06:49,720 --> 00:06:52,880
Speaker 1: thinking that led him to both discoveries. And that's the

120
00:06:52,920 --> 00:06:56,000
Speaker 1: story of science. And I love that quote because I

121
00:06:56,000 --> 00:06:57,800
Speaker 1: feel like that's sort of the case we're trying to

122
00:06:57,839 --> 00:06:59,800
Speaker 1: make in these episodes, right that there's sort of a

123
00:06:59,800 --> 00:07:04,440
Speaker 1: coherent scientific approach to looking at the world around you.

124
00:07:04,880 --> 00:07:08,080
Speaker 1: And in order to reject the age of the Earth

125
00:07:08,120 --> 00:07:10,239
Speaker 1: and say that the Earth is just a few thousand

126
00:07:10,280 --> 00:07:14,200
Speaker 1: years old, you're not just arguing with a particular method

127
00:07:14,200 --> 00:07:17,080
Speaker 1: of radiometric dating, as we will continue to explore throughout

128
00:07:17,080 --> 00:07:19,920
Speaker 1: the rest of this episode, it's essentially a rebuke of

129
00:07:19,920 --> 00:07:23,240
Speaker 1: the entire scientific way of looking at the world. Yeah,

130
00:07:23,320 --> 00:07:26,240
Speaker 1: it would really force you to throw the trigonometry baby

131
00:07:26,280 --> 00:07:32,120
Speaker 1: into the ocean, and and you shouldn't have to do that. Um. So,

132
00:07:32,640 --> 00:07:35,160
Speaker 1: there are a lot of difficulties Patterson had in his work,

133
00:07:35,240 --> 00:07:39,360
Speaker 1: so he had to develop extremely stringent experimental procedures in

134
00:07:39,440 --> 00:07:42,800
Speaker 1: order to get accurate results. That the Time's obituary talks

135
00:07:42,840 --> 00:07:45,240
Speaker 1: about this. I've read about this elsewhere too, that he

136
00:07:45,400 --> 00:07:49,600
Speaker 1: found that lead contamination was just everywhere. So scientific labs

137
00:07:49,600 --> 00:07:52,840
Speaker 1: are full of lead contaminants because of all all kinds

138
00:07:52,840 --> 00:07:55,960
Speaker 1: of lead pollution. And if you're trying to measure minute

139
00:07:56,080 --> 00:07:59,320
Speaker 1: ratios of lead isotopes inside a hunk of meteorite. You

140
00:07:59,320 --> 00:08:02,280
Speaker 1: don't want to be taminating it with lead from I

141
00:08:02,320 --> 00:08:04,600
Speaker 1: don't know, the car exhaust he walk through on the

142
00:08:04,600 --> 00:08:07,800
Speaker 1: way to the lab, and all other kinds of ambient

143
00:08:07,880 --> 00:08:11,080
Speaker 1: lead that are currently poisoning your body. So he established

144
00:08:11,080 --> 00:08:14,680
Speaker 1: clean room procedures, including like washing your hands and distilled

145
00:08:14,760 --> 00:08:17,240
Speaker 1: water and putting on all the you know, all the

146
00:08:17,560 --> 00:08:19,560
Speaker 1: what are the when people go and work on the

147
00:08:19,640 --> 00:08:22,760
Speaker 1: chips in the laboratories, Those suits and all of this

148
00:08:22,800 --> 00:08:25,760
Speaker 1: should help us notice that radiometric dating has all kinds

149
00:08:25,800 --> 00:08:29,760
Speaker 1: of important caveats, Like pretty much all types of chemical measurement.

150
00:08:30,120 --> 00:08:34,320
Speaker 1: It can be subject to sample contamination, to equipment malfunction,

151
00:08:34,480 --> 00:08:37,280
Speaker 1: to user error, and so forth. And this is why

152
00:08:37,320 --> 00:08:42,000
Speaker 1: it's really important to corroborate any radiometrically generated date with

153
00:08:42,160 --> 00:08:46,920
Speaker 1: multiple tests and if possible, with multiple methods. Also, when possible,

154
00:08:46,960 --> 00:08:50,720
Speaker 1: I think it's better to think about radiometric dating instead

155
00:08:50,760 --> 00:08:53,760
Speaker 1: of giving us a date, giving us sort of confidence

156
00:08:53,880 --> 00:08:57,480
Speaker 1: ratings for different ranges of dates. So, just as an example,

157
00:08:58,480 --> 00:09:01,520
Speaker 1: a radiometric test or series of tests might tell us

158
00:09:01,600 --> 00:09:05,840
Speaker 1: that we're sure that the thing is between four and

159
00:09:05,920 --> 00:09:09,400
Speaker 1: five billion years old, and seventy percent sure that it's

160
00:09:09,400 --> 00:09:12,120
Speaker 1: between four point five and five points or four point

161
00:09:12,200 --> 00:09:15,040
Speaker 1: six billion years old, and that kind of thing, right, Yeah,

162
00:09:15,040 --> 00:09:17,079
Speaker 1: I mean there is there is a certain amount of

163
00:09:17,120 --> 00:09:21,160
Speaker 1: uncertainty baked into the process, right, But it will tell

164
00:09:21,200 --> 00:09:25,400
Speaker 1: you bigger ranges with greater certainty. But what about rocks

165
00:09:25,440 --> 00:09:28,400
Speaker 1: from the Earth itself? This can be more difficult since

166
00:09:28,440 --> 00:09:31,280
Speaker 1: the Earth is just frequently eating and barfing up its

167
00:09:31,280 --> 00:09:34,079
Speaker 1: own crust. It's part of how Earth is. Yeah, it's

168
00:09:34,160 --> 00:09:37,360
Speaker 1: it's it's dynamic. Yeah uh, and this this can be

169
00:09:37,400 --> 00:09:40,760
Speaker 1: more difficult. So rocks from billions of years ago often

170
00:09:40,800 --> 00:09:43,240
Speaker 1: tend to disappear into the bowels of the Earth. They

171
00:09:43,240 --> 00:09:45,160
Speaker 1: get gobbled up in one way or another, they get

172
00:09:45,240 --> 00:09:49,120
Speaker 1: subducted or something like that. But sometimes we can find them.

173
00:09:49,160 --> 00:09:52,280
Speaker 1: And it's pretty common to read about discoveries of increasingly

174
00:09:52,440 --> 00:09:55,360
Speaker 1: ancient rocks found on Earth. Just I was looking at

175
00:09:55,400 --> 00:09:58,040
Speaker 1: a few articles from recent years. One is that um

176
00:09:58,320 --> 00:10:02,400
Speaker 1: rocks from the Acosta Knife in the Northwest territories of Canada.

177
00:10:02,440 --> 00:10:04,960
Speaker 1: And that's nice g N E I S S. That's

178
00:10:04,960 --> 00:10:08,880
Speaker 1: a geological term, not not like, oh, nice um that

179
00:10:09,080 --> 00:10:11,800
Speaker 1: those have been dated to more than four billion years old.

180
00:10:12,960 --> 00:10:15,680
Speaker 1: In September two thousand eight, there was a National Science

181
00:10:15,720 --> 00:10:18,360
Speaker 1: Foundation press release. I was reading about a piece of

182
00:10:18,360 --> 00:10:21,880
Speaker 1: Canadian bedrock from the and I'm sorry if I mispronounced this,

183
00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:26,360
Speaker 1: the Neuvo Agatuck Greenstone Belt, which was dated to between

184
00:10:26,400 --> 00:10:29,400
Speaker 1: three point eight and four point to eight billion years old.

185
00:10:29,800 --> 00:10:33,120
Speaker 1: And then also there is a zircon from the jack

186
00:10:33,200 --> 00:10:36,280
Speaker 1: Hills of Western Australia that's been dated to over four

187
00:10:36,320 --> 00:10:39,959
Speaker 1: billion years I think about four point four billion years old.

188
00:10:40,360 --> 00:10:42,600
Speaker 1: So here and there we find little bits of the

189
00:10:42,640 --> 00:10:45,160
Speaker 1: surface of the Earth that seemed to go almost all

190
00:10:45,200 --> 00:10:47,880
Speaker 1: the way back to the beginning and certainly back before

191
00:10:47,960 --> 00:10:50,840
Speaker 1: say that's six thousand year point. Yeah, I mean they're

192
00:10:50,880 --> 00:10:54,440
Speaker 1: they're not just quibbling with the six thousand year point.

193
00:10:54,480 --> 00:10:58,040
Speaker 1: They're saying it is so many orders of magnitude off.

194
00:10:58,880 --> 00:11:01,320
Speaker 1: As we said that, they just of confidence intervals. They

195
00:11:01,320 --> 00:11:03,840
Speaker 1: don't tell you an exact date. So you know, you

196
00:11:03,880 --> 00:11:07,400
Speaker 1: could quibble here or there with calibrating the correct date

197
00:11:07,440 --> 00:11:10,040
Speaker 1: of these rocks, but they're not going to calibrate orders

198
00:11:10,080 --> 00:11:12,559
Speaker 1: of magnitude down. It just comes back to what I

199
00:11:12,760 --> 00:11:15,880
Speaker 1: said in the last episode about the difference between the

200
00:11:15,880 --> 00:11:18,719
Speaker 1: scale of human history and the scale of geologic history,

201
00:11:19,120 --> 00:11:23,360
Speaker 1: religion and myth with with a with some notable exceptions

202
00:11:23,880 --> 00:11:27,000
Speaker 1: tend to take place within human history because it is

203
00:11:27,040 --> 00:11:29,800
Speaker 1: a product of human understanding. That's a good point. Our

204
00:11:29,840 --> 00:11:34,840
Speaker 1: our minds are just not made to contemplate time scales

205
00:11:34,960 --> 00:11:38,480
Speaker 1: like this. It's not I would argue, actually, it's not

206
00:11:38,720 --> 00:11:43,240
Speaker 1: just theological beliefs that drive people to want to imagine

207
00:11:43,600 --> 00:11:45,760
Speaker 1: a younger Earth. I think. I mean, it's also like,

208
00:11:45,960 --> 00:11:48,640
Speaker 1: if you want to wrap your brain around the history

209
00:11:48,679 --> 00:11:50,520
Speaker 1: of the Earth, you're not going to be able to

210
00:11:50,600 --> 00:11:53,080
Speaker 1: do it with a four point five billion year old Earth.

211
00:11:53,160 --> 00:11:56,040
Speaker 1: You're not really picturing that time. You're just sort of

212
00:11:56,080 --> 00:12:00,240
Speaker 1: condensing it into a representation of a timeline you can

213
00:12:00,360 --> 00:12:03,200
Speaker 1: kind of picture, right, I mean they I mean, how

214
00:12:03,200 --> 00:12:06,959
Speaker 1: do you put that into a perspective of generations? Right,

215
00:12:07,440 --> 00:12:10,079
Speaker 1: and and and so and so begot so and so,

216
00:12:10,200 --> 00:12:11,959
Speaker 1: you know, I mean it doesn't work right, I mean,

217
00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:14,480
Speaker 1: And I mean and I'm not just you know, harping

218
00:12:14,520 --> 00:12:17,800
Speaker 1: on you know, books of the Bible or anything here,

219
00:12:17,880 --> 00:12:21,640
Speaker 1: but just the human perspective, the human shape of things,

220
00:12:21,679 --> 00:12:24,880
Speaker 1: Like we just have a tendency to understand those better,

221
00:12:24,920 --> 00:12:28,320
Speaker 1: to understand those stories better. Again, the the appeal of

222
00:12:28,360 --> 00:12:33,000
Speaker 1: storytelling versus the kind of data that is involved in

223
00:12:33,000 --> 00:12:37,800
Speaker 1: in rigorous scientific understanding. Yeah, and I mean we are

224
00:12:37,840 --> 00:12:41,719
Speaker 1: always vulnerable to this. Stories are more compelling. Stories are

225
00:12:41,720 --> 00:12:43,960
Speaker 1: more compelling than data. They shouldn't be. I mean, the

226
00:12:44,040 --> 00:12:47,040
Speaker 1: data are actually more reliable. But what are people going

227
00:12:47,080 --> 00:12:50,199
Speaker 1: to remember better a story? What's going to connect better

228
00:12:50,240 --> 00:12:53,960
Speaker 1: with people emotionally is a story. Even even people who

229
00:12:54,000 --> 00:12:57,560
Speaker 1: try to be scientifically minded are highly vulnerable to stories.

230
00:12:57,600 --> 00:13:03,080
Speaker 1: I think about the most if effective science communication books

231
00:13:03,520 --> 00:13:07,320
Speaker 1: try to be story based. Like in in our last episode,

232
00:13:07,440 --> 00:13:08,800
Speaker 1: you know, there was a point where we had to

233
00:13:08,840 --> 00:13:11,960
Speaker 1: talk about radioisotopes and stuff like that in order to

234
00:13:12,000 --> 00:13:16,560
Speaker 1: explain how how radioactive decay works. But talking about how

235
00:13:16,760 --> 00:13:20,360
Speaker 1: radioisotopes decay is not as compelling as like telling the

236
00:13:20,400 --> 00:13:23,720
Speaker 1: story of the Lord of Lead anyway, I mean to

237
00:13:23,760 --> 00:13:26,440
Speaker 1: derail the conversation. I can I can talk all day

238
00:13:26,440 --> 00:13:29,480
Speaker 1: about you know, science and religion and where and where

239
00:13:29,520 --> 00:13:32,200
Speaker 1: and when they can line up and and um and

240
00:13:32,200 --> 00:13:34,760
Speaker 1: and support each other. Really, you mean like we need

241
00:13:34,800 --> 00:13:38,200
Speaker 1: to create new religious narratives that that that help people

242
00:13:38,240 --> 00:13:41,000
Speaker 1: confirm scientific knowledge, or I mean part of it is

243
00:13:41,000 --> 00:13:43,280
Speaker 1: realizing what kind of answers religion can provide versus what

244
00:13:43,360 --> 00:13:46,360
Speaker 1: kind of answers uh science can provide. Um. It's been

245
00:13:46,400 --> 00:13:50,480
Speaker 1: pointed out, for instance, that uh, you can take the

246
00:13:50,559 --> 00:13:54,320
Speaker 1: question why and they're they're essentially two different versions of why.

247
00:13:54,440 --> 00:13:57,480
Speaker 1: There's a causal why, and there's a teleological why. There's

248
00:13:57,520 --> 00:14:01,320
Speaker 1: the why like why is this, Why did this happen?

249
00:14:01,400 --> 00:14:05,200
Speaker 1: What is the thing uh that preceded it? What was

250
00:14:05,240 --> 00:14:08,360
Speaker 1: the process physical chain of events that caused it? Right?

