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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And so, Robert,

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Speaker 1: you know that every now and then on the show,

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Speaker 1: the Age of the Earth and the Age of the

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Speaker 1: Universe come up, will mention that the Earth is about

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Speaker 1: four and a half billion years old, or that the universe,

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Speaker 1: the observable universe, is about thirteen point eight billion years old,

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Speaker 1: or will in some general way talk about the scientific

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Speaker 1: concepts of deep time, some kind of observation that reflects

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Speaker 1: a deep time. And when we do this, I'm sure

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Speaker 1: you've seen that we often get emails from listeners. Listeners

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Speaker 1: sometimes from particular religious beliefs or backgrounds, asking us to

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Speaker 1: help them sort out competing claims about the age of

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Speaker 1: the Earth. Yes, so we we occasionally receive emails like this.

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Speaker 1: I've also seen comments to these effects on social media,

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Speaker 1: sometimes our own social media, but I've also seen it

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Speaker 1: on social media accounts associated with other How Stuff Works podcasts,

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Speaker 1: And uh, you know, we we don't always take the

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Speaker 1: time to really discuss this stuff because generally speaking, when

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Speaker 1: we're talking about the age of the Earth in the

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Speaker 1: Age of the Universe, we're talking about scientific consensus, and

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Speaker 1: we're generally referring to the the age of the Earth,

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Speaker 1: of the age of the universe, so that we can

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Speaker 1: discuss something else. We're generally discussing some other topic that

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Speaker 1: that is placed upon the bedrock of this understanding of

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Speaker 1: deep time. Yeah, and so we are going to be

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Speaker 1: talking about deep time and about the age of the

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Speaker 1: Earth in these next two episodes. But this is not

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Speaker 1: because it reflects a serious disagreement among working scientists. It

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Speaker 1: does not. There is not any serious controversy about whether

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Speaker 1: the Earth is billions of years old. It absolutely is.

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Speaker 1: And part of what we wanted to do in these

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Speaker 1: episodes is actually used this as an example to explore

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Speaker 1: one of the best things about sciences, which is that

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Speaker 1: science helps create a synoptic view of history in the universe.

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Speaker 1: It brings together so many different ways of exploring the

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Speaker 1: universe that all converge on similar storylines and end up

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Speaker 1: telling us the same thing in different ways. And when

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Speaker 1: you do that, of course, that always increases your confidence

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Speaker 1: that you're on the right track, you're finding out real information. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: everything's not coming from a single individual or a single

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Speaker 1: uh source of information. It's not sake all coming from

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Speaker 1: a single work of ancient literature exactly. But to kick

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Speaker 1: us off today, I thought maybe we should just look

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Speaker 1: real quick at a couple of examples of emails people

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Speaker 1: have sent us asking us to address this topic and

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Speaker 1: reflecting a genuine desire to understand more about it. Right,

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Speaker 1: because I think you know we've touched on before. People

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Speaker 1: aren't coming from a don't necessary from a place of

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Speaker 1: just absolute you know, refusal. Uh. Well, some people are,

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Speaker 1: but some people are, But I mean generally, especially if

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Speaker 1: you're listening to the show, you are curious about the world.

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Speaker 1: You're curious about about where it came from, where it's going.

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Speaker 1: You you have a scientific mind. Uh, just maybe you

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Speaker 1: haven't been able to consume necessarily the right scientific uh

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Speaker 1: uh data in some cases, such as exactly why we

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Speaker 1: believe the earth in the university be the ages that

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Speaker 1: they are. So let's first look at this email from

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Speaker 1: our listeners. C J. C J writes, Hi, gents, I've

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Speaker 1: enjoyed your podcast immensely. You guys have a way of

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Speaker 1: making extremely complex topics approachable. It's been exciting to begin

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Speaker 1: to grasp things like quantum theory and black holes, albeit

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Speaker 1: at a ridiculously high level. This is exactly the reason

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Speaker 1: I'd like you to do a podcast regarding the age

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Speaker 1: of the Earth. I have a few preface points prior

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Speaker 1: to getting into the specifics of my request. One, I

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Speaker 1: believe in God, and based on some very personal experiences,

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Speaker 1: I don't think I'll ever be able to abandon that belief.

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Speaker 1: It falls in line with subjective consciousness, wherein there's no

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Speaker 1: way for me to fully explain it from my viewpoint

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Speaker 1: and no way for you to grasp it from yours. Therefore,

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Speaker 1: I'm not looking to explore the religious origin stories more

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Speaker 1: than necessary for the things I'm asking your insight on. Two,

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Speaker 1: I'm admittedly under educated when it comes to scientific methods

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Speaker 1: regarding dating of objects through various methods. I've tried to

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Speaker 1: do research on this on my own, but I find

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Speaker 1: it difficult to get a picture of how and why

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Speaker 1: the methods are sound. That's where you come in. My

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Speaker 1: request is this, would you please do a show that

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Speaker 1: discusses the methods of scientifically determining ages of things? How

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Speaker 1: these have been proven? Given the immense scaling from our

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Speaker 1: relatively short observable timelines and compare slash contrast this with

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Speaker 1: the scientific claims of Young Earth advocates. This maybe two

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Speaker 1: different show requests, I suppose, but I would like to

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Speaker 1: have a better understanding of these forms of measurement while

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Speaker 1: also gaining understanding of the potential flaws in the science

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Speaker 1: based claims of the of a young Earth. Uh and

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Speaker 1: gives a couple of examples. I hope to hear your

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Speaker 1: insight on these matters. Thanks for the consideration, p US.

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Speaker 1: I imagine you have many listeners like myself who have

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Speaker 1: these conflicting science claims about the age of the Earth

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Speaker 1: and who have trouble parsing them out with much thanks

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Speaker 1: c J. All right, and here's another one for example.

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Speaker 1: And again this just helps, I think, put a face,

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Speaker 1: put a voice on these questions. This comes from a

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Speaker 1: listener named Lucas quote. In many episodes, the hosts have

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Speaker 1: made comments about the ridiculous nature of Young Earth creation

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Speaker 1: quote unquote science. They often comment about how the young

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Speaker 1: Earth idea is easily disproved by geological dating methods and

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Speaker 1: simple observation. However, Young arthurs claim that geological dating is

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Speaker 1: unreliable and can be influenced by environmental factors. I love

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Speaker 1: to see a show where the hosts look at geological

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Speaker 1: dating methods and either debunk or confirm their accuracy and validity.

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Speaker 1: Oddly enough, I have not been able to find much

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Speaker 1: information on this topic. All I can ever find is

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Speaker 1: Young Earth literature saying that the dating methods are flawed

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Speaker 1: and inaccurate, or mainstream science article saying young Arthur's or morons.

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Speaker 1: Nobody seems to be interested in actually proving or disproving

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Speaker 1: the valid of dating methods. Keep have the good work, Lucas. Now,

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Speaker 1: in this email from Lucas, I noticed something where he

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Speaker 1: talks about the availability of different types of sources on

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Speaker 1: this subject. And maybe this is a good moment for

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Speaker 1: us to point out some of some of what's bad

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Speaker 1: about Google results on topics related to the age of

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Speaker 1: the Earth and evolution, because I have noticed, and I'm

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Speaker 1: sure you have too, Robert. In fact, I know you have,

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Speaker 1: because you made a note about it. The top pages

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Speaker 1: of Google results are just polluted with propagandistic anti science

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Speaker 1: literature about the age of the Earth and about evolution. Right. Well,

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Speaker 1: I mean, on one hand, also you have just various

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Speaker 1: question websites and message board type interfaces where someone's like, hey,

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Speaker 1: what's the real age of the earth, And then you

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Speaker 1: have generally non experts and people with with access to

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Speaker 1: crime come in and uh and argue about it. Toilet

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Speaker 1: head Johnny on Yahoo Answers says, the age of the

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Speaker 1: Earth is very old. Anybody who says as otherwise is stupid, right,

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Speaker 1: And then you, yeah, you do have these uh, these

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Speaker 1: very problematic websites and and and normally, you know, I

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Speaker 1: wouldn't even want to call them out by name, but

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Speaker 1: I should point out to anyone out there listening. And

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Speaker 1: many of you already know this, um, but answers in

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Speaker 1: Genesis a website is not a reputable source on science

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Speaker 1: or objective reality. And I normally, again I normally be

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Speaker 1: in not be inclined to point something out like this.

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Speaker 1: But the website does tend to rank very highly in

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Speaker 1: search results for otherwise scientific questions regarding our world. Oh,

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Speaker 1: all the time. Anytime you google something about evolution or

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Speaker 1: the age of the Earth, it's on the first page

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Speaker 1: of Google results. It's amazing. It makes it right up there.

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Speaker 1: Another one and in fact, one thing I will say

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Speaker 1: that as especially insidious is that there are tendentious websites

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Speaker 1: pushing a non science based point of view that often

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Speaker 1: end up ranking very high, and at the same time

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Speaker 1: they seem to be trying to disguise their religious affiliation.

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Speaker 1: One website that comes to mind often shows up in

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Speaker 1: results is a website called evolution News, which tries to

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Speaker 1: apparently present itself as some kind of neutral scientific website,

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Speaker 1: but it's actually it's a creationist propaganda site. It's run

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Speaker 1: by the Discovery Institute, which is an intelligent design media machine.

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Speaker 1: But it's not called like the scientists are Lying dot com.

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Speaker 1: It's called evolution News. It makes it seem like it's

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Speaker 1: website that's just grabbing new articles about evolution discoveries. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and again, I I believe these these websites are just nefarious.

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Speaker 1: They managed to They managed to get both science drastically

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Speaker 1: wrong and I think get religion wrong as well. They

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Speaker 1: they they they try to force both into the same

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Speaker 1: awkward shape and managed to shatter both the vessels. Um

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Speaker 1: Because as I've talked about on the show before, you Know,

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Speaker 1: I think you can you can have a religious worldview

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Speaker 1: or a spiritual worldview without discrediting science, without throwing science

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Speaker 1: to the wolves or bending it to the will of

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Speaker 1: of a spiritual religious model. Uh So, I think these

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Speaker 1: exercises are entirely unnecessary, to say the least, well as

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Speaker 1: we know they're often based on particular theological beliefs having

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Speaker 1: to do with like the literal applicability of certain holy

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Speaker 1: books and stuff like that. Right, And to be clear,

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Speaker 1: for anyone out there who's perhaps not religiously aligned like that,

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Speaker 1: this is this is not the majority of believers that

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Speaker 1: are engaging in these uh these these these carefully manicured

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Speaker 1: models for say a young Earth or a completely biblically

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Speaker 1: aligned pseudo science for our world like this is a

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Speaker 1: small majority of people who have just managed to uh

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Speaker 1: produce websites that rank highly in in Google via search

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Speaker 1: engine optimization. Yeah. Um, now, I just want I already

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Speaker 1: said this earlier, but I want to stress again at

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Speaker 1: the outset that we are not talking about the subject

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Speaker 1: of the age of the Earth because it's a controversial

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Speaker 1: question in science. The approximate age of the Earth is

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Speaker 1: not a controversial question in science, so it used to

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Speaker 1: be until the twentieth century it was, And we're going

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Speaker 1: to explore that history a bit as we go on,

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Speaker 1: but we're not talking about this topic because there's a

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Speaker 1: legitimate possibility that the Earth is, as many Young Earth

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Speaker 1: creationists believes, somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand years old.

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Speaker 1: There there is absolutely no scientific reason to believe that,

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Speaker 1: and I hope by the end of these episodes you

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Speaker 1: will understand not just that there's lots of evidence that

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Speaker 1: the Earth is billions of years old, but that the

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Speaker 1: evidence is not confined to single methods that can be

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Speaker 1: you know, picked at and debunked. The billions of years

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Speaker 1: of the history of the Earth are an altogether view

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Speaker 1: of every branch of science. It's part of this synoptic

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Speaker 1: history that's been established by almost every material method we

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Speaker 1: have of investigating the world. Now, I know some of

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Speaker 1: you out there listening are definitely science enthusiasts, and you're

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Speaker 1: gonna say, well, Robert and Joe, I already know this.

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Speaker 1: You don't have to tell me. Or not only do

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Speaker 1: I know this, but I'm also not planning to get

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Speaker 1: in an argument online or in real life with anyone

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Speaker 1: who believes the Earth is six thousand years old. Why

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Speaker 1: should I listen to these two episodes? Well, I'll just

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Speaker 1: say that there's gonna be a lot of cool facts

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Speaker 1: about the history of our our our planet, in our universe. Um.

