Where do you start?

POSTED BY: citizen
UPDATED: Wednesday, January 8, 2025 02:57
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CITIZEN

Sunday, March 12, 2006 10:17 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
That's pretty cool.

I guess the only question left is...

Is there anything that can affect the decay rate of these isotopes?

Sort of, Rocks underwater can have erroneous results on the weathered surface, but the centre of the rock can be reliably tested.

Confidence in the dating process can increase by using different techniques that correlate.

It's a question of picking good samples, like the core of the rock not the centre, just like Carbon-14, pick seeds rather than remains of trees that can live for 5000 years.

This brings up another point. Carbon-14 dating hinges largely on environmental Carbon and we have reliable data for environmental Carbon stretching back something like 40,000 years, so the results from Carbon-14 tests can be adjusted making them far more accurate.

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

SEVENPERCENT

Sunday, March 12, 2006 2:42 PM

Oddly, while checking my mail this morning, I came upon this article -

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588
EEDF&pageNumber=1&catID=2

From the scientific American; it's their response to arguments against evolution -

------------------------------------------
He looked bigger when I couldn't see him.

Anyone wanting to continue a discussion off board is welcome to email me - check bio for details.

DREAMTROVE

Sunday, March 12, 2006 10:11 PM

I see I didn't miss a whole lot while I was away.

What does it matter? I mean aside from life expectancy and size difference, there's essentailly not much separating a human from a common fieldmouse.

Here's some facts, which are just the balance of evidence from the way too much time I devoted to this issue over the years:

People say "Oh the Earth is 4.6 Billion years old": that's nonsense.

The Earth is 3.3 Billion years old.

The only reason people say it's older is to support a wacked theory that the Earth is somehow related to the moon, which is 4.6 Billion years old. But it's not.

The Earth isn't even in its proper orbit. It belonged originally out between Jupiter and Mars. It was moved to its present location from there be a catastrophic event some 3.3 billion years ago. Anything it was before that is pretty likely lost, but the earth was undoubtedly not very old at the time.

Mouse-monkey-man first appeared a couple hunderd million years ago in dinosaur times. It's evolution to its current form is pretty recent, but I don't know that it's a terribly significant event.

The significant event was the evolution of written language, which was a random one, and resulted in the world we see. It's quite possible that larger mouse-monkey beings, our ancestors, and dinofood, were perfectly intelligent, at least as much as most humans, and had language, culture, religion, etc. But without written language, their development was limited, and they became dinofood.

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Sunday, March 12, 2006 10:57 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Here's some facts, which are just the balance of evidence from the way too much time I devoted to this issue over the years:

People say "Oh the Earth is 4.6 Billion years old": that's nonsense.

The Earth is 3.3 Billion years old.

Some facts huh?

How do you explain zircon mineral in Australia recently dated to 4.4 billion years?

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
The only reason people say it's older is to support a wacked theory that the Earth is somehow related to the moon, which is 4.6 Billion years old. But it's not.

What about meteorites on the earth dated to ~4.6 billion yr?

Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.

Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.

-- Cicero

GEEZER

Monday, March 13, 2006 1:36 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
It's quite possible that larger mouse-monkey beings, our ancestors, and dinofood, were perfectly intelligent, at least as much as most humans, and had language, culture, religion, etc. But without written language, their development was limited, and they became dinofood.

...and with this comment, Dreamtrove joined the tin-foil hat brigade along with PirateNews and PirateJenny, never to be considered for serious conversation again.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

KHYRON

Monday, March 13, 2006 2:11 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SevenPercent:
From the scientific American; it's their response to arguments against evolution -

Thanks for the link, 7%. A great rebuttal, but I doubt too may creationists would bother reading it, and those that do would probably not understand it since, after all, the article is based on facts and common sense and scientific reasoning and logic and etc...

Other people can occasionally be useful, especially as minions. I want lots of minions.

DREAMTROVE

Monday, March 13, 2006 5:49 PM

Finn,

The only rocks I've ever run into dated over 3.3 billion years are meteorites. Bounce around in space for billions of years and slam into the Earth, at a point in time not more than 3.3 billion years ago.

Just shooting down the scientific communities random assertions which are based on little or nothing but the desire to fit something into their preconceived notions, a very intellectual thing to do. I have no agenda at all. Just telling it as I sees it.

I actually am serious about this. All of the real scientific evidence I have seen supports an Earth which is slightly younger than accepted theory. Academics don't like that because it isn't 'pat' with their pseudo-creationist theory.