251
00:14:08,400 --> 00:14:10,559
Speaker 1: And then on the other hand that the telological why

252
00:14:11,000 --> 00:14:15,240
Speaker 1: is for what reason is this as it is? For

253
00:14:15,320 --> 00:14:19,120
Speaker 1: what reason? Am I? What I am? And so um

254
00:14:19,240 --> 00:14:22,320
Speaker 1: I mean, broadly speaking, you can say that religion can

255
00:14:22,360 --> 00:14:28,240
Speaker 1: provide the teleological and science provides the causal Um. Religion

256
00:14:28,320 --> 00:14:31,720
Speaker 1: is very good at providing a sense of narrative, as

257
00:14:31,760 --> 00:14:33,640
Speaker 1: we were just talking about narratives and stories, a sense

258
00:14:33,680 --> 00:14:37,920
Speaker 1: of narrative or story that that makes sense of things.

259
00:14:38,440 --> 00:14:40,760
Speaker 1: But again, I don't mean to derail the conversation. I

260
00:14:40,800 --> 00:14:42,720
Speaker 1: could talk about that all day. Well, yeah, but I

261
00:14:42,720 --> 00:14:44,120
Speaker 1: guess I guess we've got to get back to the

262
00:14:44,160 --> 00:14:46,040
Speaker 1: idea of what we're setting out to talk about we

263
00:14:46,040 --> 00:14:49,240
Speaker 1: have a lot of impersonal geology to unpack here. No,

264
00:14:49,400 --> 00:14:51,880
Speaker 1: we'll try to make it as personal it's and it's

265
00:14:51,920 --> 00:14:54,840
Speaker 1: exciting stuff. It is dynamic. We're talking about the stuff

266
00:14:54,880 --> 00:14:58,440
Speaker 1: of of you know, earthquakes and volcanoes here. So so

267
00:14:58,760 --> 00:15:01,040
Speaker 1: you might be thinking, you you've heard us talk about

268
00:15:01,120 --> 00:15:05,400
Speaker 1: radio isotope decay, about radiometric dating, about Claire Patterson, and

269
00:15:05,440 --> 00:15:08,920
Speaker 1: you think, yeah, but how do we know these methods

270
00:15:08,920 --> 00:15:11,360
Speaker 1: of dating the Earth actually work? Like are we just

271
00:15:11,480 --> 00:15:14,200
Speaker 1: taking some scientist's word for it? Like what if a

272
00:15:14,240 --> 00:15:18,200
Speaker 1: scientist is lying and saying it works but it doesn't. Really,

273
00:15:18,760 --> 00:15:23,600
Speaker 1: that's not really a plausible critique because like the yes,

274
00:15:23,680 --> 00:15:28,240
Speaker 1: but what if it wasn't response? I can explain why

275
00:15:28,240 --> 00:15:31,240
Speaker 1: it's not a plausible critique. And one strong line of

276
00:15:31,280 --> 00:15:36,400
Speaker 1: evidence is when multiple independent tests with different methods produce

277
00:15:36,560 --> 00:15:39,240
Speaker 1: results that are in agreement with each other. The simple

278
00:15:39,360 --> 00:15:41,840
Speaker 1: version of this is, um, how do you know when

279
00:15:41,920 --> 00:15:45,360
Speaker 1: eyewitness testimony is good? Right? You know? And eyewitness can

280
00:15:45,400 --> 00:15:47,520
Speaker 1: get all kinds of stuff wrong. We explore that on

281
00:15:47,560 --> 00:15:50,240
Speaker 1: the podcast all the time. So say you you know,

282
00:15:50,560 --> 00:15:52,400
Speaker 1: you arrive at the scene of a crime, you pull

283
00:15:52,480 --> 00:15:56,160
Speaker 1: up at the video store, and uh, and somebody has

284
00:15:56,200 --> 00:15:59,000
Speaker 1: just sped away stealing a priceless copy of Highlander. To

285
00:15:59,080 --> 00:16:03,120
Speaker 1: the quickening, I mean, especially if you're an orthodox Highlander

286
00:16:03,160 --> 00:16:08,600
Speaker 1: tooth than as except no director's cut, except no renegade

287
00:16:08,600 --> 00:16:12,040
Speaker 1: cut unacceptable. You've got to get the original version on

288
00:16:12,200 --> 00:16:15,200
Speaker 1: VHS that's got all the bad scenes. It's the only

289
00:16:15,200 --> 00:16:18,040
Speaker 1: way to feel the quickening. But yeah, so you get

290
00:16:18,040 --> 00:16:20,720
Speaker 1: on the scene a copy of Highlander two has been stolen,

291
00:16:20,720 --> 00:16:22,840
Speaker 1: and you want to find out who did it. Fortunately,

292
00:16:22,840 --> 00:16:25,840
Speaker 1: there are several people standing around it just happened. So

293
00:16:26,040 --> 00:16:29,320
Speaker 1: you separate all the people and they can't talk to

294
00:16:29,360 --> 00:16:31,280
Speaker 1: each other, and you interview them one at a time,

295
00:16:31,320 --> 00:16:33,520
Speaker 1: And the first witness tells you that it was a

296
00:16:33,600 --> 00:16:36,360
Speaker 1: man wearing a kilt with a bagpipe on his back

297
00:16:36,720 --> 00:16:39,120
Speaker 1: and a katana sword hanging from his hip, and he

298
00:16:39,200 --> 00:16:41,240
Speaker 1: ran into the store and he yelled, there can be

299
00:16:41,320 --> 00:16:44,840
Speaker 1: only one and he grabbed the tape and he ran out. Now,

300
00:16:45,200 --> 00:16:48,280
Speaker 1: as we've said, I witness testimony can be very faulty

301
00:16:48,320 --> 00:16:50,880
Speaker 1: sometimes people they are all kinds of issues with perception

302
00:16:50,960 --> 00:16:53,680
Speaker 1: and memory. But if you talk to the second witness

303
00:16:53,760 --> 00:16:57,480
Speaker 1: and they independently mentioned all the same stuff. They kill,

304
00:16:57,680 --> 00:17:00,920
Speaker 1: the bagpipe, the katana, and you talk to a third

305
00:17:01,000 --> 00:17:03,800
Speaker 1: witness they mentioned all the same stuff again, you really

306
00:17:03,840 --> 00:17:06,400
Speaker 1: have to think, Okay, if they haven't talked to each

307
00:17:06,440 --> 00:17:09,199
Speaker 1: other and they're all telling me all the same details,

308
00:17:09,440 --> 00:17:12,120
Speaker 1: what are the odds that three people are getting all

309
00:17:12,160 --> 00:17:15,480
Speaker 1: this different stuff wrong in the same way. And that's

310
00:17:15,480 --> 00:17:18,080
Speaker 1: how corroboration of dating methods works. It's like having a

311
00:17:18,160 --> 00:17:21,240
Speaker 1: second witness or a third witness on the scene who

312
00:17:21,280 --> 00:17:24,159
Speaker 1: independently tells you they saw the same thing that the

313
00:17:24,160 --> 00:17:27,199
Speaker 1: other witnesses did. It's possible they could be all they

314
00:17:27,240 --> 00:17:28,840
Speaker 1: could all be wrong, But if they haven't talked to

315
00:17:28,880 --> 00:17:31,400
Speaker 1: each other, why would they all be wrong the same way?

316
00:17:31,880 --> 00:17:33,480
Speaker 1: All right, Well, on that note, let's take a quick

317
00:17:33,480 --> 00:17:35,600
Speaker 1: break and we come back. We'll jump right back into

318
00:17:35,600 --> 00:17:41,000
Speaker 1: the discussion. Thank alright, we're back, alright. So I wanted

319
00:17:41,040 --> 00:17:44,200
Speaker 1: to talk about a really great article that I read

320
00:17:44,200 --> 00:17:48,320
Speaker 1: on this subject about how to corroborate the dating methods

321
00:17:48,440 --> 00:17:51,520
Speaker 1: that are used in h in radiometric dating and establishing

322
00:17:51,560 --> 00:17:53,600
Speaker 1: the Age of the Earth, and the articles by the

323
00:17:53,640 --> 00:17:57,439
Speaker 1: American geologist Brent Dalrymple, who worked for the U S

324
00:17:57,480 --> 00:18:00,720
Speaker 1: Geological Survey and was a professor at Oregon State University,

325
00:18:00,800 --> 00:18:02,919
Speaker 1: and he published a book on the Age of the

326
00:18:02,960 --> 00:18:05,920
Speaker 1: Earth called The Age of the Earth with Stanford University

327
00:18:05,960 --> 00:18:09,879
Speaker 1: Press in And so he's got this really excellent article

328
00:18:09,960 --> 00:18:12,720
Speaker 1: hosted on the National Center for Science Education website and

329
00:18:12,760 --> 00:18:16,480
Speaker 1: which he picks out four different examples, basically four studies

330
00:18:16,520 --> 00:18:20,400
Speaker 1: that he had personal experience with in which radiometric date

331
00:18:20,520 --> 00:18:24,760
Speaker 1: ranges were corroborated by multiple kinds of tests, multiple labs

332
00:18:24,840 --> 00:18:28,000
Speaker 1: that showed them to be accurate. Um, So it's again

333
00:18:28,080 --> 00:18:30,320
Speaker 1: not just that we do one test and assume it's

334
00:18:30,400 --> 00:18:33,720
Speaker 1: the answer is right, but we test multiple samples, multiple methods,

335
00:18:33,760 --> 00:18:38,040
Speaker 1: multiple labs and get agreement on the results. So, first example,

336
00:18:38,040 --> 00:18:41,560
Speaker 1: he gives the Manson meteorite impact site and the Pierre

337
00:18:41,600 --> 00:18:45,399
Speaker 1: Shale the Manson the Manson meteorite. There's got to be

338
00:18:45,440 --> 00:18:47,800
Speaker 1: a metal band for this one. And also this has

339
00:18:47,840 --> 00:18:50,280
Speaker 1: nothing to do with Charlie though right as I don't know,

340
00:18:50,680 --> 00:18:53,919
Speaker 1: uh it's Manson Iowa. Does Manson Iowa have anything to

341
00:18:53,920 --> 00:18:57,720
Speaker 1: do with Charlie does? But it's still hard to shake

342
00:18:57,800 --> 00:19:01,000
Speaker 1: that possible connection. Okay, well, this is a look at

343
00:19:01,119 --> 00:19:04,080
Speaker 1: argon argon dating, argne orgon dating is a method that's

344
00:19:04,080 --> 00:19:07,600
Speaker 1: a derivative of the classic potassium argone dating method, but

345
00:19:07,640 --> 00:19:11,240
Speaker 1: it's now considered a more accurate version of that decay

346
00:19:11,280 --> 00:19:14,920
Speaker 1: series test. It helps detect errors protect against an accurate results.

347
00:19:15,520 --> 00:19:18,560
Speaker 1: And so during the Cretaceous period, we know that there

348
00:19:18,640 --> 00:19:21,040
Speaker 1: was a big old meteorite the hit part of what

349
00:19:21,200 --> 00:19:24,120
Speaker 1: is now Iowa in the United States, near Manson, Iowa

350
00:19:24,680 --> 00:19:28,080
Speaker 1: and uh. The hot impact melted a bunch of feldspar

351
00:19:28,200 --> 00:19:30,840
Speaker 1: crystals and the granite rockley are near the surface of

352
00:19:30,920 --> 00:19:34,400
Speaker 1: the time, and when these crystals are melted, their internal

353
00:19:34,520 --> 00:19:38,200
Speaker 1: radiometric clocks get reset to zero. So if you use

354
00:19:38,359 --> 00:19:41,480
Speaker 1: argon argon dating to date these melted crystals, you'll get

355
00:19:41,480 --> 00:19:45,280
Speaker 1: an age of about seventy four point one million years. However,

356
00:19:45,520 --> 00:19:48,720
Speaker 1: when the Manson media write hit, it also created what's

357
00:19:48,760 --> 00:19:52,360
Speaker 1: known as shocked quartz crystals that exploded up into the air.

358
00:19:52,840 --> 00:19:55,320
Speaker 1: They came down west of the impact and what's what

359
00:19:55,400 --> 00:19:57,720
Speaker 1: was then an inland see and now you can find

360
00:19:57,760 --> 00:20:00,080
Speaker 1: the shocked quarts from this impact in a thing in

361
00:20:00,200 --> 00:20:03,920
Speaker 1: layer that's known as the Crow Creek member, and that's

362
00:20:03,960 --> 00:20:08,320
Speaker 1: been within this larger sedimentary rock formation called the Pierre Shale.

363
00:20:08,880 --> 00:20:12,879
Speaker 1: The Pierre Shale also contains marine fossils like ammonites and

364
00:20:13,040 --> 00:20:17,959
Speaker 1: ash from volcanic eruptions. These ash beds from the volcanic eruptions,

365
00:20:17,960 --> 00:20:20,840
Speaker 1: they've also got minerals in them like sanity and feldspar

366
00:20:20,960 --> 00:20:24,600
Speaker 1: and biotite which have been independently dated using the argon

367
00:20:24,760 --> 00:20:28,920
Speaker 1: argon method. And so there there's a study that that

368
00:20:29,080 --> 00:20:35,040
Speaker 1: the Dalrymple sites from Isaac Koban Dalrymple and Obradovich in

369
00:20:35,440 --> 00:20:40,400
Speaker 1: n in the Geological Society of America bulletin. And what

370
00:20:40,440 --> 00:20:42,920
Speaker 1: did they find. So they found more than a half

371
00:20:43,000 --> 00:20:46,600
Speaker 1: dozen dates of biotite and sanitine surrounding the Crow Creek

372
00:20:46,680 --> 00:20:49,760
Speaker 1: member where the where the evidence of this impact near

373
00:20:49,760 --> 00:20:53,800
Speaker 1: Manson was and interesting, so remember that the melted feldspar

374
00:20:53,920 --> 00:20:56,360
Speaker 1: crystals from the impact were dated to seventy four point

375
00:20:56,440 --> 00:21:00,119
Speaker 1: one million years old. The minerals found right below the

376
00:21:00,160 --> 00:21:02,560
Speaker 1: impact layer, so that means they should be a little

377
00:21:02,560 --> 00:21:04,840
Speaker 1: bit older, came up with dates about seventy four to

378
00:21:04,920 --> 00:21:08,240
Speaker 1: seventy five million years old. The minerals found right above

379
00:21:08,320 --> 00:21:10,679
Speaker 1: the impact layer, which should be a little bit younger,

380
00:21:10,960 --> 00:21:14,040
Speaker 1: got results indicating they were about seventy three to seventy

381
00:21:14,040 --> 00:21:17,640
Speaker 1: four million years old. So these dates for each mineral

382
00:21:17,720 --> 00:21:20,880
Speaker 1: we're all corroborated with multiple sample tests to make sure

383
00:21:20,920 --> 00:21:24,200
Speaker 1: they all agreed, and they tested with different kinds of minerals,

384
00:21:24,200 --> 00:21:27,760
Speaker 1: and the results agreed. The biggest discrepancy and results came

385
00:21:27,800 --> 00:21:30,480
Speaker 1: from comparing the biotite and the sanity and from the

386
00:21:30,560 --> 00:21:33,520
Speaker 1: layer right below the impact, but this was less than