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Speaker 1: And that's ultimately I think the appeal of these episodes

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Speaker 1: as well is that the is the deep time is

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Speaker 1: fascinating and it's full of these just wondrous uh facts

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Speaker 1: that that that are really thrilling to think about. Well. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and the history of the Earth for so long was

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Speaker 1: a mystery, I mean to think about, think about before

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Speaker 1: we had any really good estimates of how old the

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Speaker 1: Earth is, and to not know you live on a planet.

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Speaker 1: You don't know if it's been here for six thousand years,

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Speaker 1: as maybe a literal interpretation of your Holy Book says,

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Speaker 1: or if it's been here forever as many as Aristotle

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Speaker 1: might have said. Um, So, I mean that's a crazy

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Speaker 1: question to contemplate. Yeah, or was it here at all

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Speaker 1: before I woke up? You can get into very philosophical realms,

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Speaker 1: so when you when you contemplate this, uh. But of

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Speaker 1: course today we have we have science to give us

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Speaker 1: a far more definitive answers. Now, I want to say

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Speaker 1: one more thing, which is that while we do want

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Speaker 1: to be forceful in refuting the idea that the Earth

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Speaker 1: is just a few thousand years old. I don't want

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Speaker 1: to just spend a couple episodes harping on how wrong

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Speaker 1: Young Earth creation is so are and bash them for

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Speaker 1: being so stupid. I don't think that's our game. You know,

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Speaker 1: you don't have to be stupid to be tremendously wrong

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Speaker 1: about things. People engage in motivated reasoning about all kinds

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Speaker 1: of stuff. Um, that that is a tremendously wrong, misguided conclusion.

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Speaker 1: But I'm not especially interested in just like insulting people

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Speaker 1: for holding it. No. No, And then also, science is

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Speaker 1: a journey, and we're we're all on a journey. Uh.

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Speaker 1: Joe and I included, Uh so if you if you

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Speaker 1: believe or have believed incorrect things about the history of

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Speaker 1: the Earth, Well, we are all continuing to figure out

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Speaker 1: how the world works, and we're all we're all learning

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Speaker 1: new things as we go. So, um, you know, absolutely

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Speaker 1: no judgments uh in that regard. Well, part of the

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Speaker 1: humility that's introduced by a scientific worldview is the absolute

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Speaker 1: certainty that some things you're pretty confident about right now

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Speaker 1: will turn out to be wrong. But the age of

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Speaker 1: the Earth is so well established at this point that

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Speaker 1: it is not one of those things. Now, I think

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Speaker 1: we should actually get into the history of beliefs about

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Speaker 1: the age of the earth. Like obviously, as we said,

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Speaker 1: people have not always known how old the earth is.

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Speaker 1: In fact, until the twenty century, they were all kinds

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Speaker 1: of ideas all over the map. So I guess let's

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Speaker 1: start by looking at this history. How how did we

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Speaker 1: get to now? What is the history of beliefs about

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Speaker 1: the age of the earth? Well, I mean the world.

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Speaker 1: The world belief is key here, of course, you know,

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Speaker 1: because given non scientific thinking, given explanations in myth and folklore,

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Speaker 1: I can really believe anything I want about the history

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Speaker 1: of the earth, so long as I'm willing again to

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Speaker 1: dismiss rigorous scientific investigation and think in favor of magic

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Speaker 1: and fiction and a lot of early discussions about the

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Speaker 1: history of the world and like where animals come from

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Speaker 1: and stuff like that. And you look at these natural

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Speaker 1: histories from the ancient world there they seem to be

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Speaker 1: largely based on just looking at what's going on around

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Speaker 1: you and using your intuition trying to come up with

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Speaker 1: a logical model for what the world is. Uh So

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Speaker 1: what is today mythology might be interpreted as a far

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Speaker 1: more logical model in say, you know, ancient babylon But

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Speaker 1: an ancient Babylonian model doesn't really you know, hold up

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Speaker 1: to di scrutiny if if it's transported into the modern age.

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Speaker 1: But true enough, Religions are often interested in the time

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Speaker 1: span of things, and so their estimates for the age

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Speaker 1: of the Earth in the universe vary. And it's also

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Speaker 1: important to note here that especially for ancient faiths and

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Speaker 1: ancient thinkers, there's generally no distinction between the world and

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Speaker 1: the universe. So that you know, the world or Earth

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Speaker 1: was creation itself, why would there be anything else? Right? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: these are generally geocentric ways of thinking. I mean, even

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Speaker 1: if people didn't have a fully composed cosmology of planetary

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Speaker 1: bodies orbiting the Earth and stuff like that, you generally

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Speaker 1: would not have had any idea that the Earth is

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Speaker 1: just one planet on a sort of in a back

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Speaker 1: corner of someplace in the galaxy. Yeah. Some people saw

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Speaker 1: the world as everlasting. Other's limited it to the shape

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Speaker 1: of our own life and assumed it had a moment

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Speaker 1: of beginning in a moment of ultimate demise, which of

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Speaker 1: course is quite reasonable because I mean scientifically speaking, Uh,

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Speaker 1: the Earth definitely has a beginning and it will one

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Speaker 1: day have an end, which we've discussed on the podcast before. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: one of my favorite things about creation stories for the

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Speaker 1: Earth is how common it is to have a story

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Speaker 1: where the Earth is made out of something else, something

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Speaker 1: that's alive, like made out of the dead body of

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Speaker 1: a slain sea monster or something like that. Yeah, we

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Speaker 1: get into this. I believe it was Order out of

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Speaker 1: Chaos an older episode. I'll try to remember to link

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Speaker 1: to that episode of the landing page for this episode.

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Speaker 1: It's stuff to blow your mind dot com. But when

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Speaker 1: religions provided time frames for the birth of a world,

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Speaker 1: you know, it tended to vary. So in Orthodox Judaism,

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Speaker 1: the universe is less than six thousand years old, and

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Speaker 1: Biblical creationists, as we've discussed, get caught up on the

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Speaker 1: six thousand year old thing as well. And certainly we

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Speaker 1: do have to point out that six millennia is a

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Speaker 1: long time. This is the humans for humans. Yes, it

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Speaker 1: is a span of time that includes the rise and

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Speaker 1: fall of many great civilizations, the Indus Valley civilization, every

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Speaker 1: Chinese dynasty, the kingdoms of Sumer in Egypt. It is

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Speaker 1: essentially the span of written language for our species and

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Speaker 1: is a six thousand year ladder emerging from the shadows

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Speaker 1: of prehistory. But we of course know that that humans

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Speaker 1: existed before this point. The first agricultural revolution dates back

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Speaker 1: to ten thousand b c UH. The Neolithic period began

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Speaker 1: in UM ten thousand, two hundred BC, and this is

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Speaker 1: an important age in the evolution of human technology and

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Speaker 1: the earliest use of fire that takes us back one

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Speaker 1: point five million years. Stone tools take us back more

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Speaker 1: than three million years now. One of the funny things

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Speaker 1: is that we're so used to dealing with theologically based

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Speaker 1: beliefs that the Earth is much younger than it is.

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Speaker 1: But it could have gone the other way, right, People

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Speaker 1: could have theological reasons for thinking that the Earth is

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Speaker 1: a hundred trillion years old or something. Yeah, I mean,

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Speaker 1: some religions air in the other direction. Take Hinduism, for instance,

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Speaker 1: The Vedas explained that there's a continual death and rebirth

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Speaker 1: of the universe for each time the universe lives through

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Speaker 1: four ages or yuga's. There's the Saya Yuga, the age

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Speaker 1: in which God spoke to man Uh, there's the threat

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Speaker 1: to Yuga, the age of the Ramayana, there's uh the

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Speaker 1: Devarpa Yuga, and then there's the Kali Yuga. This is

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Speaker 1: the modern age, and you have the War of the Mahabarata.

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Speaker 1: Bridging these these, the third and fourth yuga all told.

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Speaker 1: The four Yugo's make up one Maya yuga, which is

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Speaker 1: a single day in the life of Brahma, the creator god,

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Speaker 1: but for humans it's a four million, three D twenty

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Speaker 1: thousand years. Brahma lives one hundred years each composed of

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Speaker 1: three hundred sixty Brahma days, so that's a grand timescape

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Speaker 1: of one trillion years. So yeah, the numbers get get

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Speaker 1: pretty crazy pretty quickly. So we've seen all of the

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Speaker 1: apologetics arguments that the Earth is much younger than it is.

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Speaker 1: But I wonder are there apologetics arguments that the Earth

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Speaker 1: is much older than it is? I mean, I don't know,

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Speaker 1: you now, now here's something that I hadn't thought about

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Speaker 1: until now. But if you get into these various um

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Speaker 1: ideas about the world that we live in now being

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Speaker 1: a computer simulation in a in a futuristic age, well

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Speaker 1: that that would be a model that would essentially argue

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Speaker 1: that the world is older, is actually older than we

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Speaker 1: believe it to be right now, because we are not

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Speaker 1: in two thousand and eighteen. We are in what ever

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Speaker 1: futuristic year it is that we have the simulation technology

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Speaker 1: to imagine ourselves in Wow. Now that's interesting, and you

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Speaker 1: could have interesting time dilation effects due to the simulation

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Speaker 1: of the passage of time. Yeah, so obviously every believer

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Speaker 1: would be different. But in general, do you think a

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Speaker 1: world simulated on computer hardware would be somewhat compatible with

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Speaker 1: Hindu theology? I mean you do get into that whole

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Speaker 1: idea of you know, what is what is the true reality?

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Speaker 1: And how is it hidden from us? So in a

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Speaker 1: sense it is I mean, I don't want to speak

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Speaker 1: for Hinduism or for you know, you know, true Hindu

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Speaker 1: believers and the best you know, diversity that is found

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Speaker 1: within Hindu belief but yeah, if you're kind of leaning

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Speaker 1: into it and like you know, with the Sci Fi

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Speaker 1: in one hand and Hinduism and the other, yeah, you

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Speaker 1: can make those connections for sure. Interesting. Now, of course,

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Speaker 1: one of the things that we're people like us are

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Speaker 1: going to be most familiar with is the fact that

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Speaker 1: Christians throughout history have tried to calculate the exact date

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Speaker 1: of creation by reading the Bible literally and trying to

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Speaker 1: use that literal reading to trace the amount of time

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Speaker 1: between events in in known history back through all the

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Speaker 1: Bighats to the creation of the world in Genesis. The

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Speaker 1: most famous of these literal biblical chronologies is from the

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Speaker 1: seventeenth century Irish archbishop James Usher. You've probably heard of

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Speaker 1: the Usher chronology before, and Usher try to use genealogy

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Speaker 1: based approach to the ancestors of Jesus, tracing all the

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Speaker 1: way back to Adam the first man in Genesis and

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Speaker 1: eventually concluded that the world was created on October six,

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Speaker 1: four thousand, four BC at six pm s in the afternoon.

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Speaker 1: See this would really suck though, because if this were

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Speaker 1: the case, that means you're created and then instantly you

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Speaker 1: only have five days to get a Halloween costume together.

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Speaker 1: October is always over too fast anyway. Yeah. Yeah, Speaking

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Speaker 1: of which, October always a great month for stuff to

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Speaker 1: blow your mind. So if if you're not anticipating it already,

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Speaker 1: look forward to a lot of cool Halloween related topics

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Speaker 1: that might be the case. So we've probably got new

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Speaker 1: new listeners, new ones you out there this year who

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Speaker 1: just started listening to our show and you don't even

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Speaker 1: know that every October we do monster science all months. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: this is nothing but Halloween all months. Sometimes it spills

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Speaker 1: over a little. I'm so excited, Robert, I can't wait.