In reality, planets take a long time to cool, even if the Earth and the moon became liquid globs at the same time, which is possible but not certain, they didn't become solid rocks at the same time. I would imagine 4 billion years ago, there was no solid surface of the earth on which to stand. I could be wrong about this, but I looked up those rocks of which you spoke and it said, from metorites, not an indication of the age of the Earth.

Consider the Earth's crust and rock temperature. It really doesn't make any sense that the Earth would cool so quickly initially, and not more later on. If the Earth's surface were truly 4.6 billion years old, you would expect to see a core behavior much more like that of Mars. My point in all of this is that science has become infected with religion, and alters its findings based on preconception, the way religion does, and it becomes the new religion, and not science at all. Science, in the absence of any predetermined conclusions if sought to support, would frequently come up with different results from the ones which it officially does. I say again, this is not some lead in to a grand conspiracy theory. I have studied these subjects for years, and this is my objective conclusion, based on what I see. It isn't leading anywhere at all.

Geezer,

Clearly you think evolution is tinfoil hat material. I really haven't been taking you seriously for a while, and don't care what you think. If you had read anything about biology you would know that mammals predate dinosaurs, and that large mouselike beings, our ancestors, were most certainly around at the time. The fact that they were furry and had long tails did not make them much different from us. What I stated was really just a reflection of the officially accepted science, no theory or embellishment was added. The only reason I phrased it as I did was to make a point, which was, we are really not much different from our long tailed ancestors, genetically speaking. The human race is different from animals in one way and one way only of any significance, which is the existance of a written language. Because of this, human knowledge became cumulative in a way never possible through oral tradition, for an abunance of reasons.

Finally. Team Pirate is not bad company to be in. I think they are wrong a good percentage of the time, but they are not wrong significantly more often than, say, you, or a number of people on this forum, IMHO. Sometimes they are probably spot on, or at least in the right general direction of the truth. Objectively, I think the pirates are right maybe one time in four. By contrast, I think the Bush Admin are right about one time in twenty. Given these figures, I'm very aware that I'm not right significantly more than that. I hope to be right maybe half the time. I think if someone were right three times in four, they would be Nostradamus. Unfortunately, a large number of people seem to think that they are right 100% of the time.

OMEGADARK

Monday, March 13, 2006 9:09 PM

Man, look what has spawned in the Real World Discussion Board:

Another Science/Religion battle of changing the 'facts' to support whatever/whoever/ need's the evidence for some particular view because they will either lose 'something' themselves or their constituents will also lose 'something' thus the main party losing out possibly twice....

Does anyone see the connection between philosophy, religion, and science?

OR are some people too buys deifying each one on the account of the others?

For example:

Those science minded among us must truly consider what it is that they do 'know'. Take the type of knowledge that they have and ask does anything of what you do, say, know, discover, test, etc etc etc really affect anything the religious community does or says in terms of MORALITY. You will see that nothing you say makes a difference to the price of potatoes.

To those who are religion minded don't you realize what religion IS. Do you actually believe those things that science claims/theorizes/proves takes anything away from you? You think if someone proves the world is 6000 yrs old or 6000000000000 it will make any difference in how you conduct your daily life?

The problem we often run into as humans is that we try to categorize things to fit nicely into titles and categories so that we can then easily label our experiences for ease of thought, communication, etc etc etc...and we often come across people who manipulate things for their own gain...

Often on these boards i find it hilarious to see such smart people often bickering about two different points that have NOTHING to do with each other, and only because some people have preconditioned themselves to hold a greater value on the information that they hold that it intrinsically has itself, they will end up defending it because their ideas of self-worth of intellectual ability is jeopardized...

For all those who claim to be self-proclaimed logicians and the such, why do you often act quite illogically?

Lastly, why if some of you realize that a part of what you believe could possibly be false not see that it doesn't mean the entirety of what you say is also false...

-OD

DREAMTROVE

Tuesday, March 14, 2006 1:57 AM

Clearly I'm getting too ornery again, and thus I need to take some time off from politics etc.

But before I go:

Yes. It really makes a difference. Everything we do in our everyday lives is based on the world as we understand it. If the world is 6,000 that would profoundly change almost all facts about the world as we know it, and thus every action we take would be effected.

So profound is this influcence, that it probably exceeds other facts such as whether or not there is a God. Even to the point where whether the Earth is 3.3 Billion or 4.6 Billion is going to affect our world views as it would indicate the possibility of life. In a 3.3Byo world, life is a rapidfire effect of having a habitable planet, thus indicating an abundance of alien life in the world. If the earth were say, 600Byo, the late occurance of life would show a true scarcety of alien life in the universe. I'm not a big alien fan, so it doesn't particularly matter to me, but that's one thing that might be impacted by even a slight difference like that.