387
00:21:33,560 --> 00:21:37,240
Speaker 1: a one percent difference. Also, the dates generated by the

388
00:21:37,359 --> 00:21:40,520
Speaker 1: argon argne tests generally agree with how old these layers

389
00:21:40,560 --> 00:21:42,640
Speaker 1: of rock are supposed to be and with the kinds

390
00:21:42,680 --> 00:21:45,359
Speaker 1: of fossils we'd expect to find in them. So if

391
00:21:45,400 --> 00:21:48,080
Speaker 1: the dating method is not reliable, why do so many

392
00:21:48,160 --> 00:21:51,840
Speaker 1: different tests of different minerals from different time periods agree

393
00:21:51,920 --> 00:21:55,240
Speaker 1: with each other and fit together in the correct plausible

394
00:21:55,320 --> 00:21:58,040
Speaker 1: geological order. And this is another thing we haven't even

395
00:21:58,080 --> 00:22:03,240
Speaker 1: talked about much yet, is the the idea of geologic stratification,

396
00:22:03,480 --> 00:22:07,760
Speaker 1: like that there are layers of deposition of sedimentary that

397
00:22:07,880 --> 00:22:11,680
Speaker 1: happened over time and volcanic deposits from volcanic eruptions that

398
00:22:11,800 --> 00:22:14,040
Speaker 1: you can see going back through time. And you know,

399
00:22:14,560 --> 00:22:17,920
Speaker 1: there were paleontologists who were looking at fossil layers in

400
00:22:18,080 --> 00:22:23,399
Speaker 1: rock formations going down this uh stratigraphic column looking at

401
00:22:23,480 --> 00:22:26,760
Speaker 1: the history of the Earth's surface. Before there was anything

402
00:22:26,840 --> 00:22:29,439
Speaker 1: like radiometric dating, we didn't have any dates, but they

403
00:22:29,480 --> 00:22:32,600
Speaker 1: were still saying, here are the ages that came earlier

404
00:22:32,720 --> 00:22:35,240
Speaker 1: and the ages that came before that, and identifying what

405
00:22:35,520 --> 00:22:38,560
Speaker 1: these layers looked like. Yeah, I mean, and if you

406
00:22:38,680 --> 00:22:42,320
Speaker 1: wanted a really impressive vision of this, I mean, simply

407
00:22:43,040 --> 00:22:45,600
Speaker 1: look at an image of or or better yet, a

408
00:22:45,760 --> 00:22:48,800
Speaker 1: visit say the Grand Canyon and uh, and you are

409
00:22:48,880 --> 00:22:53,719
Speaker 1: just I mean, there's no denying the these these geological layers.

410
00:22:53,760 --> 00:22:57,040
Speaker 1: I mean, it is a visual presentation of geologic time.

411
00:22:57,280 --> 00:22:59,920
Speaker 1: I have not seen the Grand Canyon walls up close.

412
00:23:00,040 --> 00:23:02,439
Speaker 1: What does it look like? Well, I mean up close

413
00:23:02,560 --> 00:23:04,840
Speaker 1: it looks well, yeah, but I mean just like the

414
00:23:05,240 --> 00:23:07,959
Speaker 1: grand scheme of things. And there there's a lot of uh,

415
00:23:08,040 --> 00:23:10,960
Speaker 1: you know edgrigal educational material at the park as well

416
00:23:11,080 --> 00:23:13,280
Speaker 1: that really talks about the different layers and what you're

417
00:23:13,320 --> 00:23:17,280
Speaker 1: looking at and really the time that you're looking into one.

418
00:23:17,359 --> 00:23:19,160
Speaker 1: In fact, there is a there is a little walk

419
00:23:19,240 --> 00:23:21,359
Speaker 1: you can do right at the like the major area

420
00:23:21,440 --> 00:23:23,480
Speaker 1: of like the in Innocence kind of like the high

421
00:23:23,560 --> 00:23:26,480
Speaker 1: tourist area of the Grand Canyon. There is a walk

422
00:23:26,520 --> 00:23:28,480
Speaker 1: through time you can take and it like just talks

423
00:23:28,520 --> 00:23:33,960
Speaker 1: about the different the different geologic ages. Do you remember

424
00:23:34,080 --> 00:23:35,920
Speaker 1: what time you were at when a squirrel tried to

425
00:23:36,000 --> 00:23:37,920
Speaker 1: steal food out of your hand? That was? That was

426
00:23:37,920 --> 00:23:41,000
Speaker 1: a little further into the king Um I want to say,

427
00:23:41,040 --> 00:23:43,679
Speaker 1: it was like, what what is it? Angelhead trail one

428
00:23:43,720 --> 00:23:46,240
Speaker 1: of one of those. Yeah, it's a creepy name. I

429
00:23:46,280 --> 00:23:48,000
Speaker 1: may have that wrong. I don't have that in my notes,

430
00:23:48,119 --> 00:23:51,920
Speaker 1: but yeah, squirrel attack trail. Now, we mentioned earlier that

431
00:23:51,960 --> 00:23:54,560
Speaker 1: one of the ways that say uh Patterson, the Lord

432
00:23:54,600 --> 00:23:57,040
Speaker 1: of Lead identified the age of the Earth was by

433
00:23:57,040 --> 00:23:59,680
Speaker 1: identifying the ages of meteorites that we think were formed

434
00:23:59,720 --> 00:24:03,320
Speaker 1: around the same time. And meteorites are often subject to

435
00:24:03,440 --> 00:24:06,240
Speaker 1: radiometric dating because it can help us understand the origins

436
00:24:06,280 --> 00:24:09,439
Speaker 1: of the Solar system. So, given our current best model

437
00:24:09,640 --> 00:24:11,800
Speaker 1: of how the Solar system formed out of a solar

438
00:24:11,880 --> 00:24:15,200
Speaker 1: nebula and accretion disc it seems likely that the oldest

439
00:24:15,280 --> 00:24:17,800
Speaker 1: meteorites are probably pretty close to the same age as

440
00:24:17,880 --> 00:24:22,159
Speaker 1: the Earth itself. And Dalrymple writes about different tests on

441
00:24:22,280 --> 00:24:25,200
Speaker 1: the ages of meteorites. So he talks about how the

442
00:24:25,280 --> 00:24:28,639
Speaker 1: earliest types of meteorites are called chondrites because they contain

443
00:24:29,040 --> 00:24:31,760
Speaker 1: these tiny spheres of crystals known as con d rules

444
00:24:32,440 --> 00:24:35,679
Speaker 1: and meteorites are often radiometrically dated, and when their mineral

445
00:24:35,760 --> 00:24:38,720
Speaker 1: composition allows it, they're often dated by more than one

446
00:24:38,840 --> 00:24:42,440
Speaker 1: different type of radioisotope de K series test. So a

447
00:24:42,480 --> 00:24:45,440
Speaker 1: few examples heat sites are the i end A meteorite

448
00:24:46,119 --> 00:24:50,840
Speaker 1: which got argon argon lead, lead, and both methods agreed

449
00:24:50,880 --> 00:24:53,600
Speaker 1: the date is about four point five something billion years old,

450
00:24:53,720 --> 00:24:58,040
Speaker 1: the Warina meteorite, which got argon argon spectrum rubidium strontium

451
00:24:58,119 --> 00:25:01,000
Speaker 1: is acron both methods agreeing with an age of a

452
00:25:01,080 --> 00:25:03,960
Speaker 1: little less than four point five billion years, and the

453
00:25:04,119 --> 00:25:08,000
Speaker 1: Saint Severin meteorite, which got argon ar gone rubidium, strontium's

454
00:25:08,040 --> 00:25:12,920
Speaker 1: samariam neodymium, lead lead, all agreeing with roughly four point

455
00:25:13,000 --> 00:25:15,680
Speaker 1: five billion years, give or take a hundred million years

456
00:25:15,800 --> 00:25:19,080
Speaker 1: or so. So lots of different labs, different methods, using

457
00:25:19,160 --> 00:25:23,080
Speaker 1: different radioactive clocks, all converging on answers within about a

458
00:25:23,200 --> 00:25:25,840
Speaker 1: one percent difference of each other. So again it all

459
00:25:25,880 --> 00:25:28,399
Speaker 1: adds up. You don't just have one eye witness, you

460
00:25:28,520 --> 00:25:31,520
Speaker 1: have multiple eyewitnesses that are independently telling you more or

461
00:25:31,600 --> 00:25:33,600
Speaker 1: less the same thing, all telling you about the kilt,

462
00:25:33,680 --> 00:25:36,840
Speaker 1: all telling you the Katana. Another example, he cites the

463
00:25:37,000 --> 00:25:40,920
Speaker 1: Katie tech tites, So we know about the the Oh

464
00:25:41,000 --> 00:25:43,560
Speaker 1: my god, I can never say this right. The cheek

465
00:25:43,640 --> 00:25:46,560
Speaker 1: shalub Um. I've whenever I've had to do it for

466
00:25:46,600 --> 00:25:48,399
Speaker 1: a video or something, I've had to look it up.

467
00:25:49,680 --> 00:25:52,760
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say cheek shalub and and hope it's right.

468
00:25:52,920 --> 00:25:56,040
Speaker 1: So the cheek shalhoub impact, Robert, we know. Around night

469
00:25:56,480 --> 00:26:00,159
Speaker 1: scientists discovered there's this huge crater spanning the code to

470
00:26:00,160 --> 00:26:03,560
Speaker 1: the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is near a

471
00:26:03,680 --> 00:26:07,080
Speaker 1: village or a town known as cheek Schlub. And this

472
00:26:07,280 --> 00:26:09,960
Speaker 1: is the site of the cheek Schalub impact event, which

473
00:26:10,359 --> 00:26:14,639
Speaker 1: in the village was not there, no occurred to certainly

474
00:26:14,720 --> 00:26:18,959
Speaker 1: not no. This happened about sixty six million years ago. Uh.

475
00:26:19,119 --> 00:26:22,399
Speaker 1: And it's the the event which many paleontologists point to

476
00:26:22,640 --> 00:26:25,360
Speaker 1: as the main factor or one of the main factors,

477
00:26:25,760 --> 00:26:29,040
Speaker 1: in the last great extinction before the present, the Cretaceous

478
00:26:29,119 --> 00:26:32,840
Speaker 1: Paleogene extinction, also known as the KPg extinction or the

479
00:26:32,920 --> 00:26:37,000
Speaker 1: kt extinction, which killed off the non avian dinosaurs. Of course,

480
00:26:37,040 --> 00:26:40,560
Speaker 1: we've still got birds, which are dinosaurs, the chi but

481
00:26:41,040 --> 00:26:44,280
Speaker 1: not just them. It killed something like seventy five percent

482
00:26:44,440 --> 00:26:47,160
Speaker 1: of the plant and animal species on Earth and basically

483
00:26:47,240 --> 00:26:50,080
Speaker 1: killed all the large animals. Was a real reboot, you

484
00:26:50,160 --> 00:26:53,440
Speaker 1: might say. Yeah. The object itself was about ten kilometers

485
00:26:53,520 --> 00:26:56,880
Speaker 1: in diameter. And when an object like that hits the earth,

486
00:26:57,400 --> 00:27:00,480
Speaker 1: it it creates a ruckus. It throws up tons of

487
00:27:00,680 --> 00:27:05,159
Speaker 1: geologically weird material into the atmosphere, which comes down all

488
00:27:05,240 --> 00:27:08,800
Speaker 1: over the place and becomes an easily recognizable layer within

489
00:27:08,960 --> 00:27:11,960
Speaker 1: the geological strata that we were just talking about. So

490
00:27:12,200 --> 00:27:15,359
Speaker 1: you can pretty easily look at geological layers and see

491
00:27:15,480 --> 00:27:18,159
Speaker 1: where this impact happened once you know what to look for,

492
00:27:18,640 --> 00:27:21,960
Speaker 1: because the sedimentary rocks below it contain Cretaceous fossils and

493
00:27:22,040 --> 00:27:24,520
Speaker 1: dinosaurs and stuff, and the rocks above it do not.

494
00:27:25,280 --> 00:27:27,960
Speaker 1: But also because there's a thin layer of these weird

495
00:27:28,200 --> 00:27:33,040
Speaker 1: impact byproducts, things like shocked quartz irridium, which is found

496
00:27:33,080 --> 00:27:37,720
Speaker 1: in asteroids and these things called tech tits, So dinosaurs

497
00:27:37,800 --> 00:27:39,680
Speaker 1: and then a layer of weird stuff and then a

498
00:27:39,760 --> 00:27:43,720
Speaker 1: layer of no dinosaurs. Uh, it tells a story, right,

499
00:27:43,840 --> 00:27:46,600
Speaker 1: And so tech tits are tech tits are sacred crystal

500
00:27:46,680 --> 00:27:49,280
Speaker 1: shop stuff. If you look these up, you know, you think,

501
00:27:49,520 --> 00:27:51,520
Speaker 1: you look at this and this is what will cure

502
00:27:51,640 --> 00:27:53,800
Speaker 1: your fear of the dark or something. Really, they are

503
00:27:53,880 --> 00:27:57,399
Speaker 1: these black glassy blobs that are found only in the

504
00:27:57,480 --> 00:28:01,240
Speaker 1: most unusual of circumstance. So when you've got a high

505
00:28:01,400 --> 00:28:06,320
Speaker 1: energy impact that occurs and instantaneously melts rock, you'll get

506
00:28:06,400 --> 00:28:10,119
Speaker 1: these tech tights and at the cheek schloub impact, these

507
00:28:10,160 --> 00:28:13,520
Speaker 1: little glass fules, these tech tits got ejected up into

508
00:28:13,560 --> 00:28:16,600
Speaker 1: the atmosphere and distributed all over the place, and they

509
00:28:16,640 --> 00:28:19,640
Speaker 1: can be found in Haiti and Mexico. And so tech

510
00:28:19,720 --> 00:28:23,680
Speaker 1: tights from this layer corresponding to the KPg impact found

511
00:28:23,720 --> 00:28:27,200
Speaker 1: in modern day Haiti have been dated radiometrically by different

512
00:28:27,280 --> 00:28:30,879
Speaker 1: labs at different times different methods. UH scientists from the

513
00:28:31,040 --> 00:28:35,359
Speaker 1: U S Geological Survey, from Berkeley, from Stanford, from places

514
00:28:35,440 --> 00:28:39,680
Speaker 1: in Canada and France all separately measured dates for these

515
00:28:39,800 --> 00:28:43,720
Speaker 1: glassy little impact blobs and then for volcanic ash beds

516
00:28:43,800 --> 00:28:46,760
Speaker 1: that are just a few centimeters above the KPg impact

517
00:28:46,880 --> 00:28:50,880
Speaker 1: layer using different methods like are gone ar gone potassium argone,

518
00:28:50,960 --> 00:28:55,560
Speaker 1: rubidium strontium and uranium lead, and all the results fell

519
00:28:55,640 --> 00:28:58,160
Speaker 1: within sixty four to sixty six million years ago. So

520
00:28:58,280 --> 00:29:01,800
Speaker 1: yet again everybody's doing different tests, different stuff, and they're

521
00:29:01,840 --> 00:29:06,880
Speaker 1: all getting the same answers. One last example that Dalrymple

522
00:29:06,920 --> 00:29:11,440
Speaker 1: gives is dating something that we actually have historical records of.