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Speaker 1: Oh boy, okay, but wait back, We've got to stay

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Speaker 1: on task. It's not October yet, that's right, Or if

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Speaker 1: it is, it's uh four thousand and four BC, right,

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Speaker 1: or I guess it's just BC. If we're just dealing

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Speaker 1: with with this guy's ideas about the history of the Earth,

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Speaker 1: I guess so. So for a long time, in much

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Speaker 1: of the Christian dominated world, that date was taken as

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Speaker 1: pretty much correct. You know. People might have had some

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Speaker 1: kind of differences about how he calculated exactly what different

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Speaker 1: parts of the Bible mean, but many Christian believers thought

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Speaker 1: that the Earth was about six thousand years old for

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Speaker 1: the past few hundred years. Though. I have to wonder

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Speaker 1: you must get into some kind of strange middle territory

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Speaker 1: when you try to fit uh say, geologically significant events

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Speaker 1: in the Bible with what we see in the natural world. Right.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean A big one, of course, is

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Speaker 1: the Great Flood. And there's actually an old episode of

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Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind that that that goes into

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Speaker 1: the Great flood um quite a bit, and not only

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Speaker 1: the Abrahamic traditions of the Great Flood, but also the

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Speaker 1: the the Great flood as we see in Chinese traditions

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Speaker 1: Chinese mythology, which itself is utterly fascinating. But yeah, you

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Speaker 1: get into it. Took a while for modern scientific understanding

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Speaker 1: of Earth's um geological and biological history to fully disengage

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Speaker 1: from Western Christian religious traditions, to fully remove the sacred

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Speaker 1: time frame from the profane time frame. And so the

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Speaker 1: earliest approach approaches a framed the antediluvian world within periods

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Speaker 1: of a pre adomic and adomic time. So you ended up,

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Speaker 1: I mean the sort of the I wouldn't say it's

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Speaker 1: a tragedy, but the situation, as you ended up, people

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Speaker 1: essentially trying to scientifically understand geology, but they were hamstrung

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Speaker 1: by these um by this necessity to somehow fit in

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Speaker 1: a great flood and uh at the time of Adam. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and I imagine it's especially complicated by the idea that

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Speaker 1: the flood in in Christian and Jewish tradition has moral

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Speaker 1: dimensions to it, So it's not just something that they

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Speaker 1: believe happened to have happened in the past. You know,

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Speaker 1: at one point a bunch of water came down and

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Speaker 1: flooded the whole earth, but they believed that like it

431
00:23:37,640 --> 00:23:40,920
Speaker 1: happened for a reason to purge the wickedness of creation

432
00:23:40,960 --> 00:23:43,400
Speaker 1: that had gone wrong. Yeah. Now, now that being said,

433
00:23:43,440 --> 00:23:46,439
Speaker 1: there is a lot of really cool uh scholarship on

434
00:23:47,000 --> 00:23:49,880
Speaker 1: you know, what inspired these myths of the Great flood,

435
00:23:50,080 --> 00:23:53,239
Speaker 1: be it in Mesopotamia or in China and uh, and

436
00:23:53,280 --> 00:23:55,679
Speaker 1: what kind of evidence we have for those situations. But

437
00:23:55,960 --> 00:23:59,320
Speaker 1: those are still the Great Flood as it occurred, and

438
00:23:59,359 --> 00:24:01,240
Speaker 1: it was you know, we're we're not really talking a

439
00:24:01,240 --> 00:24:05,040
Speaker 1: global flood, we're talking regional floods. Um these would have

440
00:24:05,359 --> 00:24:09,680
Speaker 1: would have occurred within human history. And you can't really

441
00:24:09,760 --> 00:24:13,679
Speaker 1: if you're taking that and you're trying to understand geologic history,

442
00:24:13,720 --> 00:24:15,720
Speaker 1: it's just not going to fit well, of course not.

443
00:24:15,800 --> 00:24:18,480
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, geological time and human time are are

444
00:24:18,920 --> 00:24:21,800
Speaker 1: so different. I mean, you mentioned earlier the idea that

445
00:24:21,880 --> 00:24:24,119
Speaker 1: six thousand years is a long time, and it is

446
00:24:24,160 --> 00:24:26,680
Speaker 1: a long time for us. It's the blink of an

447
00:24:26,680 --> 00:24:31,000
Speaker 1: eye in geologic time. Very little happens in six thousand

448
00:24:31,080 --> 00:24:34,320
Speaker 1: years geologically. But sorry, anyway to come back to the

449
00:24:34,359 --> 00:24:38,600
Speaker 1: idea that you had people who were in say, like

450
00:24:39,280 --> 00:24:42,960
Speaker 1: the early Modern and then Enlightenment period trying to look

451
00:24:43,000 --> 00:24:46,480
Speaker 1: at the world with a somewhat scientific eye, but but

452
00:24:46,640 --> 00:24:51,600
Speaker 1: also still being strongly influenced by their religious worldview. Yeah.

453
00:24:51,600 --> 00:24:54,320
Speaker 1: One of the earliest geologists was the seventeenth century Roman

454
00:24:54,359 --> 00:24:58,400
Speaker 1: Catholic priest named Nicholas Steno. Uh. And and he he's

455
00:24:58,400 --> 00:25:01,320
Speaker 1: actually achieved through you of the four steps to being

456
00:25:01,359 --> 00:25:04,160
Speaker 1: declared a saint. But he was one of the first

457
00:25:04,200 --> 00:25:07,200
Speaker 1: to show that rocks tell their own stories. Sometimes this

458
00:25:07,359 --> 00:25:11,120
Speaker 1: guide's religious doctrines and other times it refutes them. Uh.

459
00:25:11,400 --> 00:25:14,640
Speaker 1: But uh, yeah, he made he made some some major movements,

460
00:25:14,640 --> 00:25:18,080
Speaker 1: and it is a result of of of geology. But

461
00:25:18,280 --> 00:25:22,080
Speaker 1: by Darwin's time, most clergy members abandoned the idea that

462
00:25:22,160 --> 00:25:26,359
Speaker 1: a literal global flood had happened. But but for a while, Uh,

463
00:25:26,480 --> 00:25:29,080
Speaker 1: science progress as if the Great Flood was a very

464
00:25:29,119 --> 00:25:31,800
Speaker 1: real occurrence in the history of the Earth. Uh. And

465
00:25:31,800 --> 00:25:34,239
Speaker 1: and science is a whole move beyond this notion in

466
00:25:34,560 --> 00:25:37,320
Speaker 1: the eighteenth and nineteenth century. But I am interested in

467
00:25:37,320 --> 00:25:39,840
Speaker 1: this idea. We're back to the question that like from

468
00:25:39,840 --> 00:25:43,639
Speaker 1: our geomethology episode. You know, uh do you do you

469
00:25:43,680 --> 00:25:47,600
Speaker 1: think that there is a good evidential basis for thinking

470
00:25:47,640 --> 00:25:53,000
Speaker 1: that flood myths are inspired by some kind of regional

471
00:25:53,040 --> 00:25:56,320
Speaker 1: floods or something in history, or that it just as

472
00:25:56,359 --> 00:25:59,800
Speaker 1: easily could have been creative imagination. I think there's a

473
00:25:59,840 --> 00:26:02,840
Speaker 1: lot of strong evidence that that it was inspired by

474
00:26:02,880 --> 00:26:05,920
Speaker 1: actual floods, because floods occur. I mean, you have people,

475
00:26:06,359 --> 00:26:08,679
Speaker 1: ancient people especially, they're not living in the middle of

476
00:26:08,680 --> 00:26:12,119
Speaker 1: the desert. They're living near bodies of water, and bodies

477
00:26:12,160 --> 00:26:15,440
Speaker 1: of water are subject to flooding, be at a river

478
00:26:15,760 --> 00:26:18,719
Speaker 1: or a coastal region, and when they occur, the effects

479
00:26:18,760 --> 00:26:22,160
Speaker 1: can be catastrophic. Uh. They and they definitely make an impact.

480
00:26:22,240 --> 00:26:25,679
Speaker 1: And in terms of extrapolating this into a world flood,

481
00:26:26,119 --> 00:26:28,359
Speaker 1: I forget the name of the researcher off hand, but

482
00:26:29,080 --> 00:26:31,880
Speaker 1: these referenced in that older episode, he pointed out that, um,

483
00:26:31,960 --> 00:26:35,840
Speaker 1: you know, every every flood is a global flood if

484
00:26:35,880 --> 00:26:39,840
Speaker 1: your world is small enough, you know. So, yeah, I

485
00:26:40,240 --> 00:26:42,440
Speaker 1: think there's there's a lot of interesting evidence so that,

486
00:26:42,880 --> 00:26:46,200
Speaker 1: you know, be at Mesopotamia or China, these are these

487
00:26:46,359 --> 00:26:51,879
Speaker 1: are tales that were inspired by actual flooding. Scenarios. All right, well,

488
00:26:51,920 --> 00:26:53,399
Speaker 1: I think we should take a quick break, and when

489
00:26:53,480 --> 00:26:56,200
Speaker 1: we come back, we will look at some earlier attempts

490
00:26:56,240 --> 00:27:02,040
Speaker 1: to scientifically determine the age of the Earth. Alright, we're back.

491
00:27:02,320 --> 00:27:04,359
Speaker 1: So it wouldn't be until the twentieth century that we

492
00:27:04,400 --> 00:27:06,639
Speaker 1: started to get an accurate figure of the age of

493
00:27:06,640 --> 00:27:09,880
Speaker 1: the Earth. But there were scientists in previous centuries who

494
00:27:09,920 --> 00:27:12,879
Speaker 1: tried to use scientific methods to infer the age of

495
00:27:12,880 --> 00:27:15,320
Speaker 1: the planet, and not just say, you know, reading religious

496
00:27:15,359 --> 00:27:18,120
Speaker 1: texts to to try to determine how how long we've

497
00:27:18,160 --> 00:27:21,520
Speaker 1: been around. I found a nice little article that discusses

498
00:27:21,600 --> 00:27:25,000
Speaker 1: several of these experiments by French physicist named Jean Paul Poiller.

499
00:27:25,840 --> 00:27:27,880
Speaker 1: It's called about the Age of the Earth in Comptus

500
00:27:27,880 --> 00:27:33,359
Speaker 1: Rendus Geoscience, and Poier points out that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz,

501
00:27:33,440 --> 00:27:36,680
Speaker 1: who lived sixteen forty six to seventeen sixteen. Leibnitz, of course,

502
00:27:36,800 --> 00:27:38,639
Speaker 1: was a big figure in a lot of fields. Uh

503
00:27:38,720 --> 00:27:43,880
Speaker 1: He was a philosopher mathematician independently invented calculus. But Leibnitz

504
00:27:43,960 --> 00:27:48,920
Speaker 1: proposed in his posthumously published book proto Gaia that Earth

505
00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:53,200
Speaker 1: began as a molten Sphere and Leibniz. Though like pretty

506
00:27:53,280 --> 00:27:55,800
Speaker 1: much everybody in his time, believed in a creator of

507
00:27:55,840 --> 00:27:59,159
Speaker 1: the natural world, he was not so into direct religious

508
00:27:59,200 --> 00:28:02,439
Speaker 1: interpretation of nature. I read in this book review in

509
00:28:02,520 --> 00:28:05,680
Speaker 1: Nature that he was once referring to people who see

510
00:28:05,760 --> 00:28:09,240
Speaker 1: miraculous images in natural objects, you know, like the virgin

511
00:28:09,240 --> 00:28:12,600
Speaker 1: Mary in a pancake or whatever. Uh, see miraculous images

512
00:28:12,600 --> 00:28:15,800
Speaker 1: in natural objects. And he wrote, quote, credulity fills in

513
00:28:15,920 --> 00:28:19,440
Speaker 1: the rough outlines, shaped by accident. And I think that's

514
00:28:19,480 --> 00:28:22,760
Speaker 1: pretty much a correct view of how those perceptions come about.

515
00:28:23,400 --> 00:28:26,320
Speaker 1: But though he did not invoke a literal interpretation of

516
00:28:26,320 --> 00:28:28,920
Speaker 1: the Bible, and doing so, he still assumed a short

517
00:28:29,080 --> 00:28:32,120
Speaker 1: history of the earth. Uh. And this sort of limited

518
00:28:32,119 --> 00:28:34,479
Speaker 1: time frame hindered his thinking when he was trying to

519
00:28:34,520 --> 00:28:37,320
Speaker 1: explore the natural history. Yeah, I mean it's it's it

520
00:28:37,400 --> 00:28:40,560
Speaker 1: is a preconceived notion of of what you're going to find.

521
00:28:40,880 --> 00:28:43,800
Speaker 1: But there were people who before the people who were

522
00:28:43,800 --> 00:28:46,680
Speaker 1: really on the right track, there were people who started

523
00:28:46,720 --> 00:28:51,920
Speaker 1: to undermine the literal view of the six thousand year creation. Uh.

