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September 18, 2018 59 mins

Scientific consensus currently holds that the Earth is a 4.5 billion-year-old planet in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe. But how do we know? Why do religious models of a much younger (or older) Earth fail to pass the baloney test? In this two-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the answers.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And so, Robert,
you know that every now and then on the show,
the Age of the Earth and the Age of the

(00:23):
Universe come up, will mention that the Earth is about
four and a half billion years old, or that the universe,
the observable universe, is about thirteen point eight billion years old,
or will in some general way talk about the scientific
concepts of deep time, some kind of observation that reflects
a deep time. And when we do this, I'm sure

(00:44):
you've seen that we often get emails from listeners. Listeners
sometimes from particular religious beliefs or backgrounds, asking us to
help them sort out competing claims about the age of
the Earth. Yes, so we we occasionally receive emails like this.
I've also seen comments to these effects on social media,

(01:06):
sometimes our own social media, but I've also seen it
on social media accounts associated with other How Stuff Works podcasts,
And uh, you know, we we don't always take the
time to really discuss this stuff because generally speaking, when
we're talking about the age of the Earth in the
Age of the Universe, we're talking about scientific consensus, and
we're generally referring to the the age of the Earth,
of the age of the universe, so that we can

(01:28):
discuss something else. We're generally discussing some other topic that
that is placed upon the bedrock of this understanding of
deep time. Yeah, and so we are going to be
talking about deep time and about the age of the
Earth in these next two episodes. But this is not
because it reflects a serious disagreement among working scientists. It
does not. There is not any serious controversy about whether

(01:50):
the Earth is billions of years old. It absolutely is.
And part of what we wanted to do in these
episodes is actually used this as an example to explore
one of the best things about sciences, which is that
science helps create a synoptic view of history in the universe.
It brings together so many different ways of exploring the

(02:10):
universe that all converge on similar storylines and end up
telling us the same thing in different ways. And when
you do that, of course, that always increases your confidence
that you're on the right track, you're finding out real information. Yeah,
everything's not coming from a single individual or a single
uh source of information. It's not sake all coming from

(02:31):
a single work of ancient literature exactly. But to kick
us off today, I thought maybe we should just look
real quick at a couple of examples of emails people
have sent us asking us to address this topic and
reflecting a genuine desire to understand more about it. Right,
because I think you know we've touched on before. People

(02:51):
aren't coming from a don't necessary from a place of
just absolute you know, refusal. Uh. Well, some people are,
but some people are, But I mean generally, especially if
you're listening to the show, you are curious about the world.
You're curious about about where it came from, where it's going.
You you have a scientific mind. Uh, just maybe you

(03:11):
haven't been able to consume necessarily the right scientific uh
uh data in some cases, such as exactly why we
believe the earth in the university be the ages that
they are. So let's first look at this email from
our listeners. C J. C J writes, Hi, gents, I've
enjoyed your podcast immensely. You guys have a way of

(03:32):
making extremely complex topics approachable. It's been exciting to begin
to grasp things like quantum theory and black holes, albeit
at a ridiculously high level. This is exactly the reason
I'd like you to do a podcast regarding the age
of the Earth. I have a few preface points prior
to getting into the specifics of my request. One, I
believe in God, and based on some very personal experiences,

(03:53):
I don't think I'll ever be able to abandon that belief.
It falls in line with subjective consciousness, wherein there's no
way for me to fully explain it from my viewpoint
and no way for you to grasp it from yours. Therefore,
I'm not looking to explore the religious origin stories more
than necessary for the things I'm asking your insight on. Two,
I'm admittedly under educated when it comes to scientific methods

(04:15):
regarding dating of objects through various methods. I've tried to
do research on this on my own, but I find
it difficult to get a picture of how and why
the methods are sound. That's where you come in. My
request is this, would you please do a show that
discusses the methods of scientifically determining ages of things? How
these have been proven? Given the immense scaling from our
relatively short observable timelines and compare slash contrast this with

(04:39):
the scientific claims of Young Earth advocates. This maybe two
different show requests, I suppose, but I would like to
have a better understanding of these forms of measurement while
also gaining understanding of the potential flaws in the science
based claims of the of a young Earth. Uh and
gives a couple of examples. I hope to hear your
insight on these matters. Thanks for the consideration, p US.

(05:00):
I imagine you have many listeners like myself who have
these conflicting science claims about the age of the Earth
and who have trouble parsing them out with much thanks
c J. All right, and here's another one for example.
And again this just helps, I think, put a face,
put a voice on these questions. This comes from a
listener named Lucas quote. In many episodes, the hosts have

(05:21):
made comments about the ridiculous nature of Young Earth creation
quote unquote science. They often comment about how the young
Earth idea is easily disproved by geological dating methods and
simple observation. However, Young arthurs claim that geological dating is
unreliable and can be influenced by environmental factors. I love
to see a show where the hosts look at geological
dating methods and either debunk or confirm their accuracy and validity.

(05:44):
Oddly enough, I have not been able to find much
information on this topic. All I can ever find is
Young Earth literature saying that the dating methods are flawed
and inaccurate, or mainstream science article saying young Arthur's or morons.
Nobody seems to be interested in actually proving or disproving
the valid of dating methods. Keep have the good work, Lucas. Now,
in this email from Lucas, I noticed something where he

(06:07):
talks about the availability of different types of sources on
this subject. And maybe this is a good moment for
us to point out some of some of what's bad
about Google results on topics related to the age of
the Earth and evolution, because I have noticed, and I'm
sure you have too, Robert. In fact, I know you have,
because you made a note about it. The top pages

(06:27):
of Google results are just polluted with propagandistic anti science
literature about the age of the Earth and about evolution. Right. Well,
I mean, on one hand, also you have just various
question websites and message board type interfaces where someone's like, hey,
what's the real age of the earth, And then you

(06:48):
have generally non experts and people with with access to
crime come in and uh and argue about it. Toilet
head Johnny on Yahoo Answers says, the age of the
Earth is very old. Anybody who says as otherwise is stupid, right,
And then you, yeah, you do have these uh, these
very problematic websites and and and normally, you know, I
wouldn't even want to call them out by name, but

(07:10):
I should point out to anyone out there listening. And
many of you already know this, um, but answers in
Genesis a website is not a reputable source on science
or objective reality. And I normally, again I normally be
in not be inclined to point something out like this.
But the website does tend to rank very highly in
search results for otherwise scientific questions regarding our world. Oh,

(07:33):
all the time. Anytime you google something about evolution or
the age of the Earth, it's on the first page
of Google results. It's amazing. It makes it right up there.
Another one and in fact, one thing I will say
that as especially insidious is that there are tendentious websites
pushing a non science based point of view that often
end up ranking very high, and at the same time

(07:55):
they seem to be trying to disguise their religious affiliation.
One website that comes to mind often shows up in
results is a website called evolution News, which tries to
apparently present itself as some kind of neutral scientific website,
but it's actually it's a creationist propaganda site. It's run
by the Discovery Institute, which is an intelligent design media machine.