523
00:29:12,040 --> 00:29:14,720
Speaker 1: We know when it happened because humans were alive and

524
00:29:14,840 --> 00:29:17,520
Speaker 1: they were there to see it happen and make records

525
00:29:17,600 --> 00:29:21,160
Speaker 1: of it. And this would be the Mount Vesuvious eruption. Ah, yes,

526
00:29:21,240 --> 00:29:25,360
Speaker 1: the very explosive moment, very dramatic moment. Uh there. So this,

527
00:29:25,480 --> 00:29:30,200
Speaker 1: the Mount Vesuvious eruption, happened on auguste and this was

528
00:29:30,280 --> 00:29:33,080
Speaker 1: in the first century CE, and we actually have a

529
00:29:33,280 --> 00:29:36,280
Speaker 1: first hand description of it from Plenty of the younger

530
00:29:36,480 --> 00:29:40,640
Speaker 1: writing in a letter to Cornelius Tacitus, describing what happened.

531
00:29:41,200 --> 00:29:43,040
Speaker 1: Just to read a short part of the letter with

532
00:29:43,160 --> 00:29:46,080
Speaker 1: a couple of abridgements. Plenty rights, the sea seemed to

533
00:29:46,240 --> 00:29:48,800
Speaker 1: roll back upon itself and to be driven from its

534
00:29:48,920 --> 00:29:51,680
Speaker 1: banks by the convulsive motion of the earth. It is

535
00:29:51,760 --> 00:29:55,440
Speaker 1: certain at least the shore was considerably enlarged, and several

536
00:29:55,520 --> 00:29:58,440
Speaker 1: sea animals were left upon it. On the other side.

537
00:29:58,520 --> 00:30:02,880
Speaker 1: A black and dreadful cloud broken with rapid zigzag flashes,

538
00:30:03,240 --> 00:30:07,600
Speaker 1: revealed behind it variously shaped masses of flame. These last

539
00:30:07,720 --> 00:30:11,400
Speaker 1: were like sheet lightning, but much larger. Soon afterwards, the

540
00:30:11,440 --> 00:30:14,440
Speaker 1: cloud began to descend and cover the sea it had

541
00:30:14,440 --> 00:30:17,480
Speaker 1: already surrounded and concealed the island of Capri and the

542
00:30:17,560 --> 00:30:21,880
Speaker 1: promontory of Missenum. The ashes now began to fall upon us,

543
00:30:21,960 --> 00:30:24,960
Speaker 1: though in no great quantity. I looked back. A dark

544
00:30:25,320 --> 00:30:28,440
Speaker 1: a dense, dark mist seemed to be following us, spreading

545
00:30:28,480 --> 00:30:31,400
Speaker 1: itself over the country like a cloud. And he goes

546
00:30:31,480 --> 00:30:33,320
Speaker 1: on to talk about what all the people were doing

547
00:30:33,440 --> 00:30:36,440
Speaker 1: as they were fleeing. It's great, we should maybe revisit

548
00:30:36,520 --> 00:30:38,840
Speaker 1: the eruption of a Suko time. Yeah, let us know

549
00:30:38,960 --> 00:30:41,640
Speaker 1: if you would like to hear an episode devoted to this,

550
00:30:41,840 --> 00:30:43,560
Speaker 1: because we could have we could have a lot of

551
00:30:43,600 --> 00:30:46,360
Speaker 1: fun with it. I mean, tragic and destructive and apocalyptic

552
00:30:46,400 --> 00:30:48,880
Speaker 1: as it is, but it's it's a great description that

553
00:30:49,040 --> 00:30:52,480
Speaker 1: that planny has here. But anyway, so how does this

554
00:30:52,600 --> 00:30:57,400
Speaker 1: come into corroborating radiometric gates, Well, this is a historical

555
00:30:57,480 --> 00:31:00,240
Speaker 1: event that can be used to calibrate radiometric meth It's

556
00:31:00,360 --> 00:31:03,040
Speaker 1: not every method is appropriate for this kind of time scale,

557
00:31:03,080 --> 00:31:07,520
Speaker 1: but scientists said the Berkeley Geochronology Center in the University

558
00:31:07,560 --> 00:31:09,840
Speaker 1: of Naples, they wanted to see how well are Gone

559
00:31:09,880 --> 00:31:12,320
Speaker 1: are Gone dating could do here, so they got twelve

560
00:31:12,400 --> 00:31:16,000
Speaker 1: samples of sanitine from the ash flows from the vesuvious eruption,

561
00:31:16,600 --> 00:31:19,959
Speaker 1: and Dalrymple says that the dating method generated an estimate

562
00:31:20,120 --> 00:31:23,080
Speaker 1: of about one thousand, nine hundred and twenty five years.

563
00:31:23,600 --> 00:31:26,440
Speaker 1: This was in and the actual age of the time

564
00:31:26,560 --> 00:31:29,440
Speaker 1: was one thousand, nine hundred and eighteen years, so about

565
00:31:29,480 --> 00:31:33,080
Speaker 1: seven years off. And that's amazingly close for especially for

566
00:31:33,240 --> 00:31:36,120
Speaker 1: young rock like this, which that which was assumed to

567
00:31:36,160 --> 00:31:39,640
Speaker 1: be more difficult to date accurately. Absolutely, because again we're

568
00:31:39,760 --> 00:31:43,080
Speaker 1: zeroing in on seventy nine. Yeah. So one of the

569
00:31:43,160 --> 00:31:45,200
Speaker 1: things I wanted to mention is that in one of

570
00:31:45,240 --> 00:31:47,400
Speaker 1: the emails we got, like the the email from c

571
00:31:47,640 --> 00:31:49,120
Speaker 1: J I think that we read at the beginning of

572
00:31:49,160 --> 00:31:53,440
Speaker 1: the first episode, c J mentioned maybe like looking at

573
00:31:53,760 --> 00:31:59,080
Speaker 1: creationist critiques of radiometric dating methods, and I don't think

574
00:31:59,240 --> 00:32:01,840
Speaker 1: it really makes sense to try to focus on any

575
00:32:01,920 --> 00:32:05,240
Speaker 1: one of these because they are myriad, So like it

576
00:32:05,360 --> 00:32:08,000
Speaker 1: just seems like, there are thousands of them as many

577
00:32:08,080 --> 00:32:11,480
Speaker 1: as there are creationists books and pamphlets, so obviously we

578
00:32:11,520 --> 00:32:14,160
Speaker 1: don't have time to address them all, and none stand

579
00:32:14,240 --> 00:32:17,440
Speaker 1: out is particularly good when I've looked at them before.

580
00:32:18,120 --> 00:32:21,440
Speaker 1: They take the form of One of the things we

581
00:32:21,480 --> 00:32:25,240
Speaker 1: talked about in the last episode is like pointing out

582
00:32:26,080 --> 00:32:30,320
Speaker 1: ways that radiometric dating could be missupplied or could be flawed,

583
00:32:30,440 --> 00:32:33,600
Speaker 1: which scientists know about and they take steps to correct,

584
00:32:33,720 --> 00:32:38,800
Speaker 1: including corroborating with multiple methods, um or using using you know,

585
00:32:38,960 --> 00:32:42,400
Speaker 1: careful types of calibration to eliminate errors and to increase

586
00:32:42,440 --> 00:32:45,360
Speaker 1: accuracy in their tests. Some of it's just pointing out

587
00:32:45,480 --> 00:32:49,440
Speaker 1: ways that measurements could go wrong, which scientists already know

588
00:32:49,520 --> 00:32:52,040
Speaker 1: about and take into account, and using that as an

589
00:32:52,080 --> 00:32:54,600
Speaker 1: excuse to just throw the whole method out. Yeah, it's

590
00:32:54,640 --> 00:32:56,480
Speaker 1: kind of like saying, you know, there are lots of

591
00:32:56,560 --> 00:33:00,120
Speaker 1: ways that watches can be wrong, therefore your watch you

592
00:33:00,200 --> 00:33:03,040
Speaker 1: can't trust what time it says. Other methods that I

593
00:33:03,120 --> 00:33:07,760
Speaker 1: think are common are like isolating examples of when a

594
00:33:08,520 --> 00:33:13,120
Speaker 1: radiometric dating method has generated a incorrect result, and these

595
00:33:13,160 --> 00:33:16,600
Speaker 1: are often highlighted in order to show ways that you

596
00:33:16,680 --> 00:33:20,080
Speaker 1: can make the tests more accurate and eliminate errors. So

597
00:33:20,240 --> 00:33:22,800
Speaker 1: like scientists are aware of the fact that it's possible

598
00:33:22,840 --> 00:33:26,320
Speaker 1: to generate an incorrect result with the radiometric test, part

599
00:33:26,400 --> 00:33:28,840
Speaker 1: of what they do is learning the circumstances in which

600
00:33:28,920 --> 00:33:31,920
Speaker 1: these errors arise and trying to avoid them. And then

601
00:33:32,040 --> 00:33:34,840
Speaker 1: others are just theoretical critiques, which I think are simply

602
00:33:34,920 --> 00:33:39,680
Speaker 1: misunderstandings of the underlying science. But I it has never

603
00:33:39,760 --> 00:33:42,600
Speaker 1: seemed very productive to me to just play whack a

604
00:33:42,680 --> 00:33:47,360
Speaker 1: mole with the various uh, you know, misunderstandings and critiques

605
00:33:47,480 --> 00:33:50,200
Speaker 1: as they arise. Yeah, I agree, I don't think that's

606
00:33:50,200 --> 00:33:52,600
Speaker 1: a constructive exercise at all. But what we wanted to

607
00:33:52,640 --> 00:33:55,280
Speaker 1: finish on today was to talk about ways in which

608
00:33:55,360 --> 00:33:57,959
Speaker 1: the age of the Earth is not just confirmed by

609
00:33:58,120 --> 00:34:01,960
Speaker 1: direct measurement methods that say, look at meteorites or look

610
00:34:02,000 --> 00:34:04,320
Speaker 1: at rocks on the Earth and say this is how

611
00:34:04,400 --> 00:34:06,760
Speaker 1: old it is, and then and then as if the

612
00:34:06,840 --> 00:34:09,800
Speaker 1: age of the Earth rests entirely on those results. The

613
00:34:09,920 --> 00:34:12,680
Speaker 1: fact that the Earth is old, that it is older

614
00:34:12,800 --> 00:34:15,960
Speaker 1: than a few thousand years is something that is so

615
00:34:16,600 --> 00:34:21,000
Speaker 1: thoroughly incorporated in pretty much every branch of science that

616
00:34:21,239 --> 00:34:23,520
Speaker 1: if the Earth were only a few thousand years old,

617
00:34:23,600 --> 00:34:26,240
Speaker 1: we would have to throw out essentially all of science.

618
00:34:27,160 --> 00:34:29,759
Speaker 1: It touches everything. And so for the rest of the

619
00:34:29,800 --> 00:34:33,120
Speaker 1: today's episode, we just wanted to explore other ways of

620
00:34:33,280 --> 00:34:36,359
Speaker 1: looking at time and and the history of the Earth

621
00:34:36,440 --> 00:34:39,600
Speaker 1: and the universe, the additional examples of of of just

622
00:34:39,719 --> 00:34:42,520
Speaker 1: how interconnected all of this is, and additional examples of

623
00:34:42,600 --> 00:34:44,839
Speaker 1: things you would have to throw out if you were

624
00:34:44,960 --> 00:34:48,160
Speaker 1: to adhere to say, a six thousand year old model

625
00:34:48,440 --> 00:34:50,160
Speaker 1: for the Earth. Do you want to take a quick

626
00:34:50,160 --> 00:34:51,600
Speaker 1: break and then deal with this when we come back,

627
00:34:51,760 --> 00:34:56,359
Speaker 1: Let's do it. Thank alright, we're back. Okay, So we're

628
00:34:56,360 --> 00:34:58,960
Speaker 1: gonna talk about ways of corroborating the fact that the

629
00:34:59,040 --> 00:35:02,280
Speaker 1: Earth is old, which essentially becomes everything else in science,

630
00:35:02,719 --> 00:35:04,879
Speaker 1: right and we're gonna jump around a little bit in here.

631
00:35:05,000 --> 00:35:07,719
Speaker 1: But you know, we can do some geological science, uh

632
00:35:07,920 --> 00:35:12,320
Speaker 1: some some some some, some astronomy as well. Um, some

633
00:35:12,440 --> 00:35:14,880
Speaker 1: of these examples we're gonna spend just a few sentences on.

634
00:35:14,960 --> 00:35:17,239
Speaker 1: Others we're gonna go into a little more depth right now.

635
00:35:17,560 --> 00:35:19,920
Speaker 1: Not every method will help give us an estimate of

636
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:23,239
Speaker 1: the exact age of the Earth, like radiometric dating MTE,

637
00:35:23,680 --> 00:35:26,200
Speaker 1: but there are at least dozens of other lines of

638
00:35:26,239 --> 00:35:28,920
Speaker 1: evidence that we can talk about that the Earth, the

639
00:35:29,000 --> 00:35:32,440
Speaker 1: solar system in the universe must be older than X time,

640
00:35:32,800 --> 00:35:35,840
Speaker 1: with X always being much longer than the proponents of

641
00:35:35,880 --> 00:35:38,680
Speaker 1: a several thousand year old Earth would would grant. Yeah,

642
00:35:38,719 --> 00:35:40,640
Speaker 1: like evidence, you're gonna we're gonna see this over and

643
00:35:40,680 --> 00:35:43,359
Speaker 1: over again, Like here's evidence of something that it only

644
00:35:43,440 --> 00:35:45,879
Speaker 1: makes sense if it's eight thousand years old. It only

645
00:35:45,920 --> 00:35:48,000
Speaker 1: makes sense if it's ten thousand years old. So let's

646
00:35:48,040 --> 00:35:50,080
Speaker 1: look at some other stuff about what's in the Earth,

647
00:35:50,280 --> 00:35:53,840
Speaker 1: like geochemistry and geology. Yeah, if we enter into the

648
00:35:53,960 --> 00:35:57,840
Speaker 1: realm of petroleum geology, um uh, we have we know

649
00:35:58,200 --> 00:36:01,399
Speaker 1: that biomass requires far are more than six thousand years

650
00:36:01,440 --> 00:36:04,680
Speaker 1: to become cold or petroleum like hundreds of thousands to

651
00:36:04,800 --> 00:36:08,040
Speaker 1: millions of years. Uh, and then it takes roughly twenty

652
00:36:08,120 --> 00:36:10,520
Speaker 1: five million years for it to reach the surface in

653
00:36:10,600 --> 00:36:14,520
Speaker 1: a natural oil seep. Right, oil coal doesn't make sense

654
00:36:14,680 --> 00:36:17,520
Speaker 1: in a young earth, right, So yeah, if you're gonna

655
00:36:17,520 --> 00:36:19,560
Speaker 1: have that six thousand year old Earth, you don't get

656
00:36:19,600 --> 00:36:21,839
Speaker 1: to use any of the petroleum. So they're also if

657
00:36:21,880 --> 00:36:24,800
Speaker 1: you just look at the formations of individual like rocks

658
00:36:24,880 --> 00:36:28,120
Speaker 1: and crystals and stuff. They're they're slow forming crystals. Yeah,

659
00:36:28,200 --> 00:36:32,520
Speaker 1: take the take the diamond for instance. By radioactively dating

660
00:36:32,600 --> 00:36:35,800
Speaker 1: minerals inside diamonds, because you can't date the diamond itself,

661
00:36:36,480 --> 00:36:39,080
Speaker 1: we can tell that most diamonds probably formed in the

662
00:36:39,160 --> 00:36:42,640
Speaker 1: Earth's first two billion years or so, and even younger

663
00:36:42,760 --> 00:36:46,440
Speaker 1: diamonds are still tens of hundreds of millions of years old. Uh.