524
00:28:52,000 --> 00:28:55,760
Speaker 1: For example, George Louis le Clerk, Count de boufon of

525
00:28:56,000 --> 00:28:58,480
Speaker 1: seven he lived seventeen o seven to seventeen eighty eight.

526
00:28:58,520 --> 00:29:02,920
Speaker 1: He was this eighteenth century free naturalist and encyclopediaist. He

527
00:29:03,080 --> 00:29:06,400
Speaker 1: created this massive work of natural history called the Histoire

528
00:29:06,520 --> 00:29:10,720
Speaker 1: natural and in his introduction ala estoar de minero in,

529
00:29:12,160 --> 00:29:16,000
Speaker 1: Bouffon described how he had personally tried to determine the

530
00:29:16,040 --> 00:29:18,719
Speaker 1: age of the Earth by way of an experiment. So

531
00:29:18,760 --> 00:29:20,720
Speaker 1: you think, well, how could you do an experiment to

532
00:29:20,800 --> 00:29:23,080
Speaker 1: determine the age of the earth in the eighteenth century?

533
00:29:23,080 --> 00:29:26,160
Speaker 1: What would that experiment be? Though he was wrong, this

534
00:29:26,280 --> 00:29:30,400
Speaker 1: was actually a really clever approach, I thought. Bouffon wrote, quote,

535
00:29:30,520 --> 00:29:34,240
Speaker 1: I have made ten wrought iron cannonballs, the first one

536
00:29:34,320 --> 00:29:37,240
Speaker 1: half an inch in diameter, the second one an inch

537
00:29:37,320 --> 00:29:40,800
Speaker 1: in diameter, the tenth one five inches in diameter, or

538
00:29:40,800 --> 00:29:44,400
Speaker 1: about thirteen centimeters. And so he heated all of the

539
00:29:44,480 --> 00:29:47,720
Speaker 1: cannon balls to what he called white heat, and then

540
00:29:47,760 --> 00:29:50,160
Speaker 1: measured the length of time it took to cool them

541
00:29:50,160 --> 00:29:52,840
Speaker 1: all down to two different points. Number one, when they

542
00:29:52,840 --> 00:29:55,000
Speaker 1: were cool enough to hold in the hand for a

543
00:29:55,040 --> 00:29:58,400
Speaker 1: second without burning, and then number two, when they cooled

544
00:29:58,440 --> 00:30:02,360
Speaker 1: to room temperature. So can just imagine Bouffon out there

545
00:30:02,520 --> 00:30:06,719
Speaker 1: like fondling these hot cannon balls try and figure out

546
00:30:06,720 --> 00:30:08,720
Speaker 1: I mean. And so he's doing this by touch, like,

547
00:30:08,800 --> 00:30:11,720
Speaker 1: not even using a thermometer, but he he gets some

548
00:30:11,880 --> 00:30:16,240
Speaker 1: interesting results even despite these methods. So Bouffon found through

549
00:30:16,280 --> 00:30:20,400
Speaker 1: these experiments that the cooling times were related directly to

550
00:30:20,440 --> 00:30:24,280
Speaker 1: the cannonballs diameter. There's just a direct linear relationship between

551
00:30:24,280 --> 00:30:26,960
Speaker 1: how wide the cannon ball is and how long it

552
00:30:27,000 --> 00:30:29,520
Speaker 1: takes it to cool down to these two points. And

553
00:30:29,560 --> 00:30:32,920
Speaker 1: he used this information to extrapolate to the age of

554
00:30:32,960 --> 00:30:34,719
Speaker 1: the Earth. He says, you know, if we know the

555
00:30:34,720 --> 00:30:37,680
Speaker 1: Earth is ex number of miles wide, then I can

556
00:30:37,720 --> 00:30:40,400
Speaker 1: tell you how long it took to cool down from

557
00:30:40,440 --> 00:30:45,760
Speaker 1: this molten point that Leibniz had had proposed. So Bouffon writes, quote, now,

558
00:30:45,840 --> 00:30:48,120
Speaker 1: if we wanted to infer with Newton how much time

559
00:30:48,160 --> 00:30:50,280
Speaker 1: was needed for a sphere as big as the Earth

560
00:30:50,320 --> 00:30:53,160
Speaker 1: to cool down, one would find, according to the above

561
00:30:53,240 --> 00:30:56,239
Speaker 1: experiments that instead of the fifty thousand years that he

562
00:30:56,320 --> 00:30:59,520
Speaker 1: had estimated for the Earth's cooling time to be down

563
00:30:59,560 --> 00:31:02,960
Speaker 1: to its as in day temperature, one needed forty two thousand,

564
00:31:03,080 --> 00:31:06,760
Speaker 1: nine hundred sixty four years and two hundred twenty one

565
00:31:06,880 --> 00:31:09,560
Speaker 1: days to cool it down to a temperature where it

566
00:31:09,600 --> 00:31:13,680
Speaker 1: would not burn, and ninety six thousand, six hundred and

567
00:31:13,760 --> 00:31:16,760
Speaker 1: seventy years and one hundred and thirty two days to

568
00:31:16,840 --> 00:31:19,840
Speaker 1: cool it to room temperature. As Poirier points out, that's

569
00:31:19,920 --> 00:31:23,680
Speaker 1: kind of some illusory accuracy there. It's like so specific

570
00:31:23,760 --> 00:31:25,840
Speaker 1: it sounds like he must be right, but he was

571
00:31:25,880 --> 00:31:29,640
Speaker 1: way wrong. Uh. The Buffon argued that the real material

572
00:31:29,680 --> 00:31:32,640
Speaker 1: constituents of the Earth, like clay and sandstone, would take

573
00:31:32,760 --> 00:31:35,880
Speaker 1: less time to cool down than pure wrought iron, and

574
00:31:35,920 --> 00:31:39,600
Speaker 1: created an updated estimate based on that quote. By using

575
00:31:39,640 --> 00:31:43,920
Speaker 1: in this sum only glass, sandstone, hard limestone, marble, and

576
00:31:43,960 --> 00:31:47,720
Speaker 1: the ferruginous matter, one finds that the earth sphere solidified

577
00:31:47,760 --> 00:31:50,440
Speaker 1: down to its center in about two thousand, nine hundred

578
00:31:50,440 --> 00:31:53,480
Speaker 1: and five years, that it cooled enough to be touched

579
00:31:53,640 --> 00:31:56,720
Speaker 1: in circa thirty three thousand, nine hundred and eleven years,

580
00:31:56,760 --> 00:32:00,040
Speaker 1: and a room temperature in seventy four thousand, forty of

581
00:32:00,080 --> 00:32:02,760
Speaker 1: the years. Okay, well that's still that's more than six

582
00:32:02,800 --> 00:32:07,440
Speaker 1: thousand years, but still rather short of the actual age. Right.

583
00:32:07,480 --> 00:32:11,600
Speaker 1: So Poarier discusses several reasons that Bouffonon's calculation was so

584
00:32:11,680 --> 00:32:14,840
Speaker 1: far from the truth quote. He implicitly assumed that the

585
00:32:14,880 --> 00:32:18,400
Speaker 1: cannonballs had a uniform text temperature from their surface to

586
00:32:18,440 --> 00:32:22,400
Speaker 1: their core, and that this temperature decrease through time. Now,

587
00:32:22,480 --> 00:32:24,400
Speaker 1: of course, this is not the case with the Earth,

588
00:32:24,440 --> 00:32:27,440
Speaker 1: and while Bouffon's experiment is fairly accurate with small balls

589
00:32:27,440 --> 00:32:31,040
Speaker 1: of uniform material, the principle that there's a linear relationship

590
00:32:31,080 --> 00:32:34,480
Speaker 1: between the diameter of a ball and the cooling time

591
00:32:34,800 --> 00:32:37,760
Speaker 1: becomes less and less applicable as the spheres get bigger.

592
00:32:37,840 --> 00:32:41,720
Speaker 1: Parrier calculates that this linear relationship breaks down for spheres

593
00:32:41,760 --> 00:32:45,360
Speaker 1: once they reach about seventeen centimeters in radius. So that's

594
00:32:45,400 --> 00:32:48,000
Speaker 1: sort of what made him way off. And though he

595
00:32:48,120 --> 00:32:52,640
Speaker 1: was very wrong, Bouffon was actually also influential, not in

596
00:32:52,640 --> 00:32:55,400
Speaker 1: the answer he came up with, but in his questioning

597
00:32:55,440 --> 00:32:58,280
Speaker 1: of the theologically received idea that the Earth was six

598
00:32:58,320 --> 00:33:01,560
Speaker 1: thousand years old. He sort of showed, look, the Earth

599
00:33:01,560 --> 00:33:04,000
Speaker 1: could be as old as anything as far as we know,

600
00:33:04,280 --> 00:33:06,480
Speaker 1: and we might as well do some experiments to try

601
00:33:06,480 --> 00:33:08,640
Speaker 1: to figure out how old it could be. And so

602
00:33:08,720 --> 00:33:11,840
Speaker 1: others tried to follow suit. Like Kelvin, also tried to

603
00:33:11,880 --> 00:33:14,600
Speaker 1: infer the Earth's age by doing a similar calculation about

604
00:33:14,600 --> 00:33:18,240
Speaker 1: cooling times, except what he did to infer the rate

605
00:33:18,280 --> 00:33:22,120
Speaker 1: of the Earth's cooling was to use the geothermal gradient,

606
00:33:22,280 --> 00:33:24,719
Speaker 1: which is the rate at which the Earth gets hotter

607
00:33:24,920 --> 00:33:28,120
Speaker 1: as you go deeper into its crust. An example here

608
00:33:28,160 --> 00:33:31,000
Speaker 1: would be that there's sort of a rough approximation that

609
00:33:31,080 --> 00:33:34,040
Speaker 1: the Earth gets about thirty degrees celsius hotter for every

610
00:33:34,120 --> 00:33:38,000
Speaker 1: kilometer down into it you go. And Kelvin assumed that

611
00:33:38,040 --> 00:33:41,280
Speaker 1: the Earth cooled by conduction from the surface. So this

612
00:33:41,360 --> 00:33:44,240
Speaker 1: thinking led him in eighteen sixty three to propose that

613
00:33:44,280 --> 00:33:46,840
Speaker 1: the age of the Earth was between twenty four million

614
00:33:46,920 --> 00:33:50,760
Speaker 1: and four hundred million years, so getting a lot closer. Yeah, though,

615
00:33:50,800 --> 00:33:53,720
Speaker 1: I mean, critics may argue that it's only getting hotter

616
00:33:53,720 --> 00:33:56,600
Speaker 1: in the middle because that's where held is. That's a

617
00:33:56,720 --> 00:34:00,840
Speaker 1: very good point. Kelvin didn't even consider that event. Uh So,

618
00:34:00,960 --> 00:34:04,000
Speaker 1: But why why was Kelvin also wrong? Why why did

619
00:34:04,080 --> 00:34:07,040
Speaker 1: his cooling calculation network either even though he used this

620
00:34:07,120 --> 00:34:10,399
Speaker 1: gradient cooling method. Well, you might be thinking, what about

621
00:34:10,400 --> 00:34:13,520
Speaker 1: the radioactive heating of the Earth. It is true that

622
00:34:13,640 --> 00:34:16,800
Speaker 1: radioactive materials in the Earth do lead to continuous heating,

623
00:34:17,000 --> 00:34:19,799
Speaker 1: but Parier says this is actually not very important when

624
00:34:19,840 --> 00:34:23,439
Speaker 1: it comes to measuring the temperature gradient method. Uh So,

625
00:34:23,800 --> 00:34:27,840
Speaker 1: the actual answer, Paria says is because Kelvin assumed that

626
00:34:27,920 --> 00:34:32,239
Speaker 1: the Earth cooled through conduction. In fact, one of Kelvin's assistants,

627
00:34:32,360 --> 00:34:34,600
Speaker 1: John Perry, pointed out that if you assume there's a

628
00:34:34,680 --> 00:34:38,000
Speaker 1: higher thermal conduct conductivity inside the Earth, you would get

629
00:34:38,000 --> 00:34:40,240
Speaker 1: an age in the range of a few billion years.