(08:19):
But it's not called like the scientists are Lying dot com.
It's called evolution News. It makes it seem like it's
website that's just grabbing new articles about evolution discoveries. Yeah,
and again, I I believe these these websites are just nefarious.
They managed to They managed to get both science drastically
wrong and I think get religion wrong as well. They

(08:40):
they they they try to force both into the same
awkward shape and managed to shatter both the vessels. Um
Because as I've talked about on the show before, you Know,
I think you can you can have a religious worldview
or a spiritual worldview without discrediting science, without throwing science

(09:01):
to the wolves or bending it to the will of
of a spiritual religious model. Uh So, I think these
exercises are entirely unnecessary, to say the least, well as
we know they're often based on particular theological beliefs having
to do with like the literal applicability of certain holy
books and stuff like that. Right, And to be clear,

(09:23):
for anyone out there who's perhaps not religiously aligned like that,
this is this is not the majority of believers that
are engaging in these uh these these these carefully manicured
models for say a young Earth or a completely biblically
aligned pseudo science for our world like this is a
small majority of people who have just managed to uh

(09:47):
produce websites that rank highly in in Google via search
engine optimization. Yeah. Um, now, I just want I already
said this earlier, but I want to stress again at
the outset that we are not talking about the subject
of the age of the Earth because it's a controversial
question in science. The approximate age of the Earth is
not a controversial question in science, so it used to

(10:07):
be until the twentieth century it was, And we're going
to explore that history a bit as we go on,
but we're not talking about this topic because there's a
legitimate possibility that the Earth is, as many Young Earth
creationists believes, somewhere between six thousand and ten thousand years old.
There there is absolutely no scientific reason to believe that,
and I hope by the end of these episodes you

(10:28):
will understand not just that there's lots of evidence that
the Earth is billions of years old, but that the
evidence is not confined to single methods that can be
you know, picked at and debunked. The billions of years
of the history of the Earth are an altogether view
of every branch of science. It's part of this synoptic
history that's been established by almost every material method we

(10:52):
have of investigating the world. Now, I know some of
you out there listening are definitely science enthusiasts, and you're
gonna say, well, Robert and Joe, I already know this.
You don't have to tell me. Or not only do
I know this, but I'm also not planning to get
in an argument online or in real life with anyone
who believes the Earth is six thousand years old. Why
should I listen to these two episodes? Well, I'll just

(11:12):
say that there's gonna be a lot of cool facts
about the history of our our our planet, in our universe. Um.
And that's ultimately I think the appeal of these episodes
as well is that the is the deep time is
fascinating and it's full of these just wondrous uh facts
that that that are really thrilling to think about. Well. Yeah,
and the history of the Earth for so long was

(11:34):
a mystery, I mean to think about, think about before
we had any really good estimates of how old the
Earth is, and to not know you live on a planet.
You don't know if it's been here for six thousand years,
as maybe a literal interpretation of your Holy Book says,
or if it's been here forever as many as Aristotle
might have said. Um, So, I mean that's a crazy

(11:55):
question to contemplate. Yeah, or was it here at all
before I woke up? You can get into very philosophical realms,
so when you when you contemplate this, uh. But of
course today we have we have science to give us
a far more definitive answers. Now, I want to say
one more thing, which is that while we do want
to be forceful in refuting the idea that the Earth
is just a few thousand years old. I don't want

(12:17):
to just spend a couple episodes harping on how wrong
Young Earth creation is so are and bash them for
being so stupid. I don't think that's our game. You know,
you don't have to be stupid to be tremendously wrong
about things. People engage in motivated reasoning about all kinds
of stuff. Um, that that is a tremendously wrong, misguided conclusion.

(12:37):
But I'm not especially interested in just like insulting people
for holding it. No. No, And then also, science is
a journey, and we're we're all on a journey. Uh.
Joe and I included, Uh so if you if you
believe or have believed incorrect things about the history of
the Earth, Well, we are all continuing to figure out

(13:00):
how the world works, and we're all we're all learning
new things as we go. So, um, you know, absolutely
no judgments uh in that regard. Well, part of the
humility that's introduced by a scientific worldview is the absolute
certainty that some things you're pretty confident about right now
will turn out to be wrong. But the age of
the Earth is so well established at this point that

(13:21):
it is not one of those things. Now, I think
we should actually get into the history of beliefs about
the age of the earth. Like obviously, as we said,
people have not always known how old the earth is.
In fact, until the twenty century, they were all kinds
of ideas all over the map. So I guess let's
start by looking at this history. How how did we
get to now? What is the history of beliefs about

(13:43):
the age of the earth? Well, I mean the world.
The world belief is key here, of course, you know,
because given non scientific thinking, given explanations in myth and folklore,
I can really believe anything I want about the history
of the earth, so long as I'm willing again to
dismiss rigorous scientific investigation and think in favor of magic
and fiction and a lot of early discussions about the

(14:04):
history of the world and like where animals come from
and stuff like that. And you look at these natural
histories from the ancient world there they seem to be
largely based on just looking at what's going on around
you and using your intuition trying to come up with
a logical model for what the world is. Uh So
what is today mythology might be interpreted as a far

(14:26):
more logical model in say, you know, ancient babylon But
an ancient Babylonian model doesn't really you know, hold up
to di scrutiny if if it's transported into the modern age.
But true enough, Religions are often interested in the time
span of things, and so their estimates for the age