664
00:36:46,560 --> 00:36:50,520
Speaker 1: This according to diamond expert Jeffrey Post, who was quoted

665
00:36:50,560 --> 00:36:54,240
Speaker 1: in a Smithsonian magazine piece. Wait, tens of hundreds of millions,

666
00:36:54,280 --> 00:36:58,080
Speaker 1: wouldn't that be billions? He has attributed as saying, tens

667
00:36:58,120 --> 00:37:00,320
Speaker 1: of hundreds of millions of years old. I I you

668
00:37:00,400 --> 00:37:04,080
Speaker 1: run into this occasionally, people who are generally, you know,

669
00:37:04,200 --> 00:37:06,400
Speaker 1: experts in the field that are hesitant to use the

670
00:37:06,440 --> 00:37:08,719
Speaker 1: word billions. I feel like I've seen that too. That

671
00:37:08,920 --> 00:37:10,800
Speaker 1: is weird. It's like they don't like it. It doesn't

672
00:37:10,840 --> 00:37:13,359
Speaker 1: sound right billions. I feel like there's probably a good

673
00:37:13,400 --> 00:37:16,200
Speaker 1: reason for that, but still like the numbers are still

674
00:37:16,239 --> 00:37:19,320
Speaker 1: the same, so there's nothing yet inaccurate in in this statement.

675
00:37:19,440 --> 00:37:21,840
Speaker 1: They all have somebody they don't like named bill that

676
00:37:22,000 --> 00:37:25,759
Speaker 1: they don't want an order of magnitude named after him. Hey,

677
00:37:25,880 --> 00:37:28,759
Speaker 1: here's another one. When you look at the earth caves, Now,

678
00:37:29,120 --> 00:37:32,280
Speaker 1: there are quick forming caves, for example, like lava tubes.

679
00:37:33,120 --> 00:37:36,319
Speaker 1: Lava tubes are wonderful, fascinating thing we could look at

680
00:37:36,400 --> 00:37:39,000
Speaker 1: some time. But we know that there are other kinds

681
00:37:39,040 --> 00:37:40,800
Speaker 1: of caves, and we know what these other kinds of

682
00:37:40,840 --> 00:37:43,680
Speaker 1: caves look like that take a very long time to form,

683
00:37:43,760 --> 00:37:46,439
Speaker 1: and that formations within them take a very long time

684
00:37:46,520 --> 00:37:49,399
Speaker 1: to to assume the shape we see them in now. Yeah,

685
00:37:49,680 --> 00:37:53,040
Speaker 1: stalactites and stalagmites are great examples to look at. You know,

686
00:37:53,080 --> 00:37:56,240
Speaker 1: we're talking about calcite stone formations created by the gradual

687
00:37:56,360 --> 00:37:59,640
Speaker 1: dripping of water in cave environments, and the process is

688
00:37:59,680 --> 00:38:02,400
Speaker 1: often still taking place right before our eyes, and the

689
00:38:02,480 --> 00:38:06,680
Speaker 1: resulting formations are often quite old. So the exact rate

690
00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:13,120
Speaker 1: of stalactite and stalagmite formation varies. Of course. Limestone stalactites

691
00:38:13,200 --> 00:38:15,960
Speaker 1: and stalag mights generally take thousands of years. Those in

692
00:38:16,080 --> 00:38:19,760
Speaker 1: lava tubes, as you mentioned, those may take hours to form.

693
00:38:19,880 --> 00:38:23,440
Speaker 1: You know. Um, but like let's let's imagine a limestone

694
00:38:23,520 --> 00:38:26,160
Speaker 1: cave or you know, and again some kind of sedimentary cave.

695
00:38:26,280 --> 00:38:29,239
Speaker 1: What do the stalactites and stalagmites look like they're I mean,

696
00:38:29,280 --> 00:38:32,960
Speaker 1: there's some wonderful examples of just enormous stalactites stalagmites. If

697
00:38:32,960 --> 00:38:36,480
Speaker 1: you've ever visited a cave, uh, you know, I'm thinking

698
00:38:36,520 --> 00:38:38,759
Speaker 1: of some of like the more touristic caves, especially in

699
00:38:38,760 --> 00:38:42,360
Speaker 1: the United States, like say Mammoth Cave, h Cumberland Caverns,

700
00:38:42,400 --> 00:38:44,800
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. Then you've you've probably seen some

701
00:38:44,920 --> 00:38:47,759
Speaker 1: of these examples. They're enormous. And again it's like looking

702
00:38:47,800 --> 00:38:50,160
Speaker 1: at the Grand Canyon. You're looking at time right there

703
00:38:50,200 --> 00:38:53,719
Speaker 1: in front of you. UM. Just a few examples that

704
00:38:53,800 --> 00:38:56,960
Speaker 1: I picked out here that that I think speak to this.

705
00:38:57,640 --> 00:39:01,280
Speaker 1: For instance, in two thousand seventeen, a stalac might growing

706
00:39:01,440 --> 00:39:04,000
Speaker 1: quote unquote out of the hip bone of a prehistoric

707
00:39:04,120 --> 00:39:07,839
Speaker 1: human skeleton helped date a Yucatan Peninsula skeleton to at

708
00:39:07,920 --> 00:39:11,080
Speaker 1: least thirteen thousand years old. So, in other words, they

709
00:39:11,120 --> 00:39:13,759
Speaker 1: were looking at these bones, and they were looking at this, uh,

710
00:39:14,080 --> 00:39:17,480
Speaker 1: this this stalaga mte that seemed to be growing up

711
00:39:17,560 --> 00:39:20,000
Speaker 1: out of it, and uh and this was the the

712
00:39:20,120 --> 00:39:23,520
Speaker 1: age range they were dealing with. Another example, in France's

713
00:39:23,800 --> 00:39:27,920
Speaker 1: Brunoquil Cave, we have evidence of Neanderthals having broken off

714
00:39:28,239 --> 00:39:33,160
Speaker 1: four hundred stalagmites to a range into two rings, and

715
00:39:33,480 --> 00:39:37,040
Speaker 1: supporting evidence, including carbon dating of a burnt bare bone

716
00:39:37,120 --> 00:39:42,200
Speaker 1: from the location, indicate that the rings were roughly forty

717
00:39:42,280 --> 00:39:45,480
Speaker 1: seven thousand, six hundred years old, older than any cave painting.

718
00:39:46,280 --> 00:39:50,400
Speaker 1: In Spain's Moraine Cave, for instance, you'll find a stalagmite

719
00:39:50,719 --> 00:39:54,440
Speaker 1: that's estimated to be uh nine thousand and fifty five,

720
00:39:54,560 --> 00:39:57,680
Speaker 1: give or take nine fifteen years old. I want to

721
00:39:57,760 --> 00:40:02,440
Speaker 1: point out that you you also do see examples, small

722
00:40:02,680 --> 00:40:08,600
Speaker 1: examples of stalagmites forming in concrete structures, and this is

723
00:40:08,640 --> 00:40:11,120
Speaker 1: something that you occasionally see pointed out on some of

724
00:40:11,200 --> 00:40:13,759
Speaker 1: these websites saying how can you believe in the age

725
00:40:13,760 --> 00:40:16,359
Speaker 1: of stalagmites, because look, if you go to the parking deck,

726
00:40:16,440 --> 00:40:20,359
Speaker 1: there's a little stalagmite. They're clearly the earth is only

727
00:40:20,440 --> 00:40:24,359
Speaker 1: as old as this, uh this parking deck. Well, here's

728
00:40:24,360 --> 00:40:28,520
Speaker 1: how what's going on. Concrete derives. Stalagmites are sometimes observed

729
00:40:28,560 --> 00:40:31,719
Speaker 1: in concrete structures, and these again are quite small, and

730
00:40:31,800 --> 00:40:35,120
Speaker 1: they form more rapidly than natural cave structures. Uh. There

731
00:40:35,200 --> 00:40:39,280
Speaker 1: by no means a gotcha point for discreting geologic science.

732
00:40:39,719 --> 00:40:42,319
Speaker 1: I've never seen a parking garage sale. What you need

733
00:40:42,400 --> 00:40:46,000
Speaker 1: to get into. They're around. If you hang out in

734
00:40:46,920 --> 00:40:50,719
Speaker 1: some of the subterranean concrete zones around our own city

735
00:40:50,719 --> 00:40:53,640
Speaker 1: of Atlanta, you will encounter them. Robert, what's your favorite

736
00:40:53,680 --> 00:40:57,160
Speaker 1: parking garage to hang out in? Oh? I don't know.

737
00:40:57,239 --> 00:41:01,120
Speaker 1: I do actually enjoy like a significant, a creepy parking

738
00:41:01,160 --> 00:41:03,920
Speaker 1: garage environment. It feels act like the morlocks are going

739
00:41:03,960 --> 00:41:06,320
Speaker 1: to show up in any moment, right well, I always

740
00:41:06,440 --> 00:41:08,600
Speaker 1: think of like Escape from New York and kind of

741
00:41:09,000 --> 00:41:12,279
Speaker 1: seventies Carpenter, seventies eighties Carpenter. When I when there's a

742
00:41:12,320 --> 00:41:14,840
Speaker 1: good abandoned parking garage, it's got that kind of that

743
00:41:15,160 --> 00:41:18,719
Speaker 1: echoe creepiness of the early scenes and Escape from New York.

744
00:41:18,920 --> 00:41:21,920
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, um, but but even then you're not going

745
00:41:21,960 --> 00:41:26,200
Speaker 1: to find any huge stalactites are still like mites now. Um,

746
00:41:26,360 --> 00:41:29,680
Speaker 1: as far as the age of caves go, um, you

747
00:41:29,760 --> 00:41:32,040
Speaker 1: get into you know, much deeper time when you're just

748
00:41:32,080 --> 00:41:34,120
Speaker 1: talking about those, You're not talking about the formations within,

749
00:41:34,280 --> 00:41:38,520
Speaker 1: but just the cave systems themselves. Consider Mammoth Cave National Park,

750
00:41:38,880 --> 00:41:42,759
Speaker 1: UH major tourist attraction as far as caves go. Geologists

751
00:41:42,880 --> 00:41:45,840
Speaker 1: estimate that the oldest part of the sprawling cave complex

752
00:41:45,960 --> 00:41:49,200
Speaker 1: formed ten million years ago. And if you're in Australia

753
00:41:49,239 --> 00:41:52,200
Speaker 1: and you happen to visit gen Olan caves, I believe

754
00:41:52,200 --> 00:41:55,000
Speaker 1: I'm saying that that ride perhaps it's gen Olan. I'm

755
00:41:55,040 --> 00:41:57,400
Speaker 1: sure our our Awestlee listeners will correct me on this.

756
00:41:57,719 --> 00:42:00,160
Speaker 1: Oh I'm still I still can't live it down from

757
00:42:00,200 --> 00:42:03,719
Speaker 1: when I said, what did I say Canberra or something? Oh? Yes,

758
00:42:03,880 --> 00:42:06,920
Speaker 1: I think it's Canberra. Well, anyway, if you visit this

759
00:42:06,960 --> 00:42:09,360
Speaker 1: particular cave, you will be visiting some caves that are

760
00:42:09,400 --> 00:42:12,799
Speaker 1: thought to be three forty million years old. And there's

761
00:42:12,840 --> 00:42:15,759
Speaker 1: a lot more here we can talk about geologically. I mean,

762
00:42:15,840 --> 00:42:18,240
Speaker 1: you can look at the formation of mountains, rock layering

763
00:42:18,280 --> 00:42:21,560
Speaker 1: through sedimentation, which we've touched on already. Uh, there's a

764
00:42:21,640 --> 00:42:24,480
Speaker 1: reason we speak of geologic time, and the Earth is

765
00:42:24,600 --> 00:42:29,640
Speaker 1: written in geologic time. Young Earth views enforced human time, uh,

766
00:42:30,040 --> 00:42:33,200
Speaker 1: or the timeline of human civilization upon a thing that

767
00:42:33,360 --> 00:42:36,600
Speaker 1: dwarfs our brief period of cultural as sentence. You know,

768
00:42:36,800 --> 00:42:40,440
Speaker 1: one way you can actually make geologic time feel a

769
00:42:40,560 --> 00:42:45,000
Speaker 1: little bit more intuitive that you can try to internalize

770
00:42:45,040 --> 00:42:48,560
Speaker 1: it is visiting fossil beds. I know that was a feeling.

771
00:42:48,600 --> 00:42:50,520
Speaker 1: I One of the coolest things I've ever gotten to

772
00:42:50,560 --> 00:42:53,720
Speaker 1: do I've talked about on the show before, was visiting

773
00:42:53,960 --> 00:42:59,799
Speaker 1: the Trialobyte beds Burgess Shale National Park in Canada, which

774
00:42:59,880 --> 00:43:04,880
Speaker 1: is Cambrian fossils trial bites everywhere Anomala carreras fossils, and

775
00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:07,320
Speaker 1: you're just walking around on them, but you get to

776
00:43:07,400 --> 00:43:10,520
Speaker 1: see the massive vertical face of the shale that's made

777
00:43:10,600 --> 00:43:15,080
Speaker 1: by sedimentary deposition over millions, billions of years that's broken

778
00:43:15,120 --> 00:43:17,920
Speaker 1: off into all these flakes that you're walking around, and

779
00:43:18,040 --> 00:43:23,480
Speaker 1: you just realize, like the depth of time required to

780
00:43:23,760 --> 00:43:27,040
Speaker 1: lay down this sediment, fossilize all these creatures, and then

781
00:43:27,200 --> 00:43:29,640
Speaker 1: drive it up, make it into the side of a

782
00:43:29,800 --> 00:43:33,200
Speaker 1: mountain near the top of the mountain, and then break

783
00:43:33,280 --> 00:43:36,520
Speaker 1: it all off as it erodes into these beds along

784
00:43:36,800 --> 00:43:40,040
Speaker 1: the mountain side. It's humbling. It's a humbling amount of

785
00:43:40,160 --> 00:43:42,760
Speaker 1: time that you that is required to see this happen.

