Subject:
|
Re: Geology from Outer Space
|
Newsgroups:
|
lugnet.off-topic.debate
|
Date:
|
Wed, 4 Apr 2001 16:45:28 GMT
|
Viewed:
|
642 times
|
| |
|
|
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Bruce Schlickbernd writes:
> > [quoting Ryan's argument of sun touching earth]
> Basic bad science. Unwarranted extrapolation of evidence over a very brief
> period. It's kind of like watching the tide going out, walking away, and
> declaring the seas will dry up in a year, without any understanding of the
> ocean's (or sun's) processes.
Bruce (or anyone else, really :-),
I have a question related to this, it's something I've pondered on but no
teacher I've had could answer to my satisfaction, and it's one that I am
honestly curious about and will welcome any answer that I can get.
How does this "don't extrapolate linerally" rule not apply to long-range
dating techniques, i.e. carbon dating, geologic dating, astrophysical
dating, etc.? What kind of baseline is used in the measuring systems we use
to get the earth's age, and what corroborating evidence is used to back it
up? It seems to me that it would be extremely difficult to measure any age
past a few thousand years when we've only been measuring these things for a
couple hundred. There could be a (time-? distance-?) curve involved that we
haven't even seen yet.
In terms of distance (and the way I understand it), the measuring stick is a
meter long, our reach maybe a meter more, and we're guessing the distance of
something so far away that it's beyond our capacity to focus on it. It
seems we need a measuring stick that's both within our capacity to weild yet
at some gargantuan scale -- and a *second* mesauring stick of a sufficiently
different nature but otherwise identical qualities, which we can use to
verify the results of the first one.
Granted, we can make some educated guesses (e.g. species in the fossil
record don't appear and disappear in just a few years), but just how do you
count 4 billion years? How can it be expected that the rules that we
measure things by apply to events that happened so long ago?
Cheers,
- jsproat
|
|
Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Geology from Outer Space
|
| (...) This is a rather large subject that I could only cover here in the briefest possible manner. In part, a number of techniques may be combined as double-checks: Known decay rates of radiactivity - Carbon-14 is the best known but there are a (...) (24 years ago, 4-Apr-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
|
Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Geology from Outer Space
|
| (...) Basic bad science. Unwarranted extrapolation of evidence over a very brief period. It's kind of like watching the tide going out, walking away, and declaring the seas will dry up in a year, without any understanding of the ocean's (or sun's) (...) (24 years ago, 4-Apr-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
|
126 Messages in This Thread:
(Inline display suppressed due to large size. Click Dots below to view.)
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
This Message and its Replies on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