(14:46):
of the Earth in the universe vary. And it's also
important to note here that especially for ancient faiths and
ancient thinkers, there's generally no distinction between the world and
the universe. So that you know, the world or Earth
was creation itself, why would there be anything else? Right? Yeah,
these are generally geocentric ways of thinking. I mean, even
if people didn't have a fully composed cosmology of planetary

(15:09):
bodies orbiting the Earth and stuff like that, you generally
would not have had any idea that the Earth is
just one planet on a sort of in a back
corner of someplace in the galaxy. Yeah. Some people saw
the world as everlasting. Other's limited it to the shape
of our own life and assumed it had a moment
of beginning in a moment of ultimate demise, which of
course is quite reasonable because I mean scientifically speaking, Uh,

(15:31):
the Earth definitely has a beginning and it will one
day have an end, which we've discussed on the podcast before. Yeah,
one of my favorite things about creation stories for the
Earth is how common it is to have a story
where the Earth is made out of something else, something
that's alive, like made out of the dead body of
a slain sea monster or something like that. Yeah, we

(15:54):
get into this. I believe it was Order out of
Chaos an older episode. I'll try to remember to link
to that episode of the landing page for this episode.
It's stuff to blow your mind dot com. But when
religions provided time frames for the birth of a world,
you know, it tended to vary. So in Orthodox Judaism,
the universe is less than six thousand years old, and
Biblical creationists, as we've discussed, get caught up on the

(16:16):
six thousand year old thing as well. And certainly we
do have to point out that six millennia is a
long time. This is the humans for humans. Yes, it
is a span of time that includes the rise and
fall of many great civilizations, the Indus Valley civilization, every
Chinese dynasty, the kingdoms of Sumer in Egypt. It is
essentially the span of written language for our species and

(16:39):
is a six thousand year ladder emerging from the shadows
of prehistory. But we of course know that that humans
existed before this point. The first agricultural revolution dates back
to ten thousand b c UH. The Neolithic period began
in UM ten thousand, two hundred BC, and this is
an important age in the evolution of human technology and

(17:02):
the earliest use of fire that takes us back one
point five million years. Stone tools take us back more
than three million years now. One of the funny things
is that we're so used to dealing with theologically based
beliefs that the Earth is much younger than it is.
But it could have gone the other way, right, People
could have theological reasons for thinking that the Earth is

(17:22):
a hundred trillion years old or something. Yeah, I mean,
some religions air in the other direction. Take Hinduism, for instance,
The Vedas explained that there's a continual death and rebirth
of the universe for each time the universe lives through
four ages or yuga's. There's the Saya Yuga, the age
in which God spoke to man Uh, there's the threat

(17:43):
to Yuga, the age of the Ramayana, there's uh the
Devarpa Yuga, and then there's the Kali Yuga. This is
the modern age, and you have the War of the Mahabarata.
Bridging these these, the third and fourth yuga all told.
The four Yugo's make up one Maya yuga, which is

(18:03):
a single day in the life of Brahma, the creator god,
but for humans it's a four million, three D twenty
thousand years. Brahma lives one hundred years each composed of
three hundred sixty Brahma days, so that's a grand timescape
of one trillion years. So yeah, the numbers get get

(18:24):
pretty crazy pretty quickly. So we've seen all of the
apologetics arguments that the Earth is much younger than it is.
But I wonder are there apologetics arguments that the Earth
is much older than it is? I mean, I don't know,
you now, now here's something that I hadn't thought about
until now. But if you get into these various um
ideas about the world that we live in now being
a computer simulation in a in a futuristic age, well

(18:47):
that that would be a model that would essentially argue
that the world is older, is actually older than we
believe it to be right now, because we are not
in two thousand and eighteen. We are in what ever
futuristic year it is that we have the simulation technology
to imagine ourselves in Wow. Now that's interesting, and you

(19:08):
could have interesting time dilation effects due to the simulation
of the passage of time. Yeah, so obviously every believer
would be different. But in general, do you think a
world simulated on computer hardware would be somewhat compatible with
Hindu theology? I mean you do get into that whole
idea of you know, what is what is the true reality?

(19:30):
And how is it hidden from us? So in a
sense it is I mean, I don't want to speak
for Hinduism or for you know, you know, true Hindu
believers and the best you know, diversity that is found
within Hindu belief but yeah, if you're kind of leaning
into it and like you know, with the Sci Fi
in one hand and Hinduism and the other, yeah, you
can make those connections for sure. Interesting. Now, of course,

(19:51):
one of the things that we're people like us are
going to be most familiar with is the fact that
Christians throughout history have tried to calculate the exact date
of creation by reading the Bible literally and trying to
use that literal reading to trace the amount of time
between events in in known history back through all the
Bighats to the creation of the world in Genesis. The
most famous of these literal biblical chronologies is from the

(20:13):
seventeenth century Irish archbishop James Usher. You've probably heard of
the Usher chronology before, and Usher try to use genealogy
based approach to the ancestors of Jesus, tracing all the
way back to Adam the first man in Genesis and
eventually concluded that the world was created on October six,
four thousand, four BC at six pm s in the afternoon.

(20:37):
See this would really suck though, because if this were
the case, that means you're created and then instantly you
only have five days to get a Halloween costume together.
October is always over too fast anyway. Yeah. Yeah, Speaking
of which, October always a great month for stuff to
blow your mind. So if if you're not anticipating it already,
look forward to a lot of cool Halloween related topics

(20:59):
that might be the case. So we've probably got new
new listeners, new ones you out there this year who
just started listening to our show and you don't even
know that every October we do monster science all months. Yeah,
this is nothing but Halloween all months. Sometimes it spills
over a little. I'm so excited, Robert, I can't wait.
Oh boy, okay, but wait back, We've got to stay

(21:20):
on task. It's not October yet, that's right, Or if
it is, it's uh four thousand and four BC, right,
or I guess it's just BC. If we're just dealing
with with this guy's ideas about the history of the Earth,
I guess so. So for a long time, in much
of the Christian dominated world, that date was taken as