786
00:43:43,239 --> 00:43:47,279
Speaker 1: And it's all extinct organisms too. Yeah. Now, and now

787
00:43:47,840 --> 00:43:51,040
Speaker 1: this is great though that we brought up the fossils here,

788
00:43:51,120 --> 00:43:53,839
Speaker 1: because the next area I want to touch on has

789
00:43:53,880 --> 00:43:57,359
Speaker 1: to do with with the sea floor spreading and continental drift,

790
00:43:57,440 --> 00:44:01,000
Speaker 1: and indeed the distribution of fossils ecs. This is a

791
00:44:01,040 --> 00:44:04,120
Speaker 1: really interesting one. Yeah, and I feel it's it's particularly

792
00:44:04,160 --> 00:44:07,120
Speaker 1: interesting because I feel, on one hand, most of us

793
00:44:07,160 --> 00:44:09,719
Speaker 1: are at least dimly aware that the continents are not

794
00:44:10,520 --> 00:44:12,920
Speaker 1: in the in the position they were they were always in.

795
00:44:13,080 --> 00:44:14,920
Speaker 1: I mean, if nothing else has been pointed out to

796
00:44:14,920 --> 00:44:17,760
Speaker 1: you on a world map, how Africa and South America

797
00:44:17,880 --> 00:44:22,280
Speaker 1: wants spooned, or perhaps you've seen an epic animation detailing

798
00:44:22,600 --> 00:44:25,360
Speaker 1: the breaking up of Pangaea and the end of the

799
00:44:25,480 --> 00:44:28,839
Speaker 1: super Ocean. But wait a minute, what if I were

800
00:44:28,920 --> 00:44:31,880
Speaker 1: to say, well, I think it's just a coincidence that

801
00:44:32,040 --> 00:44:34,680
Speaker 1: South America has shaped like it used to fit into

802
00:44:34,800 --> 00:44:38,920
Speaker 1: the underside of the part of Africa. Well, this is

803
00:44:39,160 --> 00:44:42,440
Speaker 1: this was is a valid um um critique of of

804
00:44:42,640 --> 00:44:45,160
Speaker 1: just this argument on on the face of it, because

805
00:44:45,200 --> 00:44:47,879
Speaker 1: it's really only been fairly recently that we've we've known

806
00:44:47,920 --> 00:44:50,720
Speaker 1: about this, and it's been accepted before roughly a hundred

807
00:44:50,800 --> 00:44:53,000
Speaker 1: years ago. We just assumed that the continents were basically

808
00:44:53,080 --> 00:44:55,600
Speaker 1: in the same position that they've always been in. Uh.

809
00:44:55,680 --> 00:44:58,440
Speaker 1: The evidence that led to the revelation, uh here was

810
00:44:58,560 --> 00:45:01,840
Speaker 1: the distribution of fossil speed seas. And that's where German

811
00:45:01,920 --> 00:45:06,040
Speaker 1: scientists Alfred uh Wegner comes in, who lived eighteen eighty

812
00:45:06,120 --> 00:45:09,360
Speaker 1: through nineteen thirty, and indeed he came up against the

813
00:45:09,400 --> 00:45:12,880
Speaker 1: same criticism it's just a coincidence, yeah, saying well, they're saying, well,

814
00:45:12,920 --> 00:45:15,200
Speaker 1: that's interesting, but I don't know if that's really uh

815
00:45:15,840 --> 00:45:18,440
Speaker 1: that it's really solid evidence for what you're talking about.

816
00:45:18,960 --> 00:45:21,719
Speaker 1: Because he he noted the presence of similar plan and

817
00:45:21,800 --> 00:45:24,719
Speaker 1: animal fossils in South America and Africa. How did they

818
00:45:24,760 --> 00:45:27,560
Speaker 1: get there? Well, that that's that's what he was he

819
00:45:27,600 --> 00:45:30,680
Speaker 1: was trying to answer. He noted the similar geologic formations

820
00:45:30,760 --> 00:45:34,120
Speaker 1: on both continents, and uh and also the whole spooning thing.

821
00:45:34,320 --> 00:45:37,160
Speaker 1: He said, how how else, though, could we possibly have

822
00:45:37,320 --> 00:45:40,319
Speaker 1: these these examples on these separate continents unless they were

823
00:45:40,440 --> 00:45:43,560
Speaker 1: once part of the same land mass. Okay, so South

824
00:45:43,640 --> 00:45:46,120
Speaker 1: America and Africa look like they used to fit together.

825
00:45:46,560 --> 00:45:49,719
Speaker 1: Weirdly enough, we find that the same species used to

826
00:45:49,840 --> 00:45:52,879
Speaker 1: sort of cross boundaries between them. That's kind of odd.

827
00:45:53,080 --> 00:45:55,880
Speaker 1: But how could they have actually been split apart? That

828
00:45:55,960 --> 00:45:58,120
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense. And that's the thing they said, Well,

829
00:45:58,160 --> 00:46:00,480
Speaker 1: we need we need a more robust idea of how

830
00:46:00,600 --> 00:46:03,320
Speaker 1: this could possibly work. Otherwise we're just not going to

831
00:46:03,440 --> 00:46:06,040
Speaker 1: buy it. So it wasn't until the fifties and sixties

832
00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:10,840
Speaker 1: that marine geologists identified the ocean ridges that wound about

833
00:46:10,920 --> 00:46:13,360
Speaker 1: the Earth as well as the mid ocean ridges formed

834
00:46:13,360 --> 00:46:16,480
Speaker 1: by sea floor volcanoes. And this was backed up by

835
00:46:17,160 --> 00:46:21,040
Speaker 1: magnetometer data as well. So this is the basic seafloor

836
00:46:21,120 --> 00:46:27,920
Speaker 1: spreading hypothesis proposed by petrologist Harry Hess and oceanographer Robert Deats.

837
00:46:28,520 --> 00:46:33,839
Speaker 1: In sixty five, geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson used continental drift

838
00:46:33,880 --> 00:46:37,120
Speaker 1: and seafloor spreading to propose the theory of plate tectonics.

839
00:46:37,719 --> 00:46:41,840
Speaker 1: This theory is now universally accepted by geoscientists. Yeah, that's

840
00:46:41,880 --> 00:46:44,480
Speaker 1: one of those great scientific theory success stories. We could

841
00:46:44,520 --> 00:46:46,960
Speaker 1: tell that story sometime, because that was something that was

842
00:46:47,120 --> 00:46:49,840
Speaker 1: ridiculed at first. The idea that the continents are moving

843
00:46:49,880 --> 00:46:52,760
Speaker 1: around and it is it is a crazy mind blowing

844
00:46:52,840 --> 00:46:55,120
Speaker 1: thing to try and uh and think about, because it

845
00:46:55,280 --> 00:46:58,319
Speaker 1: is it just is existing on a time scale far

846
00:46:58,440 --> 00:47:02,680
Speaker 1: beyond uh we've evolved to really comprehend. But it is

847
00:47:02,719 --> 00:47:05,759
Speaker 1: amazing how an animation like I described earlier can give

848
00:47:05,800 --> 00:47:07,759
Speaker 1: it life and and make sense of it for you. Now,

849
00:47:07,840 --> 00:47:11,279
Speaker 1: let's try to imagine a model where South America and

850
00:47:11,400 --> 00:47:15,360
Speaker 1: Africa split up and they were split apart by a

851
00:47:15,440 --> 00:47:18,480
Speaker 1: spreading ocean ridge, and that happened just a few thousand

852
00:47:18,560 --> 00:47:21,879
Speaker 1: years ago. That is a that is a messed up world. Yeah,

853
00:47:22,080 --> 00:47:25,200
Speaker 1: it it doesn't hold up. Yeah, it simply doesn't work

854
00:47:25,239 --> 00:47:28,200
Speaker 1: with a model of Earth that's less than two million

855
00:47:28,280 --> 00:47:31,279
Speaker 1: years old. You cannot have a younger Earth and bring

856
00:47:31,440 --> 00:47:34,560
Speaker 1: the geosciences with you. You have to cast out all

857
00:47:34,640 --> 00:47:37,960
Speaker 1: of the twentieth centuries evidence and clinging to essentially a

858
00:47:38,080 --> 00:47:42,080
Speaker 1: pre vaga or understanding of the position of the continents.

859
00:47:42,320 --> 00:47:44,120
Speaker 1: And of course I know you'll say, keep your hands

860
00:47:44,160 --> 00:47:45,680
Speaker 1: off the dinosaur, right, Yeah, you don't get off the

861
00:47:45,719 --> 00:47:50,360
Speaker 1: dinosaurs either, And so no dinosaurs, no paleo art, stick

862
00:47:50,440 --> 00:47:52,920
Speaker 1: to uh to draw in all the other cool stuff

863
00:47:52,960 --> 00:47:55,600
Speaker 1: in those ancient texts. Now another now, just to leave

864
00:47:55,960 --> 00:47:59,160
Speaker 1: we have an exhausted everything on the Earth that points

865
00:47:59,239 --> 00:48:02,040
Speaker 1: to an old, old Earth, right because essentially the evidence

866
00:48:02,080 --> 00:48:06,680
Speaker 1: here is all geoscience. Yeah, but we could also look

867
00:48:06,719 --> 00:48:10,760
Speaker 1: beyond Earth. We can look to evidence from astronomy and astrophysics.

868
00:48:11,120 --> 00:48:13,080
Speaker 1: And what you find when you look to astronomy and

869
00:48:13,120 --> 00:48:16,800
Speaker 1: astrophysics is that everything in the universe agrees with a

870
00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:20,839
Speaker 1: long billions of years timeline of the universe. That's right.

871
00:48:21,080 --> 00:48:22,680
Speaker 1: And again part of the issue here is that world

872
00:48:22,760 --> 00:48:25,120
Speaker 1: views that call for an absurdly young Earth are also

873
00:48:25,200 --> 00:48:28,320
Speaker 1: calling for an absurdly young cosmos. And if you believe

874
00:48:28,360 --> 00:48:30,759
Speaker 1: in a six thousand year old Earth, yeah, you don't

875
00:48:30,760 --> 00:48:33,040
Speaker 1: get to keep modern astronomy. I mean, certainly we can

876
00:48:33,080 --> 00:48:35,600
Speaker 1: speak to the probable time scale for the formation of

877
00:48:35,640 --> 00:48:38,040
Speaker 1: our own solar system, but we also have to think

878
00:48:38,080 --> 00:48:40,719
Speaker 1: to the stars. Now, nobody I think is going to

879
00:48:40,800 --> 00:48:44,200
Speaker 1: be disputing the speed of light in a vacuum, right,

880
00:48:44,280 --> 00:48:45,960
Speaker 1: But what does the speed of light and a vacuum

881
00:48:46,040 --> 00:48:48,359
Speaker 1: tell us about the universe? We're looking at what gives

882
00:48:48,360 --> 00:48:52,120
Speaker 1: you an idea of of not only the size of everything,

883
00:48:52,239 --> 00:48:56,800
Speaker 1: but the but the vast time scale involved as well. So,

884
00:48:56,960 --> 00:49:01,480
Speaker 1: for instance, with the naked human eye, uh, an individual

885
00:49:01,560 --> 00:49:05,200
Speaker 1: on Earth can glimpse the light from the Andromeda galaxy,

886
00:49:05,719 --> 00:49:07,960
Speaker 1: which will one day be the same as our galaxy.

887
00:49:08,080 --> 00:49:11,320
Speaker 1: We're we're headed together, yeah, and again talking in distant

888
00:49:11,360 --> 00:49:14,440
Speaker 1: time here, the big meet up yeah, but but currently

889
00:49:14,520 --> 00:49:17,839
Speaker 1: the Andromeda galaxy that's two point six or I've also

890
00:49:17,920 --> 00:49:21,319
Speaker 1: seen two point five four million light years from Earth

891
00:49:21,800 --> 00:49:24,200
Speaker 1: and a light year will remind you is the distance

892
00:49:24,239 --> 00:49:26,320
Speaker 1: traveled by a beam of light or or the photons

893
00:49:26,400 --> 00:49:29,360
Speaker 1: technically in the space of a given year. So the

894
00:49:29,480 --> 00:49:32,680
Speaker 1: light you see when you look to Andromeda, Uh, that

895
00:49:32,960 --> 00:49:36,200
Speaker 1: left our sister galaxy two point six million years ago.

896
00:49:37,400 --> 00:49:40,360
Speaker 1: So if we're to contend with this fact alone, the

897
00:49:40,520 --> 00:49:43,800
Speaker 1: universe would have to at least be that old for

898
00:49:44,040 --> 00:49:46,600
Speaker 1: light to have reached us at all. Uh, you know,

899
00:49:46,680 --> 00:49:49,840
Speaker 1: given a magical finger snap creation of the cosmos. The

900
00:49:50,080 --> 00:49:52,080
Speaker 1: thing about playing with with magic is that you can

901
00:49:52,120 --> 00:49:55,359
Speaker 1: just make up additional Bologny answers of course and say, well,

902
00:49:56,000 --> 00:49:59,440
Speaker 1: when the universe was created beams beams of light or

903
00:49:59,480 --> 00:50:03,640
Speaker 1: photons created in transit to the destination. Well, if you're

904
00:50:03,640 --> 00:50:06,239
Speaker 1: going to say stuff like that, I mean, you know,

905
00:50:06,600 --> 00:50:09,880
Speaker 1: no no offense, you know, go in peace. But that

906
00:50:10,200 --> 00:50:14,080
Speaker 1: you've just essentially surrendered having a conversation based on evidence.

907
00:50:14,640 --> 00:50:17,680
Speaker 1: You've just said like, okay, well then I'm not interested

908
00:50:17,800 --> 00:50:20,640
Speaker 1: in talking about what we can know based on what

909
00:50:20,760 --> 00:50:24,000
Speaker 1: we observe. I just assume that magic is involved, and

910
00:50:24,080 --> 00:50:27,120
Speaker 1: then in that case, why are we having the conversation? Right?

