Complex Life May Have Started on Earth Much Earlier Than We Thought

a reply to: gortex

Sounds like witchcraft.

originally posted by: gortex

Yes, radiometric dating is a very accurate way to date the Earth.We know it is accurate because radiometric dating is based on the radioactive decay of unstable isotopes. For example, the element Uranium exists as one of several isotopes, some of which are unstable. When an unstable Uranium (U) isotope decays, it turns into an isotope of the element Lead (Pb). We call the original, unstable isotope (Uranium) the "parent", and the product of decay (Lead) the "daughter". From careful physics and chemistry experiments, we know that parents turn into daughters at a very consistent, predictable rate.

For an example of how geologists use radiometric dating, read on:

A geologist can pick up a rock from a mountainside somewhere, and bring it back to the lab, and separate out the individual minerals that compose the rock. They can then look at a single mineral, and using an instrument called a mass spectrometer, they can measure the amount of parent and the amount of daughter in that mineral. The ratio of the parent to daughter then can be used to back-calculate the age of that rock. Pretty cool!

The reason we know that radiometric dating works so well is because we can use several different isotope systems (for example, Uranium-Lead, Lutetium-Halfnium, Potassium-Argon) on the same rock, and they all come up with the same age. This gives geologists great confidence that the method correctly determines when that rock formed. Hope that helps, and please ask if you'd like more details!
[url]https://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2901#:~:text=Yes%2C%20radiometric%20dating%20is%20a,some%20of%20which%20are%20unstable.

The thing is, they usually don't match up. If it doesn't match the date they're looking for they often just assume it is wrong. Or they sway the data to make it fit their narrative. Your OP actually exemplifies this... if it is actually as consistent as they say, then how come the dates keep changing so drastically?

Without the initial concentrations of the isotopes you don't know how much time elapsed when solving the half-life equation. Yes the rate is well known, but it doesnt matter if you dont know the starting concentration.

Take for example a Volcano that had erupted 6 years prior to radiometric dating which tested isotopic samples that gave an age range of 350,000 - 2,400,000 years old.


www.google.com...://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.627.1650%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf& ved=2ahUKEwjW9pju-qD3AhXiknIEHSdeBWkQFnoECAgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw00RmPgLE1UzFJL1DFigGPa

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: LSU2018

Where does that 6,000 come from? I'm a religious creationist as well and the book I read has never mentioned a timeline.

“Young Earth” creationists interpret the Genesis account to mean that the universe was created 6,000 years ago. This age is determined by counting the generations of biblical figures recorded throughout the Bible, starting with Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Do you believe the universe is 14+ billion yeas old and earth is 4.5 billion years old and man is maybe a few 100k as we are today?

I see. Well I'm not a Young Earth Creationist. I'm just a Southern Baptist and I know the Bible never mentions anything about how old the earth is. Genesis says it as clear as day that God created man in His image, making both male and female. Later in Genesis, He takes Adam and places him in Eden. Bear with me and I'll explain why I believe what I believe.

Genesis 1
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Skip ahead to Chapter 2 where Adam and Eve are mentioned:
"7 Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed."


By the time the Bible gets to Adam and Eve, God had already created everything, including man and woman. Could Adam and Eve have happened 6,000 years ago according to their ages and the ages of their descendants? Sure, but man was created before that part, as was everything else. I believe man walked with dinosaurs.

If you want to look at the timeline according to the Bible, beginning with Adam, you can find it here in Genesis 5.

originally posted by: cooperton

originally posted by: LSU2018

Where does that 6,000 come from? I'm a religious creationist as well and the book I read has never mentioned a timeline.

There's enough information with lineages in the Bible that we can estimate the Jewish history puts humankind at around 6,000 years old.

Regarding the age of the earth, this one is tough because it doesnt say how long it took for God to create the earth when He did it in Genesis 1:1

"In the beginning of God creating heaven and earth - the earth existed waste and void"

To date the earth from Biblical evidence does not seem possible.

I agree, but the 6,000 year timeline is based off of when God made Adam and Eve, not when He created man in His image on the 6th day.

a reply to: gortex

Yeah they make it sound believable, but without traveling back thousands, millions, or billions of years, there's really no way of knowing whether it's accurate or not. Their data might be radiometrically dating a 45,000 year old rock, thinking it's 4 billion years old or vice versa. They wouldn't know it and none of us would know it. I'm certainly not hating on anyone who believes it to be accurate, I just personally don't believe it.

nothing much

originally posted by: LSU2018
By the time the Bible gets to Adam and Eve, God had already created everything, including man and woman. Could Adam and Eve have happened 6,000 years ago according to their ages and the ages of their descendants? Sure, but man was created before that part, as was everything else. I believe man walked with dinosaurs.

