Gem found is oldest known piece of Earth

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Interesting article but the dating method is very wrong. 4.4 billion years, indeed!
 
In all seriousness, I knew the Earth was supposed to be some billions of years old. Give or take some hundreds of millions of years. So that part of the article doesn't really mean much for me. The only thing that sort of holds my interest is the assertion that the Earth could have sustained life at an earlier time than previously thought.
 
Although I'm sure a journalist knows about as much as I do when it comes to atom-probe tomography and the timeline of the Earth as it relates to the "Hadean Eon." Let's hope they regurgitated the information correctly without any unfounded implications in the article.
 
Let's just say if you have exhausted all attemts to cabon dating ... I can introduce you to the proper method of measuring the electrical resistance of the common housecat.
 
you know, radioactive decay probably isn't constant after all.

The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements

as i understand it, this gem was dated by weighing individual lead isotopes (woot! atom-probe tomography) and extrapolating their age based on the assumption of a constant rate of decay over all time. also assuming the mass of an electron has never changed. and some other fundamental constants. :D




 
TheAristocat said:
The only thing that sort of holds my interest is the assertion that the Earth could have sustained life at an earlier time than previously thought.
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that was a pretty big intellectual jump, if i'm reading the article right.

what the age would indicate - if the age of the earth and the solar system remains unquestioned - is that the point at which the earth was cool enough for water to not be steam may have been earlier than previously thought. that's not completely clear from the age of a zircon crystal -- but here's the real big jump -- liquid water = life.

when you hear of an "habitable planet" being discovered these days, it just means that it's in a temperature zone relative to it's host star that would allow the presence of liquid water, if it also has the right sort of atmosphere and other planetary properties.

i found some other reports here - Zircon Chronology: Dating the Oldest Material on Earth listing the previous holder of 'oldest-known-bit-of-zircon' to be 4.2-4.3 billion years, also from the same area of Australia. so really this isn't much news; it's within the margin of error (probably, if we're realistic about how trusty dating is) of previous finds, so it's not as though it's as significant as the article would want you to believe, IMO.
 
posthuman said:
you know, radioactive decay probably isn't constant after all.

The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements

as i understand it, this gem was dated by weighing individual lead isotopes (woot! atom-probe tomography) and extrapolating their age based on the assumption of a constant rate of decay over all time. also assuming the mass of an electron has never changed. and some other fundamental constants. :D
Click to expand...

I wouldn't know, but it sounds interesting. Wonder if you can find any more of these types of articles online.
 
David_1 said:
You are being wilfully ignorant. We are commanded to be wise as serpents and not foolish.
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I think you're the one who's being willfully ignorant. We're commanded not to hold human reasoning above God's Word. But what do I regularly find? Christians questioning the creation account etc. spoken about in Genesis because Science is their god. You let human reasoning take precedence over divine revelation from the Holy Spirit (the Bible) and you have to create a whole lot of hoops to jump through to justify this crazy nonsense.
 
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