(21:40):
pretty much correct. You know. People might have had some
kind of differences about how he calculated exactly what different
parts of the Bible mean, but many Christian believers thought
that the Earth was about six thousand years old for
the past few hundred years. Though. I have to wonder
you must get into some kind of strange middle territory

(22:00):
when you try to fit uh say, geologically significant events
in the Bible with what we see in the natural world. Right.
Oh yeah, I mean A big one, of course, is
the Great Flood. And there's actually an old episode of
stuff to blow your mind that that that goes into
the Great flood um quite a bit, and not only
the Abrahamic traditions of the Great Flood, but also the

(22:23):
the the Great flood as we see in Chinese traditions
Chinese mythology, which itself is utterly fascinating. But yeah, you
get into it. Took a while for modern scientific understanding
of Earth's um geological and biological history to fully disengage
from Western Christian religious traditions, to fully remove the sacred

(22:44):
time frame from the profane time frame. And so the
earliest approach approaches a framed the antediluvian world within periods
of a pre adomic and adomic time. So you ended up,
I mean the sort of the I wouldn't say it's
a tragedy, but the situation, as you ended up, people
essentially trying to scientifically understand geology, but they were hamstrung

(23:09):
by these um by this necessity to somehow fit in
a great flood and uh at the time of Adam. Yeah,
and I imagine it's especially complicated by the idea that
the flood in in Christian and Jewish tradition has moral
dimensions to it, So it's not just something that they

(23:29):
believe happened to have happened in the past. You know,
at one point a bunch of water came down and
flooded the whole earth, but they believed that like it
happened for a reason to purge the wickedness of creation
that had gone wrong. Yeah. Now, now that being said,
there is a lot of really cool uh scholarship on
you know, what inspired these myths of the Great flood,

(23:50):
be it in Mesopotamia or in China and uh, and
what kind of evidence we have for those situations. But
those are still the Great Flood as it occurred, and
it was you know, we're we're not really talking a
global flood, we're talking regional floods. Um these would have
would have occurred within human history. And you can't really
if you're taking that and you're trying to understand geologic history,

(24:13):
it's just not going to fit well, of course not.
I mean, yeah, geological time and human time are are
so different. I mean, you mentioned earlier the idea that
six thousand years is a long time, and it is
a long time for us. It's the blink of an
eye in geologic time. Very little happens in six thousand
years geologically. But sorry, anyway to come back to the

(24:34):
idea that you had people who were in say, like
the early Modern and then Enlightenment period trying to look
at the world with a somewhat scientific eye, but but
also still being strongly influenced by their religious worldview. Yeah.
One of the earliest geologists was the seventeenth century Roman
Catholic priest named Nicholas Steno. Uh. And and he he's

(24:58):
actually achieved through you of the four steps to being
declared a saint. But he was one of the first
to show that rocks tell their own stories. Sometimes this
guide's religious doctrines and other times it refutes them. Uh.
But uh, yeah, he made he made some some major movements,
and it is a result of of of geology. But
by Darwin's time, most clergy members abandoned the idea that

(25:22):
a literal global flood had happened. But but for a while, Uh,
science progress as if the Great Flood was a very
real occurrence in the history of the Earth. Uh. And
and science is a whole move beyond this notion in
the eighteenth and nineteenth century. But I am interested in
this idea. We're back to the question that like from
our geomethology episode. You know, uh do you do you

(25:43):
think that there is a good evidential basis for thinking
that flood myths are inspired by some kind of regional
floods or something in history, or that it just as
easily could have been creative imagination. I think there's a
lot of strong evidence that that it was inspired by
actual floods, because floods occur. I mean, you have people,

(26:06):
ancient people especially, they're not living in the middle of
the desert. They're living near bodies of water, and bodies
of water are subject to flooding, be at a river
or a coastal region, and when they occur, the effects
can be catastrophic. Uh. They and they definitely make an impact.
And in terms of extrapolating this into a world flood,
I forget the name of the researcher off hand, but

(26:29):
these referenced in that older episode, he pointed out that, um,
you know, every every flood is a global flood if
your world is small enough, you know. So, yeah, I
think there's there's a lot of interesting evidence so that,
you know, be at Mesopotamia or China, these are these
are tales that were inspired by actual flooding. Scenarios. All right, well,

(26:51):
I think we should take a quick break, and when
we come back, we will look at some earlier attempts
to scientifically determine the age of the Earth. Alright, we're back.
So it wouldn't be until the twentieth century that we
started to get an accurate figure of the age of
the Earth. But there were scientists in previous centuries who
tried to use scientific methods to infer the age of

(27:12):
the planet, and not just say, you know, reading religious
texts to to try to determine how how long we've
been around. I found a nice little article that discusses
several of these experiments by French physicist named Jean Paul Poiller.
It's called about the Age of the Earth in Comptus
Rendus Geoscience, and Poier points out that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz,

(27:33):
who lived sixteen forty six to seventeen sixteen. Leibnitz, of course,
was a big figure in a lot of fields. Uh
He was a philosopher mathematician independently invented calculus. But Leibnitz
proposed in his posthumously published book proto Gaia that Earth
began as a molten Sphere and Leibniz. Though like pretty
much everybody in his time, believed in a creator of

(27:55):
the natural world, he was not so into direct religious
interpretation of nature. I read in this book review in
Nature that he was once referring to people who see
miraculous images in natural objects, you know, like the virgin
Mary in a pancake or whatever. Uh, see miraculous images
in natural objects. And he wrote, quote, credulity fills in

(28:15):
the rough outlines, shaped by accident. And I think that's
pretty much a correct view of how those perceptions come about.
But though he did not invoke a literal interpretation of
the Bible, and doing so, he still assumed a short
history of the earth. Uh. And this sort of limited
time frame hindered his thinking when he was trying to
explore the natural history. Yeah, I mean it's it's it

(28:37):
is a preconceived notion of of what you're going to find.
But there were people who before the people who were
really on the right track, there were people who started
to undermine the literal view of the six thousand year creation. Uh.
For example, George Louis le Clerk, Count de boufon of
seven he lived seventeen o seven to seventeen eighty eight.