It is interesting that you see life is static never changing. What does God do, does he every 100 million years or so breath a new batch of life on to the planet. Trillions of form of life have come and gone, so it is hard to believe all that is left is what we have today and even that is dwindling down over time.

If you want my view of Adam and Eve I think it is the story of evolution. If the Garden of Eden is a metaphor for the animal world where there is no evil only nativity and ignorance of that world. At one point man evolved beyond it, became self aware, put clothe on no longer being Just an animal, understood good and evil, and so left the garden never to return to that world.

I like how all evidence is fake, as is the entire collection of human knowledge leading up to today because a bronze age collection of desert scribblings by a random tribe that acomplished next to nothing compared to it’s contemporaries in the region says otherwise.

originally posted by: Ohanka
I like how all evidence is fake, as is the entire collection of human knowledge leading up to today because a bronze age collection of desert scribblings by a random tribe that acomplished next to nothing compared to it’s contemporaries in the region says otherwise.

No the knowledge is "fake" because it's based on speculation and not empirically reliable facts. science is far from determining the age of the earth with concrete evidence. Soft tissue being consistently found in dinosaur bones, human footprints in the same strata as dinosaurs, etc, is enough to show that the timeline is way off.

originally posted by: LSU2018

I agree, but the 6,000 year timeline is based off of when God made Adam and Eve, not when He created man in His image on the 6th day.

Yeah thats an interesting distinction. Not to mention the pre-flood world seems to have been far different than the world we live in today. No fallen angels or people living hundreds of years old anymore... at least not to our knowledge. The thing is, Biblical history corroborates with other cultures all around the world... cultures who had no contact with eachother describe the same history.

originally posted by: cooperton

originally posted by: Ohanka
I like how all evidence is fake, as is the entire collection of human knowledge leading up to today because a bronze age collection of desert scribblings by a random tribe that acomplished next to nothing compared to it’s contemporaries in the region says otherwise.

No the knowledge is "fake" because it's based on speculation and not empirically reliable facts. science is far from determining the age of the earth with concrete evidence. Soft tissue being consistently found in dinosaur bones, human footprints in the same strata as dinosaurs, etc, is enough to show that the timeline is way off.

This is true of course. But they have a fairly good idea based on what can be observed. When new methods of testing are developed they could probably narrow it down further.

Science is about expanding our understanding of reality based on observation and testing.

One thing we do know, without a shadow of a doubt, is Mankind has existed for longer than 6,000 years. There are civilizations that date back further than 4,000 BC.

a reply to: cooperton

Wait, are you declaring the need for empirical facts to refute Young Earth Creationism?

I am truly not trying to be rude, but that works both ways, correct? Where are the empirically reliable facts for Creationism?

originally posted by: pfishy
a reply to: cooperton

Wait, are you declaring the need for empirical facts to refute Young Earth Creationism?

I am truly not trying to be rude, but that works both ways, correct? Where are the empirically reliable facts for Creationism?

originally posted by: Ohanka
This is true of course. But they have a fairly good idea based on what can be observed. When new methods of testing are developed they could probably narrow it down further.

Science is about expanding our understanding of reality based on observation and testing.

One thing we do know, without a shadow of a doubt, is Mankind has existed for longer than 6,000 years. There are civilizations that date back further than 4,000 BC.

The Bible doesn't say the age of the earth, only the age of humanity and life. From what I've read in the history of ancient cultures the age range for human existence is 4,500-400,000 years ago, depending on the culture. The histories tend to match back to the global flood, but then their history beyond that becomes convoluted.

Beyond historical evidence, there are many geological cues that our current conventional timeline is off. For example, soft tissue is consistently found in dinosaur bones and carbon dated to be less than 40,000 years old, human tracks are found in the same strata as dinosaurs tracks, and humans depicted dinosaurs in all continents throughout the world. This makes me believe our ancestral history more so than geologists who have to rely on the speculative nature of U-Pb and K-Ar dating

But the nature of U-Pb radiometric dating isn't speculative. The process doesn't have the shaky premise that you seem to think it does.
a reply to: cooperton

originally posted by: pfishy
But the nature of U-Pb radiometric dating isn't speculative. The process doesn't have the shaky premise that you seem to think it does.
a reply to: cooperton

They can't know with any degree of certainty what the initial concentration of the isotopes was. Without this information, you cant solve for "time elapsed" in the half-life equation.