911
00:50:27,239 --> 00:50:29,400
Speaker 1: But but I think it's fair to say that if

912
00:50:29,440 --> 00:50:31,200
Speaker 1: you had a six thousand year old Earth within a

913
00:50:31,280 --> 00:50:34,879
Speaker 1: six thousand year old cosmos, then then you would only

914
00:50:34,960 --> 00:50:38,200
Speaker 1: be able to see things, You only be reachable by

915
00:50:38,320 --> 00:50:41,200
Speaker 1: light within a six thousand light year radius. So there

916
00:50:41,200 --> 00:50:44,719
Speaker 1: would be a six thousand light year visible universe. And uh,

917
00:50:44,920 --> 00:50:48,440
Speaker 1: and we have a vaster visible universe than that, right,

918
00:50:48,480 --> 00:50:50,800
Speaker 1: I mean, I wonder what if you are trying to

919
00:50:51,440 --> 00:50:54,200
Speaker 1: imagine a younger universe and do astronomy, what do you

920
00:50:54,320 --> 00:50:57,560
Speaker 1: make of the cosmic microwave background? What is it? What

921
00:50:57,840 --> 00:51:01,319
Speaker 1: is that to you? Because of that, that's of course

922
00:51:01,360 --> 00:51:04,080
Speaker 1: getting back to the very beginning. Um. But then there's

923
00:51:04,120 --> 00:51:06,319
Speaker 1: other evidence as well. There there have been gamma ray

924
00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:08,959
Speaker 1: bursts visible to the naked eye, UH that are further

925
00:51:09,120 --> 00:51:12,000
Speaker 1: and older than, uh than what we were talking about

926
00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:15,360
Speaker 1: with Andromeda and two thousand eight, astronomers clocked the stellar

927
00:51:15,440 --> 00:51:20,480
Speaker 1: explosion RB zero eight zero three one nine B at

928
00:51:20,600 --> 00:51:24,239
Speaker 1: seven point five billion light years away. And incidentally, this

929
00:51:24,360 --> 00:51:26,719
Speaker 1: is one of five stellar explosions recorded on the day

930
00:51:26,760 --> 00:51:30,160
Speaker 1: of author C. Clark's death on March nineteenth two thousand eight.

931
00:51:30,680 --> 00:51:34,080
Speaker 1: Do you think he made it happen? Now? I think

932
00:51:34,120 --> 00:51:36,040
Speaker 1: he would be mad if we thought that he did.

933
00:51:36,640 --> 00:51:39,960
Speaker 1: Uh Hey, And if you drag the Hubble telescope into

934
00:51:40,000 --> 00:51:42,840
Speaker 1: the fray, our limit takes takes us up to like

935
00:51:42,960 --> 00:51:46,239
Speaker 1: what thirteen point four billion light years? You know again,

936
00:51:46,320 --> 00:51:50,080
Speaker 1: that's light that that is that that can be at

937
00:51:50,160 --> 00:51:54,680
Speaker 1: least technologically observed from our little corner of the cosmos.

938
00:51:54,840 --> 00:51:57,360
Speaker 1: That's the radius of our view, not the diameter correct.

939
00:51:57,480 --> 00:51:59,719
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's like we touched on before the astronomy.

940
00:51:59,760 --> 00:52:01,719
Speaker 1: To to stare at the stars is to gaze into

941
00:52:01,760 --> 00:52:04,360
Speaker 1: the past, a deep past, a past that dwarfs the

942
00:52:04,560 --> 00:52:08,040
Speaker 1: entirety of human history, the entirety of of our our

943
00:52:08,160 --> 00:52:11,320
Speaker 1: various stories about how the universe works and where it

944
00:52:11,400 --> 00:52:14,480
Speaker 1: came from. But I mean, you can even extrapolate that

945
00:52:14,680 --> 00:52:17,920
Speaker 1: back to the circumstance, the material circumstances of our own

946
00:52:17,960 --> 00:52:21,839
Speaker 1: solar system. So it only takes light from our sun,

947
00:52:22,280 --> 00:52:25,120
Speaker 1: you know, a number of minutes to reach us. But

948
00:52:25,360 --> 00:52:27,239
Speaker 1: you can look at our sun and know that the

949
00:52:27,400 --> 00:52:30,080
Speaker 1: universe is old. So one of the things is that

950
00:52:30,160 --> 00:52:34,040
Speaker 1: the quality of our astronomical observation tools stellar astrophysics and

951
00:52:34,120 --> 00:52:37,040
Speaker 1: computer modeling capabilities. Now let us know a lot about

952
00:52:37,080 --> 00:52:40,440
Speaker 1: stars and how they form. And we know they form

953
00:52:40,840 --> 00:52:43,919
Speaker 1: from clouds of dust and gas called nebulae that fall

954
00:52:44,120 --> 00:52:47,560
Speaker 1: into gravitational collapse. They begin to coalesce and the heat

955
00:52:47,640 --> 00:52:50,120
Speaker 1: up into what's known as a protostar. And we also

956
00:52:50,200 --> 00:52:52,879
Speaker 1: know that this process of gas collapse takes a very

957
00:52:52,960 --> 00:52:56,320
Speaker 1: long time. For instance, our Sun is a star that

958
00:52:56,480 --> 00:52:59,719
Speaker 1: is obviously no longer a collapsing cloud of gas and dust.

959
00:52:59,800 --> 00:53:03,280
Speaker 1: It's an adult star. It's a star that's performing fusion

960
00:53:03,680 --> 00:53:07,240
Speaker 1: of hydrogen into helium. It's in its adult mature phase.

961
00:53:07,719 --> 00:53:10,280
Speaker 1: And the time it takes for a star the size

962
00:53:10,320 --> 00:53:13,240
Speaker 1: of our Sun to go from the beginning of collapse

963
00:53:13,760 --> 00:53:16,399
Speaker 1: of the nebula into its adult phase. I was looking

964
00:53:16,440 --> 00:53:19,120
Speaker 1: at some NASA materials on this that's somewhere around fifty

965
00:53:19,160 --> 00:53:22,440
Speaker 1: million years. We can model that with the astrophysics knowledge

966
00:53:22,520 --> 00:53:24,920
Speaker 1: we have, if the universe were not at least fifty

967
00:53:24,960 --> 00:53:27,640
Speaker 1: million years old, our son could not be an adult star.

968
00:53:28,280 --> 00:53:30,960
Speaker 1: But it gets worse because we also know that our

969
00:53:31,000 --> 00:53:34,720
Speaker 1: son cannot be a first generation star. Our solar system

970
00:53:35,040 --> 00:53:37,520
Speaker 1: is full of not just hydrogen. You know that, like

971
00:53:37,800 --> 00:53:39,840
Speaker 1: the most abundant gas in the universe. It's full of

972
00:53:39,920 --> 00:53:43,879
Speaker 1: heavy elements like iron. Where did all that come from?

973
00:53:44,360 --> 00:53:49,040
Speaker 1: That's not primordial material. Heavy elements like that are forged

974
00:53:49,200 --> 00:53:52,560
Speaker 1: in the deaths of other stars. So actually we know

975
00:53:52,760 --> 00:53:55,480
Speaker 1: that not only did you know is our is our

976
00:53:55,560 --> 00:53:58,640
Speaker 1: star an adult that had to grow up. Also, it

977
00:53:58,840 --> 00:54:01,320
Speaker 1: can't have been a for generation star. It had to

978
00:54:01,480 --> 00:54:06,040
Speaker 1: come from a previous generation of dead stars to create

979
00:54:06,120 --> 00:54:08,520
Speaker 1: these heavy elements that make up things like the planets.

980
00:54:09,080 --> 00:54:11,480
Speaker 1: And I have to say, you know, if this means

981
00:54:11,520 --> 00:54:14,319
Speaker 1: that if if you if you cast aside this understanding,

982
00:54:14,520 --> 00:54:17,200
Speaker 1: you can't have gold. And if you can't have gold,

983
00:54:17,280 --> 00:54:19,279
Speaker 1: you can't have the Ark of the Covenant. And I

984
00:54:19,480 --> 00:54:21,880
Speaker 1: and I have to say, like, how much cooler is

985
00:54:21,960 --> 00:54:25,040
Speaker 1: the story of the Ark of the Covenant if if

986
00:54:25,080 --> 00:54:27,360
Speaker 1: you factor in the fact that the Ark of the

987
00:54:27,440 --> 00:54:30,439
Speaker 1: Covenant is made of this metal forged in the heart

988
00:54:30,480 --> 00:54:33,960
Speaker 1: of a dying star. Oh, I think that's that's far

989
00:54:34,080 --> 00:54:36,600
Speaker 1: more that that's far cooler, that's far more amazing. It

990
00:54:36,760 --> 00:54:40,600
Speaker 1: is a radio for talking to God. But we can

991
00:54:40,640 --> 00:54:42,799
Speaker 1: also I mean we talked about meteorites, so you can

992
00:54:42,840 --> 00:54:45,319
Speaker 1: look at other objects in the Solar system and they

993
00:54:45,440 --> 00:54:47,839
Speaker 1: also turn out to be quite old. They line up

994
00:54:47,960 --> 00:54:50,440
Speaker 1: with our model of how old our solar system is.

995
00:54:50,480 --> 00:54:52,759
Speaker 1: What about the Moon, Yeah, I mean there are there

996
00:54:52,800 --> 00:54:54,799
Speaker 1: are a few different models for how the Moon came

997
00:54:55,360 --> 00:54:58,680
Speaker 1: to be. The most popular scientific hypothesis is the giant

998
00:54:58,800 --> 00:55:02,800
Speaker 1: impact or hypothesis. In this hypothesis, a Mars sized object

999
00:55:03,120 --> 00:55:06,520
Speaker 1: hit the young, cooling Earth at an angle and this

1000
00:55:06,560 --> 00:55:08,359
Speaker 1: would have been This would have occurred about four point

1001
00:55:08,480 --> 00:55:12,200
Speaker 1: forty five billion years ago, and the impact or itself

1002
00:55:12,360 --> 00:55:15,799
Speaker 1: melted into the Earth, but debris from the impact went

1003
00:55:15,960 --> 00:55:19,160
Speaker 1: up and event eventually formed into the Moon. And this,

1004
00:55:19,360 --> 00:55:22,320
Speaker 1: according to the hypothesis, is why moon rocks are similar

1005
00:55:22,360 --> 00:55:25,520
Speaker 1: in composition to Earth's mantle and why the Moon has

1006
00:55:25,600 --> 00:55:28,200
Speaker 1: no iron core. Yeah, this makes sense. The the Moon

1007
00:55:28,680 --> 00:55:32,200
Speaker 1: looks like something that came off the Earth, but not

1008
00:55:32,440 --> 00:55:35,320
Speaker 1: from the core of the Earth. Right, It's an accretion

1009
00:55:35,560 --> 00:55:39,440
Speaker 1: of terrestrial shrapnel according to this hypothesis. You know, another

1010
00:55:39,640 --> 00:55:42,880
Speaker 1: totally different way of looking deep into the past that

1011
00:55:43,040 --> 00:55:45,480
Speaker 1: I've talked about before. I remember one time I did

1012
00:55:45,520 --> 00:55:48,439
Speaker 1: a guest episode of Tech Stuff with Jonathan Strickland about

1013
00:55:48,480 --> 00:55:51,360
Speaker 1: this is about ice core drilling. Oh yeah, yeah, So

1014
00:55:51,480 --> 00:55:54,520
Speaker 1: one way scientists study the atmosphere of the Earth long ago,

1015
00:55:54,640 --> 00:55:57,279
Speaker 1: like if you're trying to figure out what atmospheric composition

1016
00:55:57,520 --> 00:55:59,000
Speaker 1: was a long time ago. One way you can do

1017
00:55:59,160 --> 00:56:03,759
Speaker 1: this as you can drill down into ice sheets or

1018
00:56:03,800 --> 00:56:08,080
Speaker 1: into glaciers to pull up these cylinder shaped vertical columns

1019
00:56:08,120 --> 00:56:12,520
Speaker 1: of ice, and they will contain information interesting information like

1020
00:56:12,600 --> 00:56:15,800
Speaker 1: bubbles of gas trapped in ice layers from the distant past,

1021
00:56:15,960 --> 00:56:18,960
Speaker 1: or what the snow looked like as it was deposited

1022
00:56:19,040 --> 00:56:22,840
Speaker 1: each season in the past. And often these cylinder shaped

1023
00:56:22,880 --> 00:56:26,160
Speaker 1: ice cores come from Greenland or Antarctica, places where ice

1024
00:56:26,200 --> 00:56:29,520
Speaker 1: has been accumulating on top of itself for hundreds of

1025
00:56:29,640 --> 00:56:34,160
Speaker 1: thousands of years or more, and ice layers accumulate steadily

1026
00:56:34,360 --> 00:56:37,160
Speaker 1: year after year, giving you a very helpful map of

1027
00:56:37,320 --> 00:56:41,040
Speaker 1: past freezing seasons. And normally you can date this ice

1028
00:56:41,320 --> 00:56:45,839
Speaker 1: uh simply by counting the neatly ordered layers of yearly accumulation,

1029
00:56:45,960 --> 00:56:48,000
Speaker 1: especially near the top of an ice core. You can

1030
00:56:48,080 --> 00:56:50,560
Speaker 1: do that, though this method does become more difficult the

1031
00:56:50,600 --> 00:56:53,480
Speaker 1: deeper you go, because obviously you've got stuff like compression

1032
00:56:53,600 --> 00:56:57,520
Speaker 1: and stuff happening. So older samples can cross reference multiple

1033
00:56:57,600 --> 00:57:00,960
Speaker 1: dating methods to boost accuracy. Uh. These other methods can

1034
00:57:01,000 --> 00:57:05,239
Speaker 1: be things like correlating deeper layers of ice with known

1035
00:57:05,400 --> 00:57:09,960
Speaker 1: historical geological events like the deposition of volcanic ash or

1036
00:57:10,000 --> 00:57:13,200
Speaker 1: other geological markers. If you know when a volcano erupted

1037
00:57:13,320 --> 00:57:16,280
Speaker 1: and what that deposition layer looks like, you can see

1038
00:57:16,320 --> 00:57:18,880
Speaker 1: signs of that there. But there are some really old

1039
00:57:19,000 --> 00:57:21,480
Speaker 1: ice cores that we've that we've managed to pull up

1040
00:57:21,560 --> 00:57:24,480
Speaker 1: until last year. I think the oldest known ice core

1041
00:57:24,720 --> 00:57:27,280
Speaker 1: was about eight hundred thousand years old, and that came

1042
00:57:27,320 --> 00:57:30,760
Speaker 1: from a core drilled and Antarctica's dome c which was

1043
00:57:30,880 --> 00:57:34,520
Speaker 1: dated I believe using radiometric uranium decay. That's getting on

1044
00:57:34,640 --> 00:57:39,360
Speaker 1: down to that Lovecraftian city exactly, yeah, the Mountains of Madness.

1045
00:57:39,800 --> 00:57:44,000
Speaker 1: But in an extremely old ice core was drilled in

1046
00:57:44,040 --> 00:57:46,760
Speaker 1: a patch of what's known as Blue Ice and Alan

1047
00:57:46,880 --> 00:57:49,720
Speaker 1: Hills of East Antarctica. And in fact this was dated

1048
00:57:49,760 --> 00:57:53,080
Speaker 1: to two point seven million years old. Now, because of

1049
00:57:53,120 --> 00:57:55,680
Speaker 1: the nature of the blue ice patches where old ice

1050
00:57:55,760 --> 00:57:58,600
Speaker 1: formations are driven up from below, it couldn't be dated

1051
00:57:58,680 --> 00:58:01,160
Speaker 1: by like counting the layers, but it was dated by

1052
00:58:01,200 --> 00:58:04,160
Speaker 1: potassium or gone dating to two point seven million with

1053
00:58:04,280 --> 00:58:07,440
Speaker 1: a likely error tolerance. Of something like a hundred thousand years.