(28:58):
He was this eighteenth century free naturalist and encyclopediaist. He
created this massive work of natural history called the Histoire
natural and in his introduction ala estoar de minero in,
Bouffon described how he had personally tried to determine the
age of the Earth by way of an experiment. So

(29:18):
you think, well, how could you do an experiment to
determine the age of the earth in the eighteenth century?
What would that experiment be? Though he was wrong, this
was actually a really clever approach, I thought. Bouffon wrote, quote,
I have made ten wrought iron cannonballs, the first one
half an inch in diameter, the second one an inch
in diameter, the tenth one five inches in diameter, or

(29:40):
about thirteen centimeters. And so he heated all of the
cannon balls to what he called white heat, and then
measured the length of time it took to cool them
all down to two different points. Number one, when they
were cool enough to hold in the hand for a
second without burning, and then number two, when they cooled
to room temperature. So can just imagine Bouffon out there

(30:02):
like fondling these hot cannon balls try and figure out
I mean. And so he's doing this by touch, like,
not even using a thermometer, but he he gets some
interesting results even despite these methods. So Bouffon found through
these experiments that the cooling times were related directly to
the cannonballs diameter. There's just a direct linear relationship between

(30:24):
how wide the cannon ball is and how long it
takes it to cool down to these two points. And
he used this information to extrapolate to the age of
the Earth. He says, you know, if we know the
Earth is ex number of miles wide, then I can
tell you how long it took to cool down from
this molten point that Leibniz had had proposed. So Bouffon writes, quote, now,

(30:45):
if we wanted to infer with Newton how much time
was needed for a sphere as big as the Earth
to cool down, one would find, according to the above
experiments that instead of the fifty thousand years that he
had estimated for the Earth's cooling time to be down
to its as in day temperature, one needed forty two thousand,
nine hundred sixty four years and two hundred twenty one

(31:06):
days to cool it down to a temperature where it
would not burn, and ninety six thousand, six hundred and
seventy years and one hundred and thirty two days to
cool it to room temperature. As Poirier points out, that's
kind of some illusory accuracy there. It's like so specific
it sounds like he must be right, but he was
way wrong. Uh. The Buffon argued that the real material

(31:29):
constituents of the Earth, like clay and sandstone, would take
less time to cool down than pure wrought iron, and
created an updated estimate based on that quote. By using
in this sum only glass, sandstone, hard limestone, marble, and
the ferruginous matter, one finds that the earth sphere solidified
down to its center in about two thousand, nine hundred

(31:50):
and five years, that it cooled enough to be touched
in circa thirty three thousand, nine hundred and eleven years,
and a room temperature in seventy four thousand, forty of
the years. Okay, well that's still that's more than six
thousand years, but still rather short of the actual age. Right.
So Poarier discusses several reasons that Bouffonon's calculation was so

(32:11):
far from the truth quote. He implicitly assumed that the
cannonballs had a uniform text temperature from their surface to
their core, and that this temperature decrease through time. Now,
of course, this is not the case with the Earth,
and while Bouffon's experiment is fairly accurate with small balls
of uniform material, the principle that there's a linear relationship
between the diameter of a ball and the cooling time

(32:34):
becomes less and less applicable as the spheres get bigger.
Parrier calculates that this linear relationship breaks down for spheres
once they reach about seventeen centimeters in radius. So that's
sort of what made him way off. And though he
was very wrong, Bouffon was actually also influential, not in
the answer he came up with, but in his questioning

(32:55):
of the theologically received idea that the Earth was six
thousand years old. He sort of showed, look, the Earth
could be as old as anything as far as we know,
and we might as well do some experiments to try
to figure out how old it could be. And so
others tried to follow suit. Like Kelvin, also tried to
infer the Earth's age by doing a similar calculation about
cooling times, except what he did to infer the rate

(33:18):
of the Earth's cooling was to use the geothermal gradient,
which is the rate at which the Earth gets hotter
as you go deeper into its crust. An example here
would be that there's sort of a rough approximation that
the Earth gets about thirty degrees celsius hotter for every
kilometer down into it you go. And Kelvin assumed that
the Earth cooled by conduction from the surface. So this

(33:41):
thinking led him in eighteen sixty three to propose that
the age of the Earth was between twenty four million
and four hundred million years, so getting a lot closer. Yeah, though,
I mean, critics may argue that it's only getting hotter
in the middle because that's where held is. That's a
very good point. Kelvin didn't even consider that event. Uh So,
But why why was Kelvin also wrong? Why why did

(34:04):
his cooling calculation network either even though he used this
gradient cooling method. Well, you might be thinking, what about
the radioactive heating of the Earth. It is true that
radioactive materials in the Earth do lead to continuous heating,
but Parier says this is actually not very important when
it comes to measuring the temperature gradient method. Uh So,
the actual answer, Paria says is because Kelvin assumed that

(34:27):
the Earth cooled through conduction. In fact, one of Kelvin's assistants,
John Perry, pointed out that if you assume there's a
higher thermal conduct conductivity inside the Earth, you would get
an age in the range of a few billion years.
And in fact, we now know that over large time scales,
a lot of what's going on inside the Earth behaves
like a liquid, which allows matter to flow somewhat along

(34:50):
with the heat, causing a heat transfer from the core
by convection rather than just conduction, and understanding the convection
cooling of the Earth can help give us an s
meant on the correct order of magnitude, which is billions
of years. And this brings us to the correct answer.
We mentioned it earlier in the episode. But there there
is a fully formalized consensus across the sciences now that

(35:13):
the Earth is about four point five billion years old.
About four point five four billion, Yeah, because about four
point five four billion years ago, this would be the
point at which it fully condensated from clouds of interstellar
gas and dust, then drawing in a final barrage of
planetism as that fell into its mass enormous heat stirs
within its depths. And this, of course is just a distant,

(35:36):
miniskill spinoff from the formation of the universe itself. Right,
of course, we've got the age of the observable universe,
which is about thirteen point eight billion years that we're
gonna be focusing more on the Earth today. That's just
to point out that obviously the universe is much older
than just the planet we live on, which again was
was far from a given in earlier religious mythological ideas

(35:58):
about the creation of the world we live in. Yeah,
why wouldn't you just assume that the planet you live
on in the entire universe were the same age. But
if you were with us through that history section, you
might be asking, hey, wait, wait, wait a minute. Now,
the estimated age of the Earth has changed wildly before, right,
we were going from tens of thousands to millions to billions.