Take for example A freshly erupted Volcano that was found to be 350,000-2,400,000 million years old through U-Pb dating. That is using the assumption that the initial concentrations are 100-0, which is absurd because we never find 100% pure samples of anything in nature

a reply to: cooperton

If the entire world really did flood to cover all the mountains as the bible says then the world would never have seen land again. Especially not within 4-6,000 years. There isn’t, and has never been, enough water to totally cover the Earth. Not counting the time Earth was an ocean because land as we know it hadn’t formed yet. You would need at least 3 times the volume of water currently contained in the world’s oceans to do it.

Floods are fairly common however, and the world was an awful lot smaller to people in those days. If everything you know of (your town, it’s surrounding villages and areas) all flooded, to you that was your entire world devastated. Hence the numerous flood myths (Except Japan who apparently never had one).

a reply to: cooperton
Yes, you can. Zircon is uranophilic during it's formation, but that same chemistry expels lead from the process. Therefore it is accurate to consider virtually all intrinsic lead found within terrestrial zircon crystals to be the daughter product of uranium isotopes initially incorporated within the sample at time of formation.

originally posted by: Ohanka
a reply to: cooperton

If the entire world really did flood to cover all the mountains as the bible says then the world would never have seen land again. Especially not within 4-6,000 years. There isn’t, and has never been, enough water to totally cover the Earth. Not counting the time Earth was an ocean because land as we know it hadn’t formed yet. You would need at least 3 times the volume of water currently contained in the world’s oceans to do it.

Floods are fairly common however, and the world was an awful lot smaller to people in those days. If everything you know of (your town, it’s surrounding villages and areas) all flooded, to you that was your entire world devastated. Hence the numerous flood myths (Except Japan who apparently never had one).

historical and scientific evidence for a global flood

They find fish fossils in the Himalayan mountains. And other mountains as well. They also found enough water in reservoirs beneath the earth that could "cover the highest mountaintop". Surely enough Moses said that a lot of the water from the flood came from underwater vents

originally posted by: pfishy
a reply to: cooperton
Yes, you can. Zircon is uranophilic during it's formation, but that same chemistry expels lead from the process. Therefore it is accurate to consider virtually all intrinsic lead found within terrestrial zircon crystals to be the daughter product of uranium isotopes initially incorporated within the sample at time of formation.

If this is true Then there must be samples of zircon with pure Uranium and no lead. But we've never found such a thing. It's speculative.

a reply to: LSU2018
I have similar views and have posted them on ATS a few times.
There is another part you may not have considered.
God created Adam, how long was he in Eden before Eve was created? How long were they in the garden together before being removed? A few days? Months? Years?

How old was Adam when they were removed? Did they even age in the Garden?

a reply to: cooperton

The “resovoirs” under the Earth’s surface are hydroplates, as in completely solid.

For these to become liquid water on the surface, the Earth would’ve been destroyed. As in quite literally ripped apart and left a barren, lifeless rock for all eternity. It would be as if 3000 10 mile asteroids smashed into Earth for every second for 40 straight days (the last bit is just fof fun)

Suffice to say i don’t think Noah’s Ark would’ve been up to the challenge.

a reply to: sarahvital

Because they advance our knowledge and understanding of reality using information and evidence avaliable at the time. Obviously when better information comes to light stuff gets updated. It’s an ongoing process that cumulates over time and science is the reason we don’t live in trees trying to catch snakes and bugs for food anymore.

To dismiss the entire concept because of one collection of bronze age writings is frankly alarming.

a reply to: cooperton

No, that's a ridiculous statement. Firstly, since Uranium, in all of it's isotopes, is radioactive, you can NEVER find a sample that is absolutely pure Uranium.

Second, because they are examining zircon that have been embedded in rock since it's formation, they would have to have been sampling the material as the greenstone belt was cooling magma.

Yes, zircons can be re-melted and in the process the grains will again exclude the lead decay product from their matrices. But since that's a known process, establishing an estimate of proper geological age requires detailed analysis of the best possible sample size from the source material, and several complimentary methods to ensure accuracy.

Any other misconceptions?