A Question to the Intelligent People of ATS: How old are we?

How old are we?

OK I know this topic has been raised before, but I think I have a new (or at least interesting) take on it.

The two main schools of thought on this are Creationism and Evolution.

Truly devout believers in the Creationism school say that the earth and all of its inhabitants were created about 5500 - 10,000 years ago. As this theory is directly tied to religion, the date varies depending on the religious base it extends from.
There are different sub-groups of creationism, but I don't think we need to get into that here.

Now as a scientist at heart I believe that our modern dating methods are pretty accurate. Rubidium 87 to Strontium 87 (half-life = 47,000,000,000 years) - this is the most common system used for dating rocks older than 100 million years.

Most main stream scientist's wholly accept the original idea of Evolution put forth by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book "Origin of Species". In the 150+ years since this theory was put forth the main idea has changed very little. All living organisms are subject to survival of the fittest. Over time these organisms changed or "evolved" to better suit new environments thusly the "fittest" would survive and procreate. Life continued on this path over and around obstacles through time and eventually a group of primates evolved in to us. The pinnacle of life on earth. Though an exact date will never be found for when this transition took place, as the definition for what makes us more human than the previous version is always changing, the general belief is we became "Homo Sapien" sometime between 20 million and 5 million years ago.

Now most would say that these two schools of thought are mutually exclusive. However after many years being fascinated by this subject I have come to believe they are not.

When you begin to combine the two theories you see that some aspects overlap. If you then bring in a third theory of Panspermia many of the holes left by the combining of the two main theories is filled.

Its possible that the Human Race as we know it was seeded (created) here. Not by a god, but by our own ancestors. I think it is obvious that Evolution does occur, but why does it seem that we as a species have stopped evolving. Maybe we don't evolve like the other creatures around us because we didn't initially evolve here. There is evidence to show that we have existed on this planet for hundreds of millions of years in the same form we appear today. If this is true we would be the only life form that has remained wholy unchanged in that time.




- srry for the text at top, i dont know anything about image editing.



In this article by Lin Liangtai he reports on his study of a Carboniferous skull cap found by Ed Conrad. Ed claims that a miner gave him the skull cap after finding it in a coal vein they were harvesting. The miner also said that there were many more fossils and artifacts in the waste pit of the mine. Coal is a fossil fuel so if current science is correct and it takes hundreds of million of years to form coal then it stands to reason that these fossil's are possibly that old. (but why did these fossils not turn into coal or a "fossil fuel"?)

ireport.cnn.com...

I know there is a lot of debunker's on this topic and Ed Conrad in general so I will be interested to hear every angle.

So I think it is "possible" for human kind to have been around for much longer than we are taught (and remember that teachings change as new information is brought to light). Perhaps we have been on this planet for hundreds of million of years. And maybe its our constant pursuit of technological advancement that has doomed us to repeat the same fate again and again. Rising to the heights of knowledge only to throw ourselves back into the depths of ignorance. Maybe our next evolutionary step isn't physical.

Again this is just a theory and is not intended to come across as fact. So my question to you, the people of ATS is how old do you think we are?

reply to post by coven83

Again this is just a theory and is not intended to come across as fact. So my question to you, the people of ATS is how old do you think we are?

The Earth is older than you can count. The soul is just about as old. The body is the only thing that is young in age.

I have a complex answer to the young earth of fundamentalism.

Its basically wrong because Its a Parable told to Mose by a preincarnate Christ about the Semetic peoples start.

Not a literal creation account...

Other people outside of Eden that Cain married into ?

there are more examples and verse I could bring up to back that view up as well.

Originally posted by jhill76
reply to post by coven83

 

Again this is just a theory and is not intended to come across as fact. So my question to you, the people of ATS is how old do you think we are?

The Earth is older than you can count. The soul is just about as old. The body is the only thing that is young in age.

Actually I agree that the "soul" as you refer to it is much older than the physical realm we inhabit. But my question is really directed to our age on this planet.

I did a thread about that question,becoming human.
When did the spark of intelligence happen in the rise of modern humans?
Was it a gradual thing,or did it happen suddenly?
It seems that with the latest discoveries by archaeologists,the time keeps getting pushed back,further and further.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Their discovery uncovered fishing hooks made from bone that date back to about 42,000 years ago, making them the earliest definitive evidence of such tools in the world.

www.livescience.com...