(36:21):
Don't you think it could change wildly again? Isn't it
possible that the scientists could all tomorrow discover that they
were wrong and the Earth actually is six to ten
thousand years old in a way you always want to
emphasize that. Of course, science doesn't deliver final verdicts. It
just sort of like it gives you theories that have
confidence in predictions. You know, it gives you a theory

(36:42):
that says, if you use this theory to predict what
you'll find in the future, you're going to find it
every time, and a good theory will help you find
it pretty much every time. Right. But the answer to
this is basically no, it's not going to wildly change
again because establishing the Earth's age has been a process
of calibration, with ever increasing sensitivity of methods and increasing

(37:03):
agreement of findings. I could see maybe there's an off
chance that I don't know that some there could be
further calibrations of the age. But we're not going to
find out that the Earth is less than billions of
years old, um. Because there's been this statistical convergence across
all these different disciplines of science, all zooming in on

(37:26):
the true age of the Earth, and all of them
end up agreeing it's old. Nothing tells us that it's
thousands of years old. So it's not just direct dating
methods that we've come up with to tell us that
the Earth is old. It's it's nearly every type of
science there is that tells us the Earth is old. Yes,
that's something we're gonna be touching on a lot, uh,

(37:46):
in not only this episode, but the next episode. Is that. Yeah.
If you if you throw out the the the scientifically
accepted eight of the Earth and the universe, uh, you
have to throw out pretty much every other area of science.
You don't get to keep uh, geology, you don't get
to keep the dinosaurs. Uh. This is something that always

(38:09):
ticks me off, especially as a UM, as a father
and someone who reads a lot of dinosaur books to
his son. Uh. It enrages me when I find a
creationist book that it features a cool looking dinosaur illustrations.
They always do, They've got good illustrations. Yeah, but I say, no,
you do not get to have cool dinosaurs if you
are going to use this alternate view of this non

(38:32):
scientific view of of of the Earth's timeline and how
life emerged on the planet and and indeed what dinosaurs
uh were and what dinosaurs are today in the forms
of their Avian descendants. No, dinosaurs uh and other prehistoric
piasts belong to science and uh and and uh, and

(38:52):
science gets to keep them. That's a really good point.
I can almost sense you holding back a little bit. Well,
let loose that righteous rage. Dinosaur anger. Yeah, this is
where dinosaurs come from. They come from our scientific understanding
of the Earth and the fossils embedded within it, right,
and the evolution of life itself. Right. So a lot
of our second episode is going to focus just on

(39:16):
all of the ways that that the age of the
Earth touches on, you know, every other way of looking
at the world. But for the rest of the episode today,
I think we should focus on this first episode, we
should focus on direct methods of dating the Earth. Direct
scientific experiments we can do that tell you this is
how old the rock you're standing on is. Alright, Well,

(39:38):
on that note, let's take one last break for this episode,
and when we come back, we will speak to the rocks. Alright,
we're back. So one of the best tools we have
for directly establishing the age of the Earth with measurements
is a method known as radiometric dating. Now, you will
often hear people, especially casual critics of the scientific consensus

(40:01):
on the edge of the Earth lump all of this
under carbon dating. If you hear somebody refer to dating
the age of the Earth with the phrase carbon dating,
you know you're talking to somebody who has not done
any research and they don't know what they're talking about.
Carbon dating, also known as radiocarbon dating carbon fourteen or
just C fourteen dating, is only one type of radiometric

(40:23):
dating among many, and in fact, carbon dating is completely
irrelevant to establishing the age of the Earth. Of course,
it does prove that the Earth is more than six
thousand years old, but it doesn't help you much more
than that. Yeah, I remember, remember correctly. Carbon dating only
has a has a limit of like fifty thousand years.
That's it's about as deep as you can you can
really date anything with carbon dating. Yeah, it's not like

(40:45):
a hard limit, but there are yes. That's usually cited
figure there's at a certain point carbon dating becomes inaccurate
because the amount of the radiocarbon left in the sample
is going to be too small and it's going to
give you erroneous results. But we'll get into the details
of that in it. I guess first, let's let's just
talk about the principles of radiometric dating and all of this,
it's again entangled with everything at the core of our

(41:08):
current scientific picture of the universe. So you've got to
go to the basic parts of an atom. You've got
an atomic nucleus in every atom. It contains protons and neutrons.
Uh protons have a positive charge, neutrons have no charge.
The nucleus, of course we know, is surrounded by electrons,
which have a negative charge. And as we know, how
many protons and atom has in it determines what kind

(41:31):
of element it is. So no matter how many neutrons,
no matter how many electrons, and atom with two protons
is always helium, and atom with seventeen protons is always chlorine.
Seventy nine is gold, eighty two has led, ninety four
is plutonium, etcetera. Now, while the number of protons in
an element is always the same, the number of electrons
and the number of neutrons can change, And when the

(41:53):
number of neutrons in an atom changes, we call these
different forms of the atom isotopes. For example, carbon, a
common stable isotope of carbon is carbon twelve US carbon
You're gonna find all over the place. It's got six
protons and six neutrons. But there's also the unstable carbon fourteen,
which is used in carbon fourteen dating, and this has

(42:16):
six protons and eight neutrons. Now, within every atomic nucleus,
you've got an interplay of forces. There's there's a force
that wants to hold the nucleus together, and then you've
got a force that wants to drive the nucleus apart
and spit parts of it out. So a carbon twelve
atom with six protons and six neutrons is generally held
glued together by the strong force that holds the atomic

(42:38):
nucleus together. But a carbon fourteen atom with six protons
and eight neutrons tends to decay. We call it decay,
specifically through a process known as beta decay, where an
atom shoots off an electron and a neutrino, and then
one of the neutrons in its nucleus is transformed into
a proton, which in this case makes a carbon fourteen