630
00:34:40,560 --> 00:34:43,240
Speaker 1: And in fact, we now know that over large time scales,

631
00:34:43,280 --> 00:34:46,239
Speaker 1: a lot of what's going on inside the Earth behaves

632
00:34:46,239 --> 00:34:50,440
Speaker 1: like a liquid, which allows matter to flow somewhat along

633
00:34:50,480 --> 00:34:53,040
Speaker 1: with the heat, causing a heat transfer from the core

634
00:34:53,160 --> 00:34:57,759
Speaker 1: by convection rather than just conduction, and understanding the convection

635
00:34:57,840 --> 00:34:59,880
Speaker 1: cooling of the Earth can help give us an s

636
00:35:00,080 --> 00:35:03,160
Speaker 1: meant on the correct order of magnitude, which is billions

637
00:35:03,160 --> 00:35:06,520
Speaker 1: of years. And this brings us to the correct answer.

638
00:35:06,520 --> 00:35:09,000
Speaker 1: We mentioned it earlier in the episode. But there there

639
00:35:09,080 --> 00:35:13,600
Speaker 1: is a fully formalized consensus across the sciences now that

640
00:35:13,680 --> 00:35:16,719
Speaker 1: the Earth is about four point five billion years old.

641
00:35:16,719 --> 00:35:20,040
Speaker 1: About four point five four billion, Yeah, because about four

642
00:35:20,080 --> 00:35:22,080
Speaker 1: point five four billion years ago, this would be the

643
00:35:22,120 --> 00:35:26,040
Speaker 1: point at which it fully condensated from clouds of interstellar

644
00:35:26,120 --> 00:35:29,200
Speaker 1: gas and dust, then drawing in a final barrage of

645
00:35:29,680 --> 00:35:33,480
Speaker 1: planetism as that fell into its mass enormous heat stirs

646
00:35:33,520 --> 00:35:36,360
Speaker 1: within its depths. And this, of course is just a distant,

647
00:35:36,600 --> 00:35:40,680
Speaker 1: miniskill spinoff from the formation of the universe itself. Right,

648
00:35:40,719 --> 00:35:43,280
Speaker 1: of course, we've got the age of the observable universe,

649
00:35:43,320 --> 00:35:45,759
Speaker 1: which is about thirteen point eight billion years that we're

650
00:35:45,760 --> 00:35:48,520
Speaker 1: gonna be focusing more on the Earth today. That's just

651
00:35:48,600 --> 00:35:51,480
Speaker 1: to point out that obviously the universe is much older

652
00:35:51,480 --> 00:35:54,680
Speaker 1: than just the planet we live on, which again was

653
00:35:54,680 --> 00:35:58,760
Speaker 1: was far from a given in earlier religious mythological ideas

654
00:35:58,800 --> 00:36:02,399
Speaker 1: about the creation of the world we live in. Yeah,

655
00:36:02,400 --> 00:36:05,000
Speaker 1: why wouldn't you just assume that the planet you live

656
00:36:05,080 --> 00:36:08,200
Speaker 1: on in the entire universe were the same age. But

657
00:36:08,239 --> 00:36:10,400
Speaker 1: if you were with us through that history section, you

658
00:36:10,480 --> 00:36:13,120
Speaker 1: might be asking, hey, wait, wait, wait a minute. Now,

659
00:36:13,239 --> 00:36:17,080
Speaker 1: the estimated age of the Earth has changed wildly before, right,

660
00:36:17,120 --> 00:36:20,560
Speaker 1: we were going from tens of thousands to millions to billions.

661
00:36:21,120 --> 00:36:24,080
Speaker 1: Don't you think it could change wildly again? Isn't it

662
00:36:24,120 --> 00:36:27,080
Speaker 1: possible that the scientists could all tomorrow discover that they

663
00:36:27,120 --> 00:36:29,719
Speaker 1: were wrong and the Earth actually is six to ten

664
00:36:29,760 --> 00:36:32,520
Speaker 1: thousand years old in a way you always want to

665
00:36:32,520 --> 00:36:36,040
Speaker 1: emphasize that. Of course, science doesn't deliver final verdicts. It

666
00:36:36,160 --> 00:36:38,480
Speaker 1: just sort of like it gives you theories that have

667
00:36:38,760 --> 00:36:42,080
Speaker 1: confidence in predictions. You know, it gives you a theory

668
00:36:42,200 --> 00:36:45,000
Speaker 1: that says, if you use this theory to predict what

669
00:36:45,040 --> 00:36:46,880
Speaker 1: you'll find in the future, you're going to find it

670
00:36:46,920 --> 00:36:49,640
Speaker 1: every time, and a good theory will help you find

671
00:36:49,680 --> 00:36:52,400
Speaker 1: it pretty much every time. Right. But the answer to

672
00:36:52,440 --> 00:36:56,040
Speaker 1: this is basically no, it's not going to wildly change

673
00:36:56,040 --> 00:36:58,720
Speaker 1: again because establishing the Earth's age has been a process

674
00:36:58,719 --> 00:37:03,080
Speaker 1: of calibration, with ever increasing sensitivity of methods and increasing

675
00:37:03,120 --> 00:37:07,120
Speaker 1: agreement of findings. I could see maybe there's an off

676
00:37:07,239 --> 00:37:09,680
Speaker 1: chance that I don't know that some there could be

677
00:37:10,160 --> 00:37:13,279
Speaker 1: further calibrations of the age. But we're not going to

678
00:37:13,320 --> 00:37:16,080
Speaker 1: find out that the Earth is less than billions of

679
00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:21,880
Speaker 1: years old, um. Because there's been this statistical convergence across

680
00:37:21,960 --> 00:37:26,080
Speaker 1: all these different disciplines of science, all zooming in on

681
00:37:26,239 --> 00:37:28,400
Speaker 1: the true age of the Earth, and all of them

682
00:37:28,520 --> 00:37:31,680
Speaker 1: end up agreeing it's old. Nothing tells us that it's

683
00:37:31,680 --> 00:37:35,160
Speaker 1: thousands of years old. So it's not just direct dating

684
00:37:35,200 --> 00:37:37,120
Speaker 1: methods that we've come up with to tell us that

685
00:37:37,160 --> 00:37:40,200
Speaker 1: the Earth is old. It's it's nearly every type of

686
00:37:40,239 --> 00:37:43,480
Speaker 1: science there is that tells us the Earth is old. Yes,

687
00:37:43,560 --> 00:37:46,319
Speaker 1: that's something we're gonna be touching on a lot, uh,

688
00:37:46,640 --> 00:37:50,000
Speaker 1: in not only this episode, but the next episode. Is that. Yeah.

689
00:37:50,040 --> 00:37:54,360
Speaker 1: If you if you throw out the the the scientifically

690
00:37:54,400 --> 00:37:58,319
Speaker 1: accepted eight of the Earth and the universe, uh, you

691
00:37:58,360 --> 00:38:01,880
Speaker 1: have to throw out pretty much every other area of science.

692
00:38:02,160 --> 00:38:05,560
Speaker 1: You don't get to keep uh, geology, you don't get

693
00:38:05,560 --> 00:38:09,000
Speaker 1: to keep the dinosaurs. Uh. This is something that always

694
00:38:09,040 --> 00:38:11,760
Speaker 1: ticks me off, especially as a UM, as a father

695
00:38:11,840 --> 00:38:14,080
Speaker 1: and someone who reads a lot of dinosaur books to

696
00:38:14,239 --> 00:38:17,200
Speaker 1: his son. Uh. It enrages me when I find a

697
00:38:17,280 --> 00:38:22,040
Speaker 1: creationist book that it features a cool looking dinosaur illustrations.

698
00:38:22,080 --> 00:38:25,480
Speaker 1: They always do, They've got good illustrations. Yeah, but I say, no,

699
00:38:25,640 --> 00:38:28,120
Speaker 1: you do not get to have cool dinosaurs if you

700
00:38:28,160 --> 00:38:32,600
Speaker 1: are going to use this alternate view of this non

701
00:38:32,640 --> 00:38:36,239
Speaker 1: scientific view of of of the Earth's timeline and how

702
00:38:36,640 --> 00:38:39,919
Speaker 1: life emerged on the planet and and indeed what dinosaurs

703
00:38:40,320 --> 00:38:44,360
Speaker 1: uh were and what dinosaurs are today in the forms

704
00:38:44,440 --> 00:38:48,920
Speaker 1: of their Avian descendants. No, dinosaurs uh and other prehistoric

705
00:38:48,960 --> 00:38:52,600
Speaker 1: piasts belong to science and uh and and uh, and

706
00:38:52,680 --> 00:38:55,560
Speaker 1: science gets to keep them. That's a really good point.

707
00:38:55,600 --> 00:38:58,160
Speaker 1: I can almost sense you holding back a little bit. Well,

708
00:38:58,239 --> 00:39:01,880
Speaker 1: let loose that righteous rage. Dinosaur anger. Yeah, this is

709
00:39:01,920 --> 00:39:05,680
Speaker 1: where dinosaurs come from. They come from our scientific understanding

710
00:39:06,360 --> 00:39:09,879
Speaker 1: of the Earth and the fossils embedded within it, right,

711
00:39:10,120 --> 00:39:12,640
Speaker 1: and the evolution of life itself. Right. So a lot

712
00:39:12,640 --> 00:39:16,200
Speaker 1: of our second episode is going to focus just on

713
00:39:16,239 --> 00:39:18,640
Speaker 1: all of the ways that that the age of the

714
00:39:18,640 --> 00:39:21,880
Speaker 1: Earth touches on, you know, every other way of looking

715
00:39:21,920 --> 00:39:25,279
Speaker 1: at the world. But for the rest of the episode today,

716
00:39:25,360 --> 00:39:27,680
Speaker 1: I think we should focus on this first episode, we

717
00:39:27,680 --> 00:39:31,720
Speaker 1: should focus on direct methods of dating the Earth. Direct

718
00:39:31,800 --> 00:39:34,960
Speaker 1: scientific experiments we can do that tell you this is

719
00:39:35,000 --> 00:39:38,520
Speaker 1: how old the rock you're standing on is. Alright, Well,

720
00:39:38,520 --> 00:39:40,920
Speaker 1: on that note, let's take one last break for this episode,

721
00:39:40,920 --> 00:39:46,720
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we will speak to the rocks. Alright,

722
00:39:46,719 --> 00:39:49,440
Speaker 1: we're back. So one of the best tools we have

723
00:39:49,680 --> 00:39:53,799
Speaker 1: for directly establishing the age of the Earth with measurements

724
00:39:53,920 --> 00:39:57,279
Speaker 1: is a method known as radiometric dating. Now, you will

725
00:39:57,360 --> 00:40:01,000
Speaker 1: often hear people, especially casual critics of the scientific consensus

726
00:40:01,080 --> 00:40:03,160
Speaker 1: on the edge of the Earth lump all of this

727
00:40:03,360 --> 00:40:08,120
Speaker 1: under carbon dating. If you hear somebody refer to dating

728
00:40:08,160 --> 00:40:10,920
Speaker 1: the age of the Earth with the phrase carbon dating,

729
00:40:11,120 --> 00:40:13,399
Speaker 1: you know you're talking to somebody who has not done

730
00:40:13,400 --> 00:40:15,760
Speaker 1: any research and they don't know what they're talking about.

731
00:40:16,400 --> 00:40:20,120
Speaker 1: Carbon dating, also known as radiocarbon dating carbon fourteen or

732
00:40:20,120 --> 00:40:23,399
Speaker 1: just C fourteen dating, is only one type of radiometric

733
00:40:23,480 --> 00:40:26,960
Speaker 1: dating among many, and in fact, carbon dating is completely

734
00:40:27,080 --> 00:40:30,520
Speaker 1: irrelevant to establishing the age of the Earth. Of course,

735
00:40:30,520 --> 00:40:32,359
Speaker 1: it does prove that the Earth is more than six

736
00:40:32,360 --> 00:40:34,680
Speaker 1: thousand years old, but it doesn't help you much more

737
00:40:34,760 --> 00:40:37,919
Speaker 1: than that. Yeah, I remember, remember correctly. Carbon dating only

738
00:40:37,960 --> 00:40:41,520
Speaker 1: has a has a limit of like fifty thousand years.

