Answers in Genesis has some peculiar ideas about how science is done.
This fool says you get a prize if you say the Earth is 30 billion years old, and that you get another prize if you say the Earth is 60 billion years old, but that it’s not fair that he doesn’t get a prize for saying the Earth is a few thousand years old because…creationist math is closer to 30 billion than 60 billion is? What? That’s not how anything works. There aren’t prizes for reciting numbers, this is not Numberwang. You have to provide evidence for your measurement.
Also, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
By the way, I am 178 cm tall, or 5 feet 10 inches tall. You should get prizes for announcing that I am 6 feet tall, and more prizes as my height escalates by acclamation to NBA values and beyond. You get no prizes for declaring that I’m 178 microns tall. And don’t you dare bring out a tape measure.
To them, 4.5 billion, 30 billion, and 60 billion are all the same. Any of them are contrary to their ideas of a few thousand years. They insist that all of history, both geologic and human, must be on a scale comprehensible to their small minds. They cannot fathom that they might be tiny and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
Fundamentally, they insist that they are the centre of the university, and lash out at anyone who points out any evidence to the contrary.
You just made my day: I’m three to four centimeters taller than the Norwegian!
NB!
As tectonic activity is powered by the decay of remaining long-lived isotopes in the Earth’s core, a planet that old would be completely senescent, without tectonic activity.
The carbon dioxide would not be recycled. The atmosphere would be unbreathable. The mountains (if there was still a thick atmosphere) would be completely eroded.
The rotation would have slowed down due to tidal effects, and that would in turn make the rotational axis unstable, wobbling between extremes. Good luck suriviving the seasons if the axis is tilted 90° .
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This is BTW (part of the reason) why it is bullshit that the long-lived Red Dwarf stars would have longer time to have planets develop life.
Numberwang mentioned..
let’s rotate the board!
“Also, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.:
And it contains old uranium that has been recycled by a previous generation of stars. In Uni, we were given a trick question, deriving the age of the Earth through the proportions of U-235 and U-238. In reality, you also have to include the amount of decay products to correlate for the older, U-235-depleted uranium. And there are other long-lived isotopes you can use.
Wait, that was supposed to be science? I thought it was a conservative comedy sketch. Since it managed not to be racist, mysogynist, depend heavily upon recognizing dog whistles, or otherwise have “humor” that depended on being obnoxiously offensive I thought it was better than most conservative attempts at comedy. It just sounded like absurdist humor because as far as I’m aware we don’t know of anything 15 billion years old much less two to four times that age.
What prize is he expecting, one for lying?
Why not young earth?
Because all evidence results in an age of 4.5 billion, there was never a world wide flood, and the stories about the man who lived (aka Noah) are Mesopotamian myths that the Jewish people incorporated into their own mythology.
Would this be the original British Numberwang or the dumbed-down US spin-off?
I think the Brit bishop Usher claimed creation was 4004 BC, which is more than 5000 years after the ice age ended. There are Swedish tree cores (preserved in peat) older than this. And probably still living bristlecone pine trees older than this.
It is probably not coincidental that the invention of writing in Mesopotamia is quite close to the age of their Young Earth.
The modern world runs on fossil fuels derived from ancient life. Hydrocarbons are typically millions of years old, though the oldest is 1.4 billion in Australia.
If the Earth was only 6000 years old, there wouldn’t be any hydrocarbons for us to exploit.
@11: Fossil fuels derive from organisms buried in The Flood, and fast-cooked into coal or petroleum. You really ought to be keeping up on the latest creationist research ;-).
(I suspect known reserves would require there to have been a wildly unlikely large amount of biomass on the earth’s surface immediately pre-Flood).
PZ, I’m not trying to pamper your ego (I know you don’t like that), but your stature (anyone’s) has nothing to do with your height. Stature is the measure of the quality of character: honesty, caring, decent, peaceful, rejecting superstition. And, these creationist crackpots are just shoveling shit, as usual.
At least the YECs understand numbers can have power. They don’t understand fully, why they have power.
@#10 birgerjohansson
Not trying to embarrass you, but Bishop Ussher was Irish. Also, while spelling was quite fluid in the 1600s, I believe his name is more commonly spelled with a double s. From Wikipedia:
“James Ussher (or Usher; 4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656) was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was a prolific Irish scholar and church leader, who today is most famous for his identification of the genuine letters of the church father, Ignatius of Antioch, and for his chronology that sought to establish the time and date of the creation as “the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October … the year before Christ 4004″; that is, around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.”
birger @10, you’re right, as is moar@15, the good Bishop specified the date and time too.
I have always wondered: since this calculation was done in the 16th or 17th century, and creationists would probably like to have a modern, more accurate, updated number, why don’t creationists sit down and do their own calculations? Why rely on the Bishop’s antiquated methods and result?
There’s nothing wrong with making an older measurement more accurate with new calculations, and surely William Dembski now has enough time on his hands to do the math.