could these 3 scientists be simultaneously wrong?

Question

i was watching NGC last week. it's about lake toba and 3 scientists studying 3 different things dated this BIG event that happened approx 70+ thousand years ago. they dated this event individually using different methods without the others' knowledge(and without knowing the other's estimated tiime). long story short, earth is more than 70 thousand years old.

what do you think?

ok so they could be wrong because the actual date may have been 40 to 100 thousand years ago?

bible is still wrong that way.


or are they wrong because it's in NGC? i actually had a christian tell me to not watch NGC

Answer 1

Of course scientists pretty much all accept that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. This value is derived from several different lines of evidence.

The oldest rocks which have been found so far (on the Earth) date to about 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago (by several radiometric dating methods). Some of these rocks are sedimentary, and include minerals which are themselves as old as 4.1 to 4.2 billion years. Rocks of this age are relatively rare, however rocks that are at least 3.5 billion years in age have been found on North America, Greenland, Australia, Africa, and Asia.

While these values do not compute an age for the Earth, they do establish a lower limit (the Earth must be at least as old as any formation on it). This lower limit is at least concordant with the independently derived figure of 4.55 billion years for the Earth's actual age.

Answer 2

Sure they could all be wrong. Without having seen the show I can't give specific criticisms but I do know that in general scientists make honest mistakes when they try to date things because they come to the process with presuppositions that are based upon theories and so the whole process gets started on the wrong basis for scientific investigation.

What I mean is, they don't gather facts up and then see what the facts themselves have to say. They presuppose certain things like soil layers were all formed under normal conditions and that there was no world wide flood that caused massive upheavals in the earth's surface and the rapid formation of soil layers that would seem to have to take millions of years to form.

Or they use radioisotopic dating methods and presuppose that they can determine the rate of decay and thereby know how much material was in the object when it first was formed. This method was used on diamonds and they came up with figures in the hundreds of millions or billions of years. But scientists from the Creation Research Institute tried dating diamonds by looking for traces of helium in them. Scientists agree that after 10,000 years there should be no traces of helium left. Yet in diamonds that are very unlikely to be contaminated by outside sources, helium was found that put the date of their formation at around 6,000 years give or take 2,000 years.

So while I believe that the scientists were doing their best to give accurate estimates in the show you were watching, their methods are all flawed because of the presuppositions that they bring to using them.

Answer 3

It's well accepted that the Earth is millions of years old. Many fundamentalise Christians believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old. For many of these people, the findings of some scientists is not going to change their belief.

Answer 4

Scientists hardly ever agree on anything. I think that nobody knows how old the earth is, because the "estimate" is always, always changing. & just look at the range in your answers. Don't believe what you hear. It will change in a few days or maybe a little longer...

Edit: THANK YOU maxmacank! You're the only one who really got it right! (Except me, of course!!!)

EDIT #TWO!!!! **** Going back over this, I'm compelled to say that I LOVE smiley.ge's answer best of all. Introduced some humour-much needed! &, did anyone say anything about how the earth was once believed to be flat? (Confirming my reasoning that nobody knows because it's always changing.) Who knows--maybe it's all an illusion.

Answer 5

They have the facts because the tests of thier different time capsules that had climate readings which had the same dated results. That was the one about the big volcano right? It was a super volcano that affected the entire earth's climate form the ice caps to different regions of the earth. I thought that was a very interesting revelation and nobody could do such a study by themselves. It shows how powerful a super volcano is.

Answer 6

Does it not occur to anyone that the scientists would be using similar dating techniques, like carbon dating.

What I cannot understand, is this: carbon dating was unheard of 200 years ago, and now that it has been discovered people want to use it to date things billions of years ago.
There is no experience to justify that.

Every element has a half life, and it has a curve that shows the degrading of the element. How can we know what the carbon curve is for billions of years ago?

Answer 7

one step ... more than 70 thousand years old
next, I suppose 12 billion years old

Soon you will need to change your "name" [we're not monkeys] ???

Not sure who NGC is, but many television programmes produce interesting and scenic documentaries. Most of them, though, are biased. With the information you provided, there certainly isn't enough to defend nor dispute the age based on their calculations.

Answer 8

It is a lot more than 70,000 years old.

If you look at Andromeda (don't even need a telescope) you are looking at something 2.5 million light years away. That means the light you see left 2.5 million years ago. If it were on 6-10,000 years since creation the light wouldn't be here yet. Hubble sees things billions of light years away.

Answer 9

Er, the Earth is about 4 and a half billion years old. The universe is roughly three times that old.

Answer 10

What event were they studying? What were their testing methods? And yes, they could be, they are fallible humans. Have you looked at the RATE project through ICR? After years of research, they came up with a much younger earth.