739
00:40:41,640 --> 00:40:43,359
Speaker 1: That's it's about as deep as you can you can

740
00:40:43,360 --> 00:40:45,920
Speaker 1: really date anything with carbon dating. Yeah, it's not like

741
00:40:45,960 --> 00:40:48,880
Speaker 1: a hard limit, but there are yes. That's usually cited

742
00:40:48,960 --> 00:40:52,560
Speaker 1: figure there's at a certain point carbon dating becomes inaccurate

743
00:40:52,640 --> 00:40:55,560
Speaker 1: because the amount of the radiocarbon left in the sample

744
00:40:55,640 --> 00:40:57,120
Speaker 1: is going to be too small and it's going to

745
00:40:57,200 --> 00:40:59,560
Speaker 1: give you erroneous results. But we'll get into the details

746
00:40:59,600 --> 00:41:01,960
Speaker 1: of that in it. I guess first, let's let's just

747
00:41:02,320 --> 00:41:05,359
Speaker 1: talk about the principles of radiometric dating and all of this,

748
00:41:05,640 --> 00:41:08,799
Speaker 1: it's again entangled with everything at the core of our

749
00:41:08,800 --> 00:41:12,000
Speaker 1: current scientific picture of the universe. So you've got to

750
00:41:12,000 --> 00:41:14,560
Speaker 1: go to the basic parts of an atom. You've got

751
00:41:14,600 --> 00:41:18,560
Speaker 1: an atomic nucleus in every atom. It contains protons and neutrons.

752
00:41:19,000 --> 00:41:22,280
Speaker 1: Uh protons have a positive charge, neutrons have no charge.

753
00:41:22,600 --> 00:41:25,239
Speaker 1: The nucleus, of course we know, is surrounded by electrons,

754
00:41:25,280 --> 00:41:27,799
Speaker 1: which have a negative charge. And as we know, how

755
00:41:27,800 --> 00:41:31,319
Speaker 1: many protons and atom has in it determines what kind

756
00:41:31,360 --> 00:41:33,640
Speaker 1: of element it is. So no matter how many neutrons,

757
00:41:33,680 --> 00:41:36,680
Speaker 1: no matter how many electrons, and atom with two protons

758
00:41:36,760 --> 00:41:41,080
Speaker 1: is always helium, and atom with seventeen protons is always chlorine.

759
00:41:41,239 --> 00:41:44,439
Speaker 1: Seventy nine is gold, eighty two has led, ninety four

760
00:41:44,520 --> 00:41:48,279
Speaker 1: is plutonium, etcetera. Now, while the number of protons in

761
00:41:48,280 --> 00:41:50,719
Speaker 1: an element is always the same, the number of electrons

762
00:41:50,719 --> 00:41:53,560
Speaker 1: and the number of neutrons can change, And when the

763
00:41:53,640 --> 00:41:57,080
Speaker 1: number of neutrons in an atom changes, we call these

764
00:41:57,120 --> 00:42:01,520
Speaker 1: different forms of the atom isotopes. For example, carbon, a

765
00:42:01,640 --> 00:42:05,120
Speaker 1: common stable isotope of carbon is carbon twelve US carbon

766
00:42:05,120 --> 00:42:07,760
Speaker 1: You're gonna find all over the place. It's got six

767
00:42:07,800 --> 00:42:12,719
Speaker 1: protons and six neutrons. But there's also the unstable carbon fourteen,

768
00:42:12,880 --> 00:42:15,960
Speaker 1: which is used in carbon fourteen dating, and this has

769
00:42:16,000 --> 00:42:21,040
Speaker 1: six protons and eight neutrons. Now, within every atomic nucleus,

770
00:42:21,080 --> 00:42:23,680
Speaker 1: you've got an interplay of forces. There's there's a force

771
00:42:23,719 --> 00:42:26,520
Speaker 1: that wants to hold the nucleus together, and then you've

772
00:42:26,520 --> 00:42:29,320
Speaker 1: got a force that wants to drive the nucleus apart

773
00:42:29,360 --> 00:42:31,960
Speaker 1: and spit parts of it out. So a carbon twelve

774
00:42:32,000 --> 00:42:34,960
Speaker 1: atom with six protons and six neutrons is generally held

775
00:42:35,040 --> 00:42:38,160
Speaker 1: glued together by the strong force that holds the atomic

776
00:42:38,239 --> 00:42:41,759
Speaker 1: nucleus together. But a carbon fourteen atom with six protons

777
00:42:41,800 --> 00:42:45,280
Speaker 1: and eight neutrons tends to decay. We call it decay,

778
00:42:45,400 --> 00:42:48,440
Speaker 1: specifically through a process known as beta decay, where an

779
00:42:48,480 --> 00:42:52,040
Speaker 1: atom shoots off an electron and a neutrino, and then

780
00:42:52,080 --> 00:42:55,319
Speaker 1: one of the neutrons in its nucleus is transformed into

781
00:42:55,360 --> 00:42:58,719
Speaker 1: a proton, which in this case makes a carbon fourteen

782
00:42:58,840 --> 00:43:02,440
Speaker 1: into a stable Add nitrogen fourteen with seven protons and

783
00:43:02,480 --> 00:43:05,440
Speaker 1: seven neutrons, and then once it's nitrogen fourteen, that's a

784
00:43:05,480 --> 00:43:09,399
Speaker 1: happy atom. It just hangs out. Unstable radioactive isotopes are

785
00:43:09,520 --> 00:43:12,160
Speaker 1: very common. There are tons of them out in the world,

786
00:43:12,200 --> 00:43:16,480
Speaker 1: just humming along in the background being radioactive, steadily emitting

787
00:43:16,600 --> 00:43:21,160
Speaker 1: radiation to transform into more stable atoms. But you might

788
00:43:21,200 --> 00:43:24,719
Speaker 1: have some questions at this point, like if unstable isotopes

789
00:43:24,880 --> 00:43:29,719
Speaker 1: decay into stable isotopes, why are there any unstable isotopes left?

790
00:43:30,200 --> 00:43:32,920
Speaker 1: Why aren't they all stable now right? Why haven't they

791
00:43:32,960 --> 00:43:36,800
Speaker 1: all decayed into this unchanging form. Which is a good question,

792
00:43:37,200 --> 00:43:39,799
Speaker 1: and there are two basic answers. One is that new

793
00:43:39,920 --> 00:43:43,080
Speaker 1: unstable atoms can be created, like, for example, you've got

794
00:43:43,080 --> 00:43:46,320
Speaker 1: a high energy event which can change a stable atom

795
00:43:46,320 --> 00:43:49,880
Speaker 1: into an unstable form. A great example is carbon fourteen,

796
00:43:49,920 --> 00:43:52,319
Speaker 1: which we talked about a minute ago. Say there, you've

797
00:43:52,360 --> 00:43:56,680
Speaker 1: got a nitrogen fourteen atom high up in the atmosphere. Uh,

798
00:43:56,760 --> 00:44:00,520
Speaker 1: there's a cosmic ray bombardment. Cosmic rays send some neutrons

799
00:44:00,520 --> 00:44:03,360
Speaker 1: shooting around in the upper atmosphere. They collide with the

800
00:44:03,440 --> 00:44:08,200
Speaker 1: nitrogen atom and change it into a radioactive carbon fourteen atom.

801
00:44:08,239 --> 00:44:11,080
Speaker 1: But then the other major principle is that unstabile isotopes

802
00:44:11,160 --> 00:44:14,000
Speaker 1: decay at different rates. So while it's not possible to

803
00:44:14,040 --> 00:44:18,000
Speaker 1: predict exactly when a radioactive decay event will happen, you

804
00:44:18,000 --> 00:44:20,439
Speaker 1: don't know when the decay particle is going to shoot off.

805
00:44:20,520 --> 00:44:23,440
Speaker 1: It is possible to determine the rate at which a

806
00:44:23,480 --> 00:44:27,000
Speaker 1: certain percent of a radioisotope will decay over time. Like

807
00:44:27,239 --> 00:44:30,560
Speaker 1: you can't predict individual events, but you can predict averages,

808
00:44:30,920 --> 00:44:33,520
Speaker 1: kind of like how Robert, you know, you can't predict

809
00:44:33,640 --> 00:44:36,480
Speaker 1: the outcome of a coin flip, but you can predict

810
00:44:36,560 --> 00:44:38,840
Speaker 1: that if you flip a coin a million times, it

811
00:44:38,880 --> 00:44:41,960
Speaker 1: will land heads half of the time. Correct. Yeah, and uh.

812
00:44:42,000 --> 00:44:44,759
Speaker 1: And while you're flipping, you occasionally get streaks which are

813
00:44:44,840 --> 00:44:49,120
Speaker 1: ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of of the coin

814
00:44:49,160 --> 00:44:52,120
Speaker 1: flips exactly right, And the same thing happens with these

815
00:44:52,200 --> 00:44:55,399
Speaker 1: radioactive atoms. Sometimes they might not omit one for a while,

816
00:44:55,440 --> 00:44:57,840
Speaker 1: sometimes they might admit a bunch at once, but over time,

817
00:44:58,160 --> 00:45:00,400
Speaker 1: you know what that steady rate of emis is going

818
00:45:00,440 --> 00:45:03,520
Speaker 1: to be. And so radio isotopes have what's known as

819
00:45:03,560 --> 00:45:06,040
Speaker 1: a half life. This is the period after which we

820
00:45:06,160 --> 00:45:09,480
Speaker 1: know that half of a given sample of a radio

821
00:45:09,520 --> 00:45:13,520
Speaker 1: isotope will have decayed into something else. So if you've

822
00:45:13,560 --> 00:45:16,200
Speaker 1: got ten grams of a sample with a half life

823
00:45:16,200 --> 00:45:19,360
Speaker 1: of one year, after one year, you'll have five grams

824
00:45:19,360 --> 00:45:22,879
Speaker 1: of the original radio isotope left. After two years, half

825
00:45:22,880 --> 00:45:25,120
Speaker 1: will be gone again, so you'll have two point five

826
00:45:25,200 --> 00:45:28,520
Speaker 1: grams after three years, half again, so one point to

827
00:45:28,680 --> 00:45:31,920
Speaker 1: five grams, and on and on until the proportion becomes

828
00:45:31,920 --> 00:45:35,960
Speaker 1: extremely small. Now, half lives can where can vary wildly.

829
00:45:36,320 --> 00:45:39,279
Speaker 1: Summer measured in fractions of a second, summer measured in

830
00:45:39,400 --> 00:45:43,800
Speaker 1: millions of years. Cobalt sixty, which is used in radiotherapy

831
00:45:43,840 --> 00:45:46,400
Speaker 1: and medicine, It's got a half life of five point

832
00:45:46,440 --> 00:45:50,319
Speaker 1: to six years, and it decays into nickel sixty. Oxygen

833
00:45:50,400 --> 00:45:52,680
Speaker 1: fifteen has a half life of only about a hundred

834
00:45:52,680 --> 00:45:55,440
Speaker 1: and twenty two seconds. It's only around for about two

835
00:45:55,480 --> 00:45:59,280
Speaker 1: minutes before half of it decays into nitrogen fourteen. Carbon

836
00:45:59,360 --> 00:46:02,320
Speaker 1: fourteen has a half life about five thousand, seven hundred

837
00:46:02,360 --> 00:46:05,719
Speaker 1: and thirty years, and uranium two thirty eight, the most

838
00:46:05,719 --> 00:46:08,520
Speaker 1: common form of uranium found in nature, has a half

839
00:46:08,560 --> 00:46:11,880
Speaker 1: life of four point five billion years. So with a

840
00:46:11,880 --> 00:46:14,600
Speaker 1: half life like that, even the age of the universe

841
00:46:14,719 --> 00:46:16,719
Speaker 1: is not enough to eliminate all of it. Right, it

842
00:46:16,920 --> 00:46:18,719
Speaker 1: can just hang out. It will be there for a

843
00:46:18,760 --> 00:46:21,840
Speaker 1: long time. But another important thing to understand is that

844
00:46:21,880 --> 00:46:26,000
Speaker 1: when radio isotopes decay, they don't disappear. Right. If you've

845
00:46:26,040 --> 00:46:29,200
Speaker 1: got you know, ten grams of material and half of

846
00:46:29,200 --> 00:46:32,680
Speaker 1: it decays. You're not left with five grams of rock.