All of what we are is the some total of what we know, experience, and understand. If someone imposes an unnatural belief system that limits what we understand, we are definitely less for it.

Quote:
Lastly, why if some of you realize that a part of what you believe could possibly be false not see that it doesn't mean the entirety of what you say is also false...

Because true and false are not absolutes. There is an unreachable truth, let's call it one, and a nexus of anti-truth, call it zero. If you happen to hold a position at .50, then you are half right/half wrong. In a sense, sure, everything you know is wrong, because it isn't one, and will potentially be supplanted by .75 at some later date, provided you are open minded enough to see this possibility.

A few people here with drastically different positions to my own have shown me a perspective that has changed my overall outlook. If I have position .50, and I see pirate News, and he's got position 2.00, and the truth lies somewhere at 1.00, then by seeing that there is some truth in PN that I don't yet hold, I know that the truth would then lie somewhere between us. Neither one of us is more right or more wrong than the other in this hypothetical example. I would think I'm more right, but that would only be because I'm me, and my ego is standing up for team me, but he would think that he was more right with an equal degree of justification for thinking so.

SEVENPERCENT

Tuesday, March 14, 2006 2:10 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by OmegaDark:
Another Science/Religion battle of changing the 'facts' to support whatever/whoever/ need's the evidence for

You can't change facts. Facts are what they are. To be sure, they can be interpreted different ways, or be omitted, but the only people trying to 'change' facts are religious zealots.

Quote:
Does anyone see the connection between philosophy, religion, and science?

Certainly. Each asks the same fundamental question - "Why are we here?" But never fall into the trap of thinking that while it's the same question, the answers the three seek are the same. They aren't.

Quote:
Those science minded among us must truly consider what it is that they do 'know'. Take the type of knowledge that they have and ask does anything of what you do, say, know, discover, test, etc etc etc really affect anything the religious community does or says in terms of MORALITY. You will see that nothing you say makes a difference to the price of potatoes.

The science community isn't the community with the problem. The science community says "believe what you want, we won't stop you." They really don't care whether or not it affects the religious folk at all.

Quote:
To those who are religion minded don't you realize what religion IS. Do you actually believe those things that science claims/theorizes/proves takes anything away from you? You think if someone proves the world is 6000 yrs old or 6000000000000 it will make any difference in how you conduct your daily life?

Yes, they do. That's the problem. If they didn't, they wouldn't be fighting scientists at every turn. You don't see scientists fighting churches for the right to teach particle physics in Sunday School, do you? Yet you do see the religious right, with a subpar (at best) knowledge of science barging into the classrooms. If suddenly tomorrow every biologist in America demanded that Jehova's Witnesses teach evolution every Sunday morning, you could make a case that both sides are equally at fault. But they aren't, so you can't.

Quote:
The problem we often run into as humans is that we try to categorize things to fit nicely

It's not a problem, it's how we cope. It only becomes a problem for those too ignorant or too foolish to accept that some square things don't always fit into the round holes. The rest of us just alter our perspectives and move on.

Quote:
etc etc etc...and we often come across people who manipulate things for their own gain...

If a scientist manipulates data, other scientists catch them, prove them to be phonies, and trash their reputations in the field. Same thing can't be said of religion - Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell still have ministries; priests get "shuffled," not excommunicated. I see policing happening in one community, not the other.

Quote:
Often on these boards i find it hilarious to see such smart people often bickering about two different points that have NOTHING to do with each other,

One side isn't pressing an issue, just defending themselves. Besides, how are scientists supposed to respond? They've already tried "we're not attacking your faith," so what option is there? Allow people with no grasp of science to set their own arbitrary rules for the laws of nature? It's not gravity, evolution, or quantum mechanics, it's the magical will of an invisible ghost! Cast off ye thy lab coats and rejoice!

Quote:
For all those who claim to be self-proclaimed logicians and the such, why do you often act quite illogically?

Damn right, Chrisisall, you logician you!

Quote:
Lastly, why if some of you realize that a part of what you believe could possibly be false not see that it doesn't mean the entirety of what you say is also false...

And with this I leave you with this thought: Some people so badly want to believe that they have the market cornered on Truth (with a capital T) that they believe that they must force their 'Truth' over the top of plain little ol' 'truth' (small t) - but no m

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