(42:58):
into a stable Add nitrogen fourteen with seven protons and
seven neutrons, and then once it's nitrogen fourteen, that's a
happy atom. It just hangs out. Unstable radioactive isotopes are
very common. There are tons of them out in the world,
just humming along in the background being radioactive, steadily emitting
radiation to transform into more stable atoms. But you might

(43:21):
have some questions at this point, like if unstable isotopes
decay into stable isotopes, why are there any unstable isotopes left?
Why aren't they all stable now right? Why haven't they
all decayed into this unchanging form. Which is a good question,
and there are two basic answers. One is that new
unstable atoms can be created, like, for example, you've got

(43:43):
a high energy event which can change a stable atom
into an unstable form. A great example is carbon fourteen,
which we talked about a minute ago. Say there, you've
got a nitrogen fourteen atom high up in the atmosphere. Uh,
there's a cosmic ray bombardment. Cosmic rays send some neutrons
shooting around in the upper atmosphere. They collide with the

(44:03):
nitrogen atom and change it into a radioactive carbon fourteen atom.
But then the other major principle is that unstabile isotopes
decay at different rates. So while it's not possible to
predict exactly when a radioactive decay event will happen, you
don't know when the decay particle is going to shoot off.
It is possible to determine the rate at which a

(44:23):
certain percent of a radioisotope will decay over time. Like
you can't predict individual events, but you can predict averages,
kind of like how Robert, you know, you can't predict
the outcome of a coin flip, but you can predict
that if you flip a coin a million times, it
will land heads half of the time. Correct. Yeah, and uh.
And while you're flipping, you occasionally get streaks which are

(44:44):
ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of of the coin
flips exactly right, And the same thing happens with these
radioactive atoms. Sometimes they might not omit one for a while,
sometimes they might admit a bunch at once, but over time,
you know what that steady rate of emis is going
to be. And so radio isotopes have what's known as
a half life. This is the period after which we

(45:06):
know that half of a given sample of a radio
isotope will have decayed into something else. So if you've
got ten grams of a sample with a half life
of one year, after one year, you'll have five grams
of the original radio isotope left. After two years, half
will be gone again, so you'll have two point five
grams after three years, half again, so one point to

(45:28):
five grams, and on and on until the proportion becomes
extremely small. Now, half lives can where can vary wildly.
Summer measured in fractions of a second, summer measured in
millions of years. Cobalt sixty, which is used in radiotherapy
and medicine, It's got a half life of five point
to six years, and it decays into nickel sixty. Oxygen

(45:50):
fifteen has a half life of only about a hundred
and twenty two seconds. It's only around for about two
minutes before half of it decays into nitrogen fourteen. Carbon
fourteen has a half life about five thousand, seven hundred
and thirty years, and uranium two thirty eight, the most
common form of uranium found in nature, has a half
life of four point five billion years. So with a

(46:11):
half life like that, even the age of the universe
is not enough to eliminate all of it. Right, it
can just hang out. It will be there for a
long time. But another important thing to understand is that
when radio isotopes decay, they don't disappear. Right. If you've
got you know, ten grams of material and half of
it decays. You're not left with five grams of rock.

(46:32):
You will still have roughly the same amount of material,
just half of it will be changed into something else,
and it gives us the evidence exactly this is this
is the crucial part that comes in with radiometric dating,
because you will end up with what are known as
daughter isotopes in a decay series. So you've got uranium
two thirty eight and in a chunk of rock, and

(46:54):
it's decaying, and those atoms will steadily turn into a
series of daughter isotopes, a very known, steady, reliable progression,
turning into things like thorium, radium, bismuth, lead, and so forth.
And so this gives us what we need. Right, If
you know the rate at which a radio isotope decays,
and you know approximately how much of it there was

(47:16):
to begin with in an object, and you you can
measure how much is left. Couldn't that tell us how
old the object is? And this is exactly the principle
in radiometric dating. So the principles of radiometric dating were
discovered around the turn of the twentieth century. I think
it's sometimes traced back to Rutherford. And there are many

(47:37):
forms of radiometric dating, including uranium lead, radiocarbon dating, potassium
argone dating, and then it's more accurate derivative are gone
thirty nine, are gone forty or are gone ar gone dating, rubidium, strontium, uranium, thorium,
and some others. And all these methods are different, not
not every type of radiometric dating can be used on

(47:58):
any substance or on any time scale. For example, you
cannot use carbon dating to date an inorganic rock. Each
method has different applications in which they're possible to use
and in which they're most accurate. And what these methods
have in common is that they look at an isotope
that has a known rate of decay into another isotope,
and there's some kind of historical clock setting event, which

(48:22):
is the time we know we're trying to trace back
to me. It's basic detective work, right, you're establishing a timeline. Yeah,
It's kind of like if you intercept somebody and you
know they've been driving in a straight line, and you
know how fast they were driving, and you know where
they started driving, then you can determine how long they've
been driving. So One really common example of radiometric dating

(48:44):
is is radiocarbon dating. And as I've said that this
has no relevance at all really to dating the Earth itself.
It's used for dating things that used to be alive.
And the principle works like this. About seventy eight percent
of the Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen. Nitrogen, as we say,
at a little bit ago, has a stabil isotope nitrogen
fourteen with seven protons and seven neutrons, and Earth's atmosphere

(49:06):
is being steadily hammered by cosmic rays from space. Space
really gives it a good knocking around. And these high
energy cosmic rays smash into atoms and knock neutrons loose.
And then these neutron cannonballs they fly off and they
smash into nitrogen fourteen atoms and change them. They add
a neutron, knock away a proton, and change nitrogen fourteen

(49:28):
into carbon fourteen with six protons and eight neutrons. Now,
as we said, most carbon is carbon twelve with equal
numbers of protons and neutrons, but carbon fourteen gets incorporated
into carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere and it enters
the biosphere just like regular carbon twelve does, meaning it
gets sucked in by plants, and then this radioactive carbon

(49:51):
becomes part of the plants, and it gets eaten by
animals that eat those plants, and then it gets eaten
by the animals that eat those animals that eat the plants.
So almost every living thing on Earth has a steady,
predictable ratio of carbon molecules in its body, mostly carbon twelve,
but with a known tiny fraction of carbon fourteen. But