1054
00:58:07,480 --> 00:58:10,040
Speaker 1: So even just ice ice is not even rock. I mean,

1055
00:58:10,400 --> 00:58:12,600
Speaker 1: if you think about like ice should be melting and

1056
00:58:12,680 --> 00:58:15,280
Speaker 1: churning up all the time, we can find ice that

1057
00:58:15,440 --> 00:58:18,360
Speaker 1: goes back hundreds of thousands of years. So again, these

1058
00:58:18,400 --> 00:58:21,280
Speaker 1: are these are not like the only examples we could

1059
00:58:21,320 --> 00:58:23,920
Speaker 1: turn to. We could, it would be an exhaustive list,

1060
00:58:24,760 --> 00:58:30,960
Speaker 1: because virtually all the geosciences uh astronomical understanding, I mean,

1061
00:58:31,160 --> 00:58:34,200
Speaker 1: it all is based on this, and it all ties

1062
00:58:34,320 --> 00:58:37,760
Speaker 1: into this idea um of an old, much older Earth

1063
00:58:37,800 --> 00:58:40,800
Speaker 1: and a much older cosmos. Yeah, and so of course,

1064
00:58:40,920 --> 00:58:42,760
Speaker 1: as we were talking about a minute ago, a person

1065
00:58:42,840 --> 00:58:45,600
Speaker 1: whose theological beliefs to drive them toward believing in a

1066
00:58:45,640 --> 00:58:48,120
Speaker 1: young Earth can always simply say, well, none of that matters,

1067
00:58:48,240 --> 00:58:51,200
Speaker 1: because I have a supernatural explanation for the way things are.

1068
00:58:51,760 --> 00:58:54,200
Speaker 1: You know, there, it was just made to look that way.

1069
00:58:55,120 --> 00:58:57,160
Speaker 1: And if you believe that, as I've said, I mean that,

1070
00:58:57,440 --> 00:58:58,960
Speaker 1: I think that is the point where you may go

1071
00:58:59,080 --> 00:59:01,920
Speaker 1: in peace. Like you, it is possible you simply will

1072
00:59:01,960 --> 00:59:05,200
Speaker 1: not be convinced. But notice how much that type of

1073
00:59:05,880 --> 00:59:10,960
Speaker 1: explanation starts to resemble the invisible dragon in Carl Sagan's garage, Right, Like,

1074
00:59:11,360 --> 00:59:14,240
Speaker 1: if a belief is designed so that it can safely

1075
00:59:14,360 --> 00:59:17,920
Speaker 1: ignore all tests and all evidence to the contrary, why

1076
00:59:17,960 --> 00:59:20,520
Speaker 1: would you believe it? Yeah, And again I want to

1077
00:59:20,560 --> 00:59:23,120
Speaker 1: be clear, this is not aimed at religious beliefs in general.

1078
00:59:23,200 --> 00:59:26,120
Speaker 1: People have all kinds of ways of of being religious.

1079
00:59:26,120 --> 00:59:29,160
Speaker 1: And I'm talking about those specifically that make claims about

1080
00:59:29,320 --> 00:59:32,920
Speaker 1: physical reality and about history that encroach on territory for

1081
00:59:33,080 --> 00:59:36,480
Speaker 1: which we have good evidence about what actually happened. Yeah,

1082
00:59:36,960 --> 00:59:41,520
Speaker 1: areas where we're actually dealing with, um uh, the rejection

1083
00:59:41,720 --> 00:59:45,600
Speaker 1: of science or the twisting and replacement of science with

1084
00:59:45,720 --> 00:59:50,520
Speaker 1: a pseudoscience that supports a preconceived theological notion. Right. And

1085
00:59:50,600 --> 00:59:52,920
Speaker 1: so I guess maybe one question to end with is

1086
00:59:53,760 --> 00:59:56,480
Speaker 1: we started with these emails we've gotten from listeners asking

1087
00:59:56,520 --> 00:59:59,600
Speaker 1: for help sorting out these claims, and we get these

1088
00:59:59,640 --> 01:00:03,680
Speaker 1: emails else because people live in a world where they're

1089
01:00:03,760 --> 01:00:06,280
Speaker 1: competing claims against about the age of the Earth, and

1090
01:00:06,320 --> 01:00:08,600
Speaker 1: they don't know how to make sense of of the

1091
01:00:08,760 --> 01:00:12,800
Speaker 1: arguments coming from each side. And yeah, I've experienced this too.

1092
01:00:12,880 --> 01:00:15,880
Speaker 1: There are a bazillion Young Earth creationist arguments out there,

1093
01:00:16,120 --> 01:00:18,680
Speaker 1: and unless you literally devote your entire life to it.

1094
01:00:18,760 --> 01:00:22,240
Speaker 1: You're really not going to have time to investigate all

1095
01:00:22,280 --> 01:00:25,320
Speaker 1: of them for yourself and find out if they're correct. So,

1096
01:00:25,680 --> 01:00:28,920
Speaker 1: I mean, I think a fair question to ask is,

1097
01:00:29,080 --> 01:00:32,360
Speaker 1: how do you know when you can just consider an

1098
01:00:32,440 --> 01:00:35,920
Speaker 1: issue settled? How do you know when you can responsibly

1099
01:00:36,080 --> 01:00:40,040
Speaker 1: just start ignoring arguments that come from a certain perspective?

1100
01:00:40,640 --> 01:00:43,400
Speaker 1: You know what I mean? Robert? Yeah, yeah, Like, and

1101
01:00:43,560 --> 01:00:46,280
Speaker 1: we talk about it being the bedrock for person for

1102
01:00:46,520 --> 01:00:48,600
Speaker 1: a scientific understanding, but yeah, how can you know it's

1103
01:00:48,640 --> 01:00:50,720
Speaker 1: bed rock that you can build up up and on

1104
01:00:50,840 --> 01:00:53,120
Speaker 1: top of it, right, Because I mean, the scientific mindset,

1105
01:00:53,400 --> 01:00:55,920
Speaker 1: it doesn't say like, okay, now we've got a dogma

1106
01:00:56,000 --> 01:00:58,240
Speaker 1: and you just accept it forever and never question it.

1107
01:00:58,320 --> 01:01:00,600
Speaker 1: You know, you should always be open to evidence to

1108
01:01:00,640 --> 01:01:04,000
Speaker 1: the contrary. But how do you know when by paying

1109
01:01:04,040 --> 01:01:07,160
Speaker 1: attention to certain kinds of arguments you can be nine

1110
01:01:07,760 --> 01:01:11,400
Speaker 1: point nine sure that you are wasting your time? I mean,

1111
01:01:11,440 --> 01:01:13,400
Speaker 1: it's a great question because so much of the bedrock

1112
01:01:13,480 --> 01:01:16,760
Speaker 1: understanding of the natural world, you know, it's it's based

1113
01:01:16,840 --> 01:01:19,680
Speaker 1: on things that are technically theories. You know that we

1114
01:01:19,800 --> 01:01:23,400
Speaker 1: have theoretical understandings of things, and we have to proceed

1115
01:01:23,480 --> 01:01:26,880
Speaker 1: based upon those theories. Now, of course, we don't want

1116
01:01:26,880 --> 01:01:30,160
Speaker 1: to give the accidentally give the misimpression that a theory

1117
01:01:30,320 --> 01:01:32,640
Speaker 1: means a thing like is something we should not have

1118
01:01:32,760 --> 01:01:35,120
Speaker 1: good confidence in. No. No, you can have good confidence

1119
01:01:35,160 --> 01:01:38,600
Speaker 1: in a theory. Theory is above a hypothesis. Yeah, exactly.

1120
01:01:38,680 --> 01:01:41,320
Speaker 1: But I guess I'm trying to figure out where do

1121
01:01:41,360 --> 01:01:44,200
Speaker 1: you draw the line between. So here's one where most

1122
01:01:44,320 --> 01:01:48,000
Speaker 1: I think paleontologists think that the the we were talking

1123
01:01:48,000 --> 01:01:51,240
Speaker 1: about the cheek Schalube impact, right, that that was a

1124
01:01:51,360 --> 01:01:54,720
Speaker 1: major factor in the demise of the dinosaurs, right, But

1125
01:01:54,800 --> 01:01:57,680
Speaker 1: there are some who disagree. And so that seems like

1126
01:01:58,160 --> 01:02:01,000
Speaker 1: an issue where the evidence seems to be or at

1127
01:02:01,040 --> 01:02:03,920
Speaker 1: least the experts are largely on one side of the question,

1128
01:02:04,560 --> 01:02:07,919
Speaker 1: but there's maybe still legitimate controversy. Maybe we could find

1129
01:02:07,960 --> 01:02:11,120
Speaker 1: out the opposite is true. Maybe that impact was not

1130
01:02:11,320 --> 01:02:14,000
Speaker 1: the main factor in the dewise of the dinosaurs, And

1131
01:02:14,280 --> 01:02:17,600
Speaker 1: I can conceivably see that happening. The Young Earth does

1132
01:02:17,680 --> 01:02:21,520
Speaker 1: not feel that way to me, because it is it's

1133
01:02:21,680 --> 01:02:25,640
Speaker 1: so violates in such a fundamental way everything we know

1134
01:02:25,920 --> 01:02:30,240
Speaker 1: from every field that's you know, that's independently verified by

1135
01:02:30,480 --> 01:02:34,040
Speaker 1: the means of that field on its own. It seems

1136
01:02:34,080 --> 01:02:36,240
Speaker 1: like stuff that goes in the face of an old

1137
01:02:36,320 --> 01:02:39,919
Speaker 1: Earth is guaranteed to fail. Yeah, you're dealing with such

1138
01:02:40,240 --> 01:02:46,800
Speaker 1: drastically different ideas here. Yeah, again, just drastically different time scales.

1139
01:02:47,360 --> 01:02:50,160
Speaker 1: One matches up with our scientific understanding of the world

1140
01:02:50,200 --> 01:02:52,760
Speaker 1: and the other. As we have just been hammering home

1141
01:02:52,880 --> 01:02:56,200
Speaker 1: here in these two episodes, does not discovering that the

1142
01:02:56,320 --> 01:02:58,680
Speaker 1: Earth is young would be kind of like discovering that

1143
01:02:58,920 --> 01:03:02,960
Speaker 1: electricity not involve electrons. I would just want to just

1144
01:03:03,080 --> 01:03:05,160
Speaker 1: drive home. Like, if you're out there and you feel

1145
01:03:05,320 --> 01:03:11,480
Speaker 1: like your belief system keeps you from embracing science, um,

1146
01:03:11,840 --> 01:03:14,240
Speaker 1: I would encourage you to to look around and find

1147
01:03:14,400 --> 01:03:16,880
Speaker 1: and see if you can't find a version of your

1148
01:03:16,960 --> 01:03:20,480
Speaker 1: belief system that makes room for science and allows for science,

1149
01:03:20,520 --> 01:03:23,240
Speaker 1: because I can almost guarantee you that it's out there

1150
01:03:23,480 --> 01:03:26,080
Speaker 1: and there there are people out there who can hold

1151
01:03:26,160 --> 01:03:29,280
Speaker 1: on to the beliefs that you cherish and the culture

1152
01:03:29,320 --> 01:03:33,680
Speaker 1: that you cherish without rejecting science. All right, Well, on

1153
01:03:33,760 --> 01:03:36,320
Speaker 1: that note, we're gonna close this episode out, and we're

1154
01:03:36,360 --> 01:03:38,920
Speaker 1: just gonna remind everybody head on over to Stuff to

1155
01:03:38,920 --> 01:03:41,440
Speaker 1: Blow your mind dot com, because that is our mothership.

1156
01:03:41,520 --> 01:03:43,480
Speaker 1: That is where you will find all of our episodes,

1157
01:03:44,040 --> 01:03:46,800
Speaker 1: you'll find blog posts, you'll find links to our various

1158
01:03:46,840 --> 01:03:49,520
Speaker 1: social media accounts, and you also find a tab for

1159
01:03:49,600 --> 01:03:51,840
Speaker 1: our store, which is which is super cool. If you

1160
01:03:51,880 --> 01:03:56,080
Speaker 1: want to get a T shirt, a pillow, stickers for

1161
01:03:56,160 --> 01:03:59,760
Speaker 1: your laptops or street science whatever, UH stick them on

1162
01:03:59,800 --> 01:04:04,400
Speaker 1: your body. UM. We have some cool UH merchandise. They're

1163
01:04:04,400 --> 01:04:06,840
Speaker 1: available with our logo on it. Some some of them

1164
01:04:06,880 --> 01:04:09,160
Speaker 1: say stuff to blow your mind. Sometimes it's just the logo.

1165
01:04:09,320 --> 01:04:11,320
Speaker 1: It's just kind of a wink to you know, other

1166
01:04:11,360 --> 01:04:13,960
Speaker 1: people you might encounter who are also fans of the show. UH.

1167
01:04:14,040 --> 01:04:16,760
Speaker 1: And we also have some cool designs based on particular

1168
01:04:16,880 --> 01:04:19,080
Speaker 1: episodes that are worth checking out. Do you know if

1169
01:04:19,120 --> 01:04:21,880
Speaker 1: our designs are being sold as temporary tattoos? If not,

1170
01:04:22,120 --> 01:04:24,080
Speaker 1: how can we get that done? I do not believe

1171
01:04:24,160 --> 01:04:27,360
Speaker 1: that is currently available, but they're always adding new products

1172
01:04:27,600 --> 01:04:30,280
Speaker 1: UH to the to the store, so perhaps in the

1173
01:04:30,360 --> 01:04:33,320
Speaker 1: future it will become possible. UM. And Hey, if you

1174
01:04:33,360 --> 01:04:35,480
Speaker 1: want to support the show in a way that doesn't

1175
01:04:35,560 --> 01:04:38,360
Speaker 1: involve money, rate and review us wherever you have the

1176
01:04:38,400 --> 01:04:41,240
Speaker 1: power to do so, such as Apple Podcasts. It really

1177
01:04:41,320 --> 01:04:44,120
Speaker 1: helps us out huge thanks. As always to our wonderful

1178
01:04:44,120 --> 01:04:47,800
Speaker 1: audio producers Alex Williams and Try Harrison. If you would

1179
01:04:47,840 --> 01:04:50,280
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback about

1180
01:04:50,320 --> 01:04:53,200
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to let us know a

1181
01:04:53,320 --> 01:04:55,280
Speaker 1: topic you'd like us to cover in the future, or

1182
01:04:55,440 --> 01:04:57,960
Speaker 1: just to say hi, you can email us at blow

1183
01:04:58,080 --> 01:05:09,320
Speaker 1: the Mind at how Stuff Works. Do Come on for

1184
01:05:09,440 --> 01:05:11,760
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it

1185
01:05:11,840 --> 01:05:24,640
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com, Think the Differ