847
00:46:32,880 --> 00:46:35,600
Speaker 1: You will still have roughly the same amount of material,

848
00:46:36,120 --> 00:46:39,200
Speaker 1: just half of it will be changed into something else,

849
00:46:39,719 --> 00:46:42,440
Speaker 1: and it gives us the evidence exactly this is this

850
00:46:42,480 --> 00:46:45,640
Speaker 1: is the crucial part that comes in with radiometric dating,

851
00:46:45,680 --> 00:46:48,000
Speaker 1: because you will end up with what are known as

852
00:46:48,120 --> 00:46:52,320
Speaker 1: daughter isotopes in a decay series. So you've got uranium

853
00:46:52,320 --> 00:46:54,520
Speaker 1: two thirty eight and in a chunk of rock, and

854
00:46:54,560 --> 00:46:58,279
Speaker 1: it's decaying, and those atoms will steadily turn into a

855
00:46:58,320 --> 00:47:03,560
Speaker 1: series of daughter isotopes, a very known, steady, reliable progression,

856
00:47:03,600 --> 00:47:07,600
Speaker 1: turning into things like thorium, radium, bismuth, lead, and so forth.

857
00:47:08,239 --> 00:47:10,200
Speaker 1: And so this gives us what we need. Right, If

858
00:47:10,239 --> 00:47:13,640
Speaker 1: you know the rate at which a radio isotope decays,

859
00:47:13,800 --> 00:47:16,560
Speaker 1: and you know approximately how much of it there was

860
00:47:16,600 --> 00:47:19,719
Speaker 1: to begin with in an object, and you you can

861
00:47:19,800 --> 00:47:22,960
Speaker 1: measure how much is left. Couldn't that tell us how

862
00:47:23,040 --> 00:47:26,280
Speaker 1: old the object is? And this is exactly the principle

863
00:47:26,560 --> 00:47:30,600
Speaker 1: in radiometric dating. So the principles of radiometric dating were

864
00:47:30,640 --> 00:47:33,080
Speaker 1: discovered around the turn of the twentieth century. I think

865
00:47:33,080 --> 00:47:36,920
Speaker 1: it's sometimes traced back to Rutherford. And there are many

866
00:47:37,000 --> 00:47:42,319
Speaker 1: forms of radiometric dating, including uranium lead, radiocarbon dating, potassium

867
00:47:42,400 --> 00:47:45,480
Speaker 1: argone dating, and then it's more accurate derivative are gone

868
00:47:45,480 --> 00:47:51,120
Speaker 1: thirty nine, are gone forty or are gone ar gone dating, rubidium, strontium, uranium, thorium,

869
00:47:51,200 --> 00:47:55,399
Speaker 1: and some others. And all these methods are different, not

870
00:47:55,400 --> 00:47:58,319
Speaker 1: not every type of radiometric dating can be used on

871
00:47:58,360 --> 00:48:01,560
Speaker 1: any substance or on any time scale. For example, you

872
00:48:01,680 --> 00:48:06,000
Speaker 1: cannot use carbon dating to date an inorganic rock. Each

873
00:48:06,080 --> 00:48:09,919
Speaker 1: method has different applications in which they're possible to use

874
00:48:09,960 --> 00:48:12,280
Speaker 1: and in which they're most accurate. And what these methods

875
00:48:12,280 --> 00:48:14,880
Speaker 1: have in common is that they look at an isotope

876
00:48:14,880 --> 00:48:17,799
Speaker 1: that has a known rate of decay into another isotope,

877
00:48:18,239 --> 00:48:22,239
Speaker 1: and there's some kind of historical clock setting event, which

878
00:48:22,280 --> 00:48:24,640
Speaker 1: is the time we know we're trying to trace back

879
00:48:24,680 --> 00:48:28,880
Speaker 1: to me. It's basic detective work, right, you're establishing a timeline. Yeah,

880
00:48:29,040 --> 00:48:31,440
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if you intercept somebody and you

881
00:48:31,480 --> 00:48:33,799
Speaker 1: know they've been driving in a straight line, and you

882
00:48:33,840 --> 00:48:36,759
Speaker 1: know how fast they were driving, and you know where

883
00:48:36,800 --> 00:48:39,839
Speaker 1: they started driving, then you can determine how long they've

884
00:48:39,840 --> 00:48:44,040
Speaker 1: been driving. So One really common example of radiometric dating

885
00:48:44,239 --> 00:48:46,880
Speaker 1: is is radiocarbon dating. And as I've said that this

886
00:48:46,920 --> 00:48:50,560
Speaker 1: has no relevance at all really to dating the Earth itself.

887
00:48:51,080 --> 00:48:53,520
Speaker 1: It's used for dating things that used to be alive.

888
00:48:53,640 --> 00:48:56,520
Speaker 1: And the principle works like this. About seventy eight percent

889
00:48:56,600 --> 00:48:59,920
Speaker 1: of the Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen. Nitrogen, as we say,

890
00:49:00,000 --> 00:49:02,600
Speaker 1: at a little bit ago, has a stabil isotope nitrogen

891
00:49:02,640 --> 00:49:06,759
Speaker 1: fourteen with seven protons and seven neutrons, and Earth's atmosphere

892
00:49:06,920 --> 00:49:10,520
Speaker 1: is being steadily hammered by cosmic rays from space. Space

893
00:49:10,640 --> 00:49:13,600
Speaker 1: really gives it a good knocking around. And these high

894
00:49:13,719 --> 00:49:17,200
Speaker 1: energy cosmic rays smash into atoms and knock neutrons loose.

895
00:49:17,560 --> 00:49:21,000
Speaker 1: And then these neutron cannonballs they fly off and they

896
00:49:21,040 --> 00:49:24,600
Speaker 1: smash into nitrogen fourteen atoms and change them. They add

897
00:49:24,640 --> 00:49:28,440
Speaker 1: a neutron, knock away a proton, and change nitrogen fourteen

898
00:49:28,520 --> 00:49:32,799
Speaker 1: into carbon fourteen with six protons and eight neutrons. Now,

899
00:49:32,920 --> 00:49:36,240
Speaker 1: as we said, most carbon is carbon twelve with equal

900
00:49:36,320 --> 00:49:40,040
Speaker 1: numbers of protons and neutrons, but carbon fourteen gets incorporated

901
00:49:40,120 --> 00:49:44,480
Speaker 1: into carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere and it enters

902
00:49:44,560 --> 00:49:48,120
Speaker 1: the biosphere just like regular carbon twelve does, meaning it

903
00:49:48,239 --> 00:49:51,720
Speaker 1: gets sucked in by plants, and then this radioactive carbon

904
00:49:51,840 --> 00:49:54,480
Speaker 1: becomes part of the plants, and it gets eaten by

905
00:49:54,520 --> 00:49:57,200
Speaker 1: animals that eat those plants, and then it gets eaten

906
00:49:57,239 --> 00:49:59,720
Speaker 1: by the animals that eat those animals that eat the plants.

907
00:50:00,120 --> 00:50:03,560
Speaker 1: So almost every living thing on Earth has a steady,

908
00:50:03,680 --> 00:50:08,560
Speaker 1: predictable ratio of carbon molecules in its body, mostly carbon twelve,

909
00:50:08,840 --> 00:50:12,400
Speaker 1: but with a known tiny fraction of carbon fourteen. But

910
00:50:13,000 --> 00:50:17,120
Speaker 1: carbon fourteen is radioactive, so over time, as we've explored,

911
00:50:17,320 --> 00:50:21,080
Speaker 1: it breaks down through beta decay to become nitrogen fourteen again,

912
00:50:21,600 --> 00:50:23,680
Speaker 1: and so we know the half life as well. Carbon

913
00:50:23,719 --> 00:50:26,280
Speaker 1: fourteen has a half life of five thousand, seven hundred

914
00:50:26,320 --> 00:50:28,600
Speaker 1: and thirty years plus or minus a known error bar.

915
00:50:29,040 --> 00:50:32,080
Speaker 1: So if you find a dead carbon based organism that

916
00:50:32,160 --> 00:50:34,480
Speaker 1: lived on the Earth, you can actually look at the

917
00:50:34,600 --> 00:50:37,799
Speaker 1: ratio of carbon fourteen left in the remains and you

918
00:50:37,800 --> 00:50:41,640
Speaker 1: can determine roughly when it stopped taking new carbon into

919
00:50:41,680 --> 00:50:44,400
Speaker 1: its body, which generally means, of course, when it died.

920
00:50:45,280 --> 00:50:47,720
Speaker 1: But while carbon dating is great for illustrating the general

921
00:50:47,760 --> 00:50:51,240
Speaker 1: principles of radiometric dating, it's also completely useless for dating

922
00:50:51,239 --> 00:50:53,920
Speaker 1: the Earth for a couple of reasons. Number one, it

923
00:50:53,960 --> 00:50:56,480
Speaker 1: of course only works on carbon based organisms that were

924
00:50:56,480 --> 00:50:59,880
Speaker 1: once alive, so you can date would you could date,

925
00:51:00,719 --> 00:51:02,359
Speaker 1: I don't know what else would you want to date

926
00:51:02,719 --> 00:51:06,760
Speaker 1: the charred remains of an animal? Yeah, ancient ancient camp fire.

927
00:51:07,400 --> 00:51:10,360
Speaker 1: But you cannot date say a piece of granite. And

928
00:51:10,400 --> 00:51:12,960
Speaker 1: then even if it did work on inorganic rocks, it

929
00:51:13,000 --> 00:51:15,440
Speaker 1: doesn't go back far enough. The half life of carbon

930
00:51:15,480 --> 00:51:18,680
Speaker 1: fourteen is like fifty seven hundred years, which means that

931
00:51:18,719 --> 00:51:21,279
Speaker 1: within a few tens of thousands of years there's not

932
00:51:21,440 --> 00:51:23,920
Speaker 1: enough carbon fourteen left in the remains in order to

933
00:51:23,960 --> 00:51:26,680
Speaker 1: give accurate results. As we talked about earlier, the limits

934
00:51:26,760 --> 00:51:29,400
Speaker 1: usually said to be somewhere around fifty thousand years. After that,

935
00:51:29,440 --> 00:51:32,440
Speaker 1: it's just not a useful method. So for carbon dating,

936
00:51:32,440 --> 00:51:35,800
Speaker 1: this clock is set when the organism dies and stops

937
00:51:35,840 --> 00:51:39,200
Speaker 1: taking atmospheric carbon into its body. At death, you've got

938
00:51:39,200 --> 00:51:42,799
Speaker 1: this ratio of of carbon fourteen atoms that's fixed, and

939
00:51:42,840 --> 00:51:46,319
Speaker 1: the carbon can decay. But how how do other clocks work?

940
00:51:46,360 --> 00:51:48,360
Speaker 1: Because you've got to imagine that clocks are set in

941
00:51:48,400 --> 00:51:51,759
Speaker 1: different ways for inorganic substances. There are a lot of

942
00:51:51,760 --> 00:51:53,800
Speaker 1: different methods you can use. I figured one we should

943
00:51:53,800 --> 00:51:57,880
Speaker 1: look at is maybe uranium lead decay. So unlike radio

944
00:51:57,920 --> 00:52:03,040
Speaker 1: carbon decay, uranium lead decay takes a long time. There's

945
00:52:03,080 --> 00:52:05,680
Speaker 1: an isotope called uranium two thirty five and it's got

946
00:52:05,719 --> 00:52:08,600
Speaker 1: a half life of a little over seven hundred million

947
00:52:08,719 --> 00:52:12,600
Speaker 1: years before half of it decays into lead two oh seven.

948
00:52:13,360 --> 00:52:16,160
Speaker 1: And underneath the surface of the Earth, you've got magma

949
00:52:16,239 --> 00:52:20,360
Speaker 1: churning around, and magma builds up for thousands of years

950
00:52:20,360 --> 00:52:23,480
Speaker 1: before getting spewed out as part of a volcanic eruption.

951
00:52:23,600 --> 00:52:27,600
Speaker 1: And inside this magma that's collecting near the Earth's surface,

952
00:52:28,160 --> 00:52:32,279
Speaker 1: there are these crystals called zircons that can form a

953
00:52:32,400 --> 00:52:39,719
Speaker 1: normal zircon molecule contains zirconium, silicon, and oxygen. But sometimes

954
00:52:39,760 --> 00:52:43,440
Speaker 1: these crystals get a little mixed up with some radioactive

955
00:52:43,520 --> 00:52:47,279
Speaker 1: rough housing and the zirconium atom in this crystal can

956
00:52:47,320 --> 00:52:52,040
Speaker 1: be substituted with a radioactive uranium atom. And this is

957
00:52:52,080 --> 00:52:55,799
Speaker 1: because uranium has a similar outer electron structure to zirconium,

958
00:52:55,880 --> 00:52:58,080
Speaker 1: so it can play a similar role in the molecule.