Just an example.

reply to post by coven83


Sadly we'll never know for sure. One thing we do know is that we live our human life in a linear timeline
and end up dead ( physically ).

For all we know, we just keep reincarnating in flesh until our soul has attained a certain level of balance and equilibrium. But as for our past, far away, we'll never know for sure, sadly...

Peace

A good analogy: Take a picture once every year of someone from birth to 40 years old, now evolution-airily 40 years is considered to be practically nothing, but that 40 year old has drastically changed since birth.

Even with 40 years of pictures there will always be gaps between the photos where someone can ask the question "Where is the missing link?", when in reality there is no missing link and it's just another aspect of time which we don't yet understand.

Most people constantly search for the proverbial "light-switch" that flipped on one day, but I believe it to have been a gradual process, just like aging.

Analogy credit: Matt Dillahunty

reply to post by coven83


IMHO we cannot have evolved naturally, we have none of the things every single apecs predator on land has. Big nasty teeth( well for the most part anyways) nope not us, ok how about abundant fur for protection? Nope. How about big ass claws for capturing prey? Again nope. I won't even get into the fact that mans DNA shows obvioujs signs of tampering( google genetic defects man. Than do the same for any animal except dog because we did make them and they share a hiamount of affor mentioned genetic abnormalities just like us.

I would say that I am pretty convinced that we are at least a million but not much more than that, god plz say we can get our # straight faster than a million years.

These are the sorts of mysteries as to why I'm on ATS.

I'm a firm believer that there is a MASSIVE cover up going on in the archaeology community, as there are too many artifacts that really don't match the readily accepted timeline.

We could probably be a branch of human like creatures and possibly be billions of years old, nobody knows.... Think about this, say we are here for 100,000-1 million years longer from now, would we have colonized space? Our main drive is to preserve our species, so we are attempting to seed other planets so we may never go extinct....

So what if a much older version of ourselves seeded us here, along with hundreds or thousands of other planets and we are simply just one branch existing on this planet? Say we have brothers and sisters from another planet but due to the differing conditions of other planets their evolutionary path was different than our own, so they may be human like but not exactly like us (think Avatar)..... I don't know, just something to think about....

I wonder how many times we rise in technology only to get knocked back down by cataclysms. I don't think it is just a matter of if we walked with dinosaurs, I often wonder if we didn't fly in machines long ago only to be almost wiped out and had to basically start over again. (The Vimanas of Ancient India being one source.)

We only have speculation regarding the building of megaliths worldwide and a once advanced technological human can be the answer to this. It seems its a long lost technique from humans who knew the technology to do it.

The 5 to 10 thousand year old belief of human existence could be from the latest time a cataclysmic event has started us over again. The great deluge could be effects from the last cataclysmic event.

Time is an illusion .. remember
the question should be .. how old is your soul
some kids today are way older then both of their parent age combined

I've always suspected that we've been around for far longer than our recorded history.

If you just think about the size of your brain, it hasn't changed dramatically in 1000's of generations. That means to me, that our problem solving ability has remained the same for 1000's of generations. So imagine yourself 100,000 years ago. You are part of a hunter gather society. The knowledge you have of plants and animals was taught to you by the rest of your group as you grew up.

You've been taught when and where to hunt, when and where to look for certain types of plants. You are a tool user.
You would be a keen observer of nature.

How many generations would it take to figure out the seasons?
How many generations to create adequate housing?
How long before your group could figure out to plant seeds and reap a bigger harvest?

What I'm getting at is, once again in my opinion, your group could advance itself in a few generations. You'd have wood houses, a decent diet, you'd understand a lot about plants and animals.

But, you might not leave megalithic structures for our current archaeologists to find.
Would you have qualified as an advanced culture?

I Think the answer lies in Biosteel.
Yes this is made from spider-goats.
The natural expression of evolution seem to be intelligence.
And it appears when intelligence is high enough it takes over for evolution.
So it may be not chicken or egg but evolution or intelligence.

reply to post by coven83


Well obviously the creationism thing is crazy, I wonder why you brought it up when you specifically asked for 'intelligent people'.. Cause you may have just scared them away.

I believe we are 100,000 or possibly millions of years old as a species. Whether or not our intelligence is the same today as in the past is unknown. It's very possible mankind was a wild animal with primarily instinctive and reactionary thinking. Somewhere I believe something changed our species into the intelligence we exhibit today. Was that simple evolution? Or was something else responsible for leaps in intelligence foreign to the rest of the natural world?