(50:13):
carbon fourteen is radioactive, so over time, as we've explored,
it breaks down through beta decay to become nitrogen fourteen again,
and so we know the half life as well. Carbon
fourteen has a half life of five thousand, seven hundred
and thirty years plus or minus a known error bar.
So if you find a dead carbon based organism that
lived on the Earth, you can actually look at the

(50:34):
ratio of carbon fourteen left in the remains and you
can determine roughly when it stopped taking new carbon into
its body, which generally means, of course, when it died.
But while carbon dating is great for illustrating the general
principles of radiometric dating, it's also completely useless for dating
the Earth for a couple of reasons. Number one, it
of course only works on carbon based organisms that were

(50:56):
once alive, so you can date would you could date,
I don't know what else would you want to date
the charred remains of an animal? Yeah, ancient ancient camp fire.
But you cannot date say a piece of granite. And
then even if it did work on inorganic rocks, it
doesn't go back far enough. The half life of carbon
fourteen is like fifty seven hundred years, which means that

(51:18):
within a few tens of thousands of years there's not
enough carbon fourteen left in the remains in order to
give accurate results. As we talked about earlier, the limits
usually said to be somewhere around fifty thousand years. After that,
it's just not a useful method. So for carbon dating,
this clock is set when the organism dies and stops
taking atmospheric carbon into its body. At death, you've got

(51:39):
this ratio of of carbon fourteen atoms that's fixed, and
the carbon can decay. But how how do other clocks work?
Because you've got to imagine that clocks are set in
different ways for inorganic substances. There are a lot of
different methods you can use. I figured one we should
look at is maybe uranium lead decay. So unlike radio
carbon decay, uranium lead decay takes a long time. There's

(52:03):
an isotope called uranium two thirty five and it's got
a half life of a little over seven hundred million
years before half of it decays into lead two oh seven.
And underneath the surface of the Earth, you've got magma
churning around, and magma builds up for thousands of years
before getting spewed out as part of a volcanic eruption.

(52:23):
And inside this magma that's collecting near the Earth's surface,
there are these crystals called zircons that can form a
normal zircon molecule contains zirconium, silicon, and oxygen. But sometimes
these crystals get a little mixed up with some radioactive
rough housing and the zirconium atom in this crystal can

(52:47):
be substituted with a radioactive uranium atom. And this is
because uranium has a similar outer electron structure to zirconium,
so it can play a similar role in the molecule.
And once these zircon with secret secret stowaway uranium atoms
inside them are formed in the magma, the radioactive clock
is set, and now we've got zircons with bits of

(53:09):
uranium in them. The magma erupts out of the volcano,
gets spewed everywhere, and the zircons are brought to the surface,
including their radioactive stowaways, and then the ash and the
lava containing these crystals harden into rock, and then way
way ahead in the future, geologists can discover these rocks,
discover these zircon crystals and measure the age of the
zircons using mass spectrometry to determine the ratio of the

(53:32):
parent uranium to the daughter lead. And once you know
this ratio, you can establish the age that the crystal
was formed in the magma before the eruption. And one
advantage to this method is that the zircons do not
incorporate lead naturally, so you don't have to worry about
the crystals containing lead to begin with. Now, they are
all kinds of things that can contaminate samples and screw

(53:54):
up radiometric clocks, so it's very important when possible to
understand everything you can about a sample and to use
multiple methods to corroborate dates and give confidence. For for example,
with the uranium lead series I just mentioned, it's possible
that a piece of rock that's got mostly zircons from
one time period could be contaminated with zircons from a
different time period. And this is why it helps to

(54:16):
test with multiple crystals from each sample and a cross
reference with other methods of dating when possible. And this
is all part of what's known about these methods of testing, right,
because one of one of the things you see come
up in um like creationist attacks on radiometric dating methods
is that sometimes the attacks are just like not founded

(54:38):
in fact, but sometimes they are founded in fact, and
they're simply like announcing possible vulnerabilities of the method that
are known to the scientists who use them. It's almost
like announcing we can't trust lab results because somebody else's,
you know, samples in the lab can be contaminated. And
it's like, well, yeah, scientists know that that's part of

(54:59):
the prob process. Or say pointing to a single journalistic
error and then saying, well, this entire journalistic institution or
journalism itself cannot be trusted, right, So and so got
got a name wrong in an article one time therefore
the newspaper they work for. It's all lies, and as
we've discussed plenty of times before, getting it wrong occasionally

(55:22):
is part of scientific process progress and the process itself
um which is which is a rather interesting reversal from
from people who really doubled down on, say, you know,
biblical truth or some sort of theological model. It is
held up to be right all the time for all times. Well, right,

(55:44):
I mean, that's sort of the problem with infallibility, right,
Like the idea that a that a source is infallible
would mean that you're your trust in it is invalidated
by a by a single mistake, whereas the trust in
any type of lab test. I mean this is not
unique to radiometric dating. Any type of measurement performed in
science is subject to experiment or flaws, mistakes, contamination of

(56:10):
the sample, malfunctions of equipment, all that kind of stuff
can happen, and that's why it's important to use multiple
methods and to cross check and corroborate. Now, just a
quick note, I will say this does not mean that
I don't mean to say that religions themselves do not change. Obviously,
religions change to meet the that the needs of modern humans,

(56:31):
and I think that the there are plenty of great
examples of individual religious traditions that that change and adapt
to meet new modes of understanding and the needs of
modern humans. Well. Yeah, as we said at the outset,
not every religious person is tied to some kind of
literal understanding of a holy text. All right, I think

(56:52):
this is a good place for us to to break.
We're gonna go ahead and cap off this episode, but
we are going to pick up the conversation in second episode.
And in that episode we are going to roll through
a lot of the examples of of of scientific endeavor
depending upon these uh these these uh these established estimates

(57:13):
for the age of the universe and the Earth. Yeah,
we will talk about the twentieth century work that established
the modern age of the Earth estimate. We will talk
about reasons that we can know radiometric dating methods are reliable,
and then we'll talk about the synoptic view of science
that shows that really an old Earth is an is
an indispensable part of our picture of reality. All right,

(57:34):
And in the meantime, head on over to Stuff to
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(58:43):
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