959
00:52:58,719 --> 00:53:03,160
Speaker 1: And once these zircon with secret secret stowaway uranium atoms

960
00:53:03,200 --> 00:53:06,520
Speaker 1: inside them are formed in the magma, the radioactive clock

961
00:53:06,640 --> 00:53:09,200
Speaker 1: is set, and now we've got zircons with bits of

962
00:53:09,360 --> 00:53:12,680
Speaker 1: uranium in them. The magma erupts out of the volcano,

963
00:53:12,719 --> 00:53:15,720
Speaker 1: gets spewed everywhere, and the zircons are brought to the surface,

964
00:53:15,760 --> 00:53:19,000
Speaker 1: including their radioactive stowaways, and then the ash and the

965
00:53:19,080 --> 00:53:22,560
Speaker 1: lava containing these crystals harden into rock, and then way

966
00:53:22,680 --> 00:53:26,000
Speaker 1: way ahead in the future, geologists can discover these rocks,

967
00:53:26,040 --> 00:53:28,880
Speaker 1: discover these zircon crystals and measure the age of the

968
00:53:28,920 --> 00:53:32,600
Speaker 1: zircons using mass spectrometry to determine the ratio of the

969
00:53:32,600 --> 00:53:35,040
Speaker 1: parent uranium to the daughter lead. And once you know

970
00:53:35,160 --> 00:53:38,320
Speaker 1: this ratio, you can establish the age that the crystal

971
00:53:38,440 --> 00:53:41,960
Speaker 1: was formed in the magma before the eruption. And one

972
00:53:42,000 --> 00:53:44,719
Speaker 1: advantage to this method is that the zircons do not

973
00:53:44,920 --> 00:53:48,400
Speaker 1: incorporate lead naturally, so you don't have to worry about

974
00:53:48,440 --> 00:53:51,440
Speaker 1: the crystals containing lead to begin with. Now, they are

975
00:53:51,440 --> 00:53:54,880
Speaker 1: all kinds of things that can contaminate samples and screw

976
00:53:54,960 --> 00:53:58,440
Speaker 1: up radiometric clocks, so it's very important when possible to

977
00:53:58,560 --> 00:54:01,120
Speaker 1: understand everything you can about a sample and to use

978
00:54:01,239 --> 00:54:05,160
Speaker 1: multiple methods to corroborate dates and give confidence. For for example,

979
00:54:05,480 --> 00:54:08,200
Speaker 1: with the uranium lead series I just mentioned, it's possible

980
00:54:08,200 --> 00:54:11,120
Speaker 1: that a piece of rock that's got mostly zircons from

981
00:54:11,160 --> 00:54:14,359
Speaker 1: one time period could be contaminated with zircons from a

982
00:54:14,400 --> 00:54:16,799
Speaker 1: different time period. And this is why it helps to

983
00:54:16,840 --> 00:54:20,000
Speaker 1: test with multiple crystals from each sample and a cross

984
00:54:20,080 --> 00:54:23,359
Speaker 1: reference with other methods of dating when possible. And this

985
00:54:23,440 --> 00:54:26,680
Speaker 1: is all part of what's known about these methods of testing, right,

986
00:54:26,719 --> 00:54:29,160
Speaker 1: because one of one of the things you see come

987
00:54:29,280 --> 00:54:35,560
Speaker 1: up in um like creationist attacks on radiometric dating methods

988
00:54:35,640 --> 00:54:38,840
Speaker 1: is that sometimes the attacks are just like not founded

989
00:54:38,880 --> 00:54:41,920
Speaker 1: in fact, but sometimes they are founded in fact, and

990
00:54:41,960 --> 00:54:47,239
Speaker 1: they're simply like announcing possible vulnerabilities of the method that

991
00:54:47,280 --> 00:54:50,520
Speaker 1: are known to the scientists who use them. It's almost

992
00:54:50,560 --> 00:54:54,799
Speaker 1: like announcing we can't trust lab results because somebody else's,

993
00:54:54,840 --> 00:54:57,600
Speaker 1: you know, samples in the lab can be contaminated. And

994
00:54:57,600 --> 00:54:59,680
Speaker 1: it's like, well, yeah, scientists know that that's part of

995
00:54:59,680 --> 00:55:04,200
Speaker 1: the prob process. Or say pointing to a single journalistic

996
00:55:04,360 --> 00:55:08,200
Speaker 1: error and then saying, well, this entire journalistic institution or

997
00:55:08,280 --> 00:55:11,799
Speaker 1: journalism itself cannot be trusted, right, So and so got

998
00:55:11,920 --> 00:55:14,320
Speaker 1: got a name wrong in an article one time therefore

999
00:55:14,400 --> 00:55:17,960
Speaker 1: the newspaper they work for. It's all lies, and as

1000
00:55:17,960 --> 00:55:21,920
Speaker 1: we've discussed plenty of times before, getting it wrong occasionally

1001
00:55:22,080 --> 00:55:27,000
Speaker 1: is part of scientific process progress and the process itself

1002
00:55:27,640 --> 00:55:31,239
Speaker 1: um which is which is a rather interesting reversal from

1003
00:55:31,680 --> 00:55:36,200
Speaker 1: from people who really doubled down on, say, you know,

1004
00:55:36,480 --> 00:55:39,880
Speaker 1: biblical truth or some sort of theological model. It is

1005
00:55:40,160 --> 00:55:44,759
Speaker 1: held up to be right all the time for all times. Well, right,

1006
00:55:44,800 --> 00:55:47,520
Speaker 1: I mean, that's sort of the problem with infallibility, right,

1007
00:55:47,560 --> 00:55:50,359
Speaker 1: Like the idea that a that a source is infallible

1008
00:55:51,120 --> 00:55:54,600
Speaker 1: would mean that you're your trust in it is invalidated

1009
00:55:54,600 --> 00:55:57,600
Speaker 1: by a by a single mistake, whereas the trust in

1010
00:55:57,680 --> 00:55:59,880
Speaker 1: any type of lab test. I mean this is not

1011
00:56:00,160 --> 00:56:04,719
Speaker 1: unique to radiometric dating. Any type of measurement performed in

1012
00:56:04,800 --> 00:56:10,920
Speaker 1: science is subject to experiment or flaws, mistakes, contamination of

1013
00:56:10,960 --> 00:56:14,640
Speaker 1: the sample, malfunctions of equipment, all that kind of stuff

1014
00:56:14,680 --> 00:56:17,360
Speaker 1: can happen, and that's why it's important to use multiple

1015
00:56:17,440 --> 00:56:20,440
Speaker 1: methods and to cross check and corroborate. Now, just a

1016
00:56:20,480 --> 00:56:22,200
Speaker 1: quick note, I will say this does not mean that

1017
00:56:22,360 --> 00:56:26,040
Speaker 1: I don't mean to say that religions themselves do not change. Obviously,

1018
00:56:26,120 --> 00:56:31,120
Speaker 1: religions change to meet the that the needs of modern humans,

1019
00:56:31,160 --> 00:56:33,399
Speaker 1: and I think that the there are plenty of great

1020
00:56:33,400 --> 00:56:39,040
Speaker 1: examples of individual religious traditions that that change and adapt

1021
00:56:39,280 --> 00:56:43,120
Speaker 1: to meet new modes of understanding and the needs of

1022
00:56:43,400 --> 00:56:45,680
Speaker 1: modern humans. Well. Yeah, as we said at the outset,

1023
00:56:45,800 --> 00:56:48,560
Speaker 1: not every religious person is tied to some kind of

1024
00:56:48,680 --> 00:56:51,960
Speaker 1: literal understanding of a holy text. All right, I think

1025
00:56:52,000 --> 00:56:53,840
Speaker 1: this is a good place for us to to break.

1026
00:56:54,520 --> 00:56:57,360
Speaker 1: We're gonna go ahead and cap off this episode, but

1027
00:56:57,440 --> 00:57:01,080
Speaker 1: we are going to pick up the conversation in second episode.

1028
00:57:01,480 --> 00:57:03,479
Speaker 1: And in that episode we are going to roll through

1029
00:57:03,640 --> 00:57:08,080
Speaker 1: a lot of the examples of of of scientific endeavor

1030
00:57:08,239 --> 00:57:13,200
Speaker 1: depending upon these uh these these uh these established estimates

1031
00:57:13,239 --> 00:57:15,560
Speaker 1: for the age of the universe and the Earth. Yeah,

1032
00:57:15,600 --> 00:57:18,760
Speaker 1: we will talk about the twentieth century work that established

1033
00:57:18,800 --> 00:57:21,320
Speaker 1: the modern age of the Earth estimate. We will talk

1034
00:57:21,360 --> 00:57:25,680
Speaker 1: about reasons that we can know radiometric dating methods are reliable,

1035
00:57:25,800 --> 00:57:28,160
Speaker 1: and then we'll talk about the synoptic view of science

1036
00:57:28,240 --> 00:57:30,760
Speaker 1: that shows that really an old Earth is an is

1037
00:57:30,800 --> 00:57:34,800
Speaker 1: an indispensable part of our picture of reality. All right,

1038
00:57:34,880 --> 00:57:37,200
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, head on over to Stuff to

1039
00:57:37,200 --> 00:57:39,680
Speaker 1: Blow your mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's where

1040
00:57:39,680 --> 00:57:42,800
Speaker 1: we'll find all the episodes of the podcast. You will

1041
00:57:42,840 --> 00:57:45,680
Speaker 1: find blog posts, you'll find uh links out to our

1042
00:57:45,720 --> 00:57:48,040
Speaker 1: various social media accounts. Right there on the front page.

1043
00:57:48,040 --> 00:57:50,760
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1044
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Speaker 1: on that and you go. You can go pick up

1045
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1046
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Speaker 1: street signs, and laptops that have our cool new logo

1047
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Speaker 1: on it. Uh go check those out is out. It's

1048
00:58:03,680 --> 00:58:06,320
Speaker 1: a great way to support the show. We also have

1049
00:58:06,320 --> 00:58:09,120
Speaker 1: custom designs based on some of our more popular episodes

1050
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Speaker 1: and including that wonderful black Hole shirt. Oh yes, fear Catastrophe.

1051
00:58:13,640 --> 00:58:16,400
Speaker 1: You gonna buy it? Yeah, check on that up. Uh.

1052
00:58:16,440 --> 00:58:18,120
Speaker 1: And hey, if you want to support the show in

1053
00:58:18,160 --> 00:58:20,960
Speaker 1: a way that doesn't cost you any money, UH, the

1054
00:58:21,000 --> 00:58:23,040
Speaker 1: best thing you can do is just go and rate

1055
00:58:23,080 --> 00:58:25,600
Speaker 1: and review us wherever you have the power to do so.

1056
00:58:25,640 --> 00:58:29,840
Speaker 1: We're talking Apple podcasts, et cetera. But that helps out

1057
00:58:29,880 --> 00:58:31,959
Speaker 1: the algorithm, that helps out the show, and we greatly

1058
00:58:32,000 --> 00:58:35,280
Speaker 1: appreciate it big thanks as always to our excellent audio

1059
00:58:35,320 --> 00:58:38,400
Speaker 1: producers Alex Williams and Terry Harrison. If you would like

1060
00:58:38,440 --> 00:58:40,120
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us directly to let us

1061
00:58:40,120 --> 00:58:42,800
Speaker 1: know feedback on this episode or any other uh, to

1062
00:58:43,120 --> 00:58:45,320
Speaker 1: suggest a topic for a future episode, or just to

1063
00:58:45,360 --> 00:58:48,000
Speaker 1: say hi, let us know how you found out about

1064
00:58:48,000 --> 00:58:51,680
Speaker 1: the show, where you listen from, or just send pleasant greetings.

1065
00:58:51,720 --> 00:58:53,800
Speaker 1: You can email us at blow the Mind at how

1066
00:58:53,840 --> 00:59:05,640
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands

1067
00:59:05,640 --> 00:59:13,920
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com?

1068
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Speaker 1: Believe I