Originally posted by libertytoall
I believe we are 100,000 or possibly millions of years old as a species. Whether or not our intelligence is the same today as in the past is unknown. It's very possible mankind was a wild animal with primarily instinctive and reactionary thinking. Somewhere I believe something changed our species into the intelligence we exhibit today. Was that simple evolution? Or was something else responsible for leaps in intelligence foreign to the rest of the natural world?

edit on 23-7-2012 by libertytoall because: (no reason given)

Your are correct in that line of thought.
We,as Homo Sapiens Sapiens are vastly different then the rest of the animal kingdom here on Earth.

Like,for example,why did we lose our body hair?
Was it because of the long time we spent in the hot savannahs in Africa?
Other apes still have all they're body hair.

When it comes to darwinism,humans kind of buck the trend.

Originally posted by libertytoall
I believe we are 100,000 or possibly millions of years old as a species. Whether or not our intelligence is the same today as in the past is unknown. It's very possible mankind was a wild animal with primarily instinctive and reactionary thinking. Somewhere I believe something changed our species into the intelligence we exhibit today. Was that simple evolution? Or was something else responsible for leaps in intelligence foreign to the rest of the natural world?

edit on 23-7-2012 by libertytoall because: (no reason given)

Intelligence is subjective really.
Man kind was a 'wild animal' and technically we still are today, a lot of wild animals have more then just instinct guiding them.

Evolution? Not specifically.
Adaption? Yes.

The change from monkey to what we are today was slow and probably had many inhibiting factors. An example would be using fire to cook food, the domination of emotion over instinct etc.. Changes like this are driven by environmental factors and their consequences can be anything. It could have caused us to be poisoned, likewise it could have triggered a gradual change of chemical composition in the brain to create the more 'human' animal.

I like this question so much i made an account here at ATS just to post.

FACTS

-Earth is 4.54 billion years old

-The oldest known hominid, or humanlike species, has been dated at 4.4 million years old. Another species, which is yet to be confirmed as a hominid, has been dated at 6 million years old. Scientists estimate that the hominid lineage diverged from the ape lineage 5 to 8 million years ago. Homo sapiens, the species to which we belong, has existed for about 100,000 years.


Now the fun begins:

using these numbers, and a little bit of 'guessing' it takes about we will say 10 million years for a 'human like species' to evolve into what we know today as human people.

if the earth is 4.54 billion years old

WAIT if theres no oxygen, or water on earth then we cant survive so i will google this 1st...

ok

water- The Earth is about four and a half billion years old. It's difficult to study what the Earth was like back then, because the Earth's crust is constantly being recycled, and very few rocks are that old. However, we do have a little bit of rock that is 4,400,000,000 years old, found on the continent of Australia. This rock shows evidence that the surface of the Earth was solid and cool when this rock solidified, just 600,000,000 years after the Earth was formed!

There was even liquid water present where this rock solidified!

So as far back as we have geological evidence of what the Earth was like, there was liquid water present.





ok back to my post:

4.54 billion - 600 000 000 = three billion nine hundred forty million

if evolution takes approx. 10 million years then IT IS POSSIBLE that apes (or insert your own method of evolution here) evolved into what we know as humans 394 TIMES.

now still just guessing, and thinking,

but that means its possible, that evolution took place, build up to 'human' advanced, spread, thrived, and died out 394 times.

MY OPINIONS ON THIS-

this would in my eyes explain aliens - (maybe civilizations that existed millions of years ago, that advanced to the point of space travel, maybe even travel faster then light etc. i mean they do have..well a couple billion years on us) maybe the planet was going to be destroyed by any means asteroid, worldwide event etc. and they had to leave. and if an advanced civilization, or even OURS if we had the means would travel to the nearest terrestial planet or moon.
This would also explain life and/or monuments (as speculated on the moon, and mars) or even jupiters moon Europa which in fact DOES HAVE WATER.

this would explain languages that are unknown but science finds currently on earth, maybe old languages from past civilizations.

this would explain the 'life cycle of earth recycling everything and starting over hypothesis" ive read that everything goes through cycles, and earth is included in this.

just my 2 cents

Op you should check out Slayer's threads on the history of humanity, if you have not already. He put together a very good theory, and if nothing else it is extremely interesting.

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