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OT: Feeling old this Christmas? This young’un is about 66,000,000 years old

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CochiseCowbell

CochiseCowbell

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I concur Goat. I never understood choosing a side on that issue.

As for bringing them back, if we can domesticate & train them, perhaps they'd help us defeat the robots.*
 
Mobile Bay

Mobile Bay

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If one drills far enough down into science there is a fundamental assumption. It's called the principal of uniformitarianism. It is the assumption that throughout the entire universe and throughout all time the fundamental laws of physics have applied exactly as we perceive them today. But it's just that, an assumption. It's a useful assumption. But the fact that it may not be true should always be in the back of ones mind, lest hubris set in.
 
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BeardoMSU

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Law of Uniformitarianism. Scientific laws describe phenomena of nature, they're hardly assumptions.
 
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Go Budaw

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horshack.sixpack

horshack.sixpack

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Never lost on me is that if there is a God as described in the Bible, then there just might be some things that I'll never understand about how he has done, or goes about doing, stuff. I've already concluded, through decades of living, that there are way more things on earth that I'll never understand than those that I will/do understand. The idea that everything that we might come across in this world should be completely understandable to us is the height of pride.
 
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johnson86-1

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BeardoMSU said:
Law of Uniformitarianism. Scientific laws describe phenomena of nature, they're hardly assumptions.
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Pretty sure that one is an assumption. I think I remember a recipient of a MacArthur grant recipient speculating that the assumption is wrong with respect to the time period immediately following the big bang and that during such period, even the speed of light was different. Can't remember what phenomena he was trying to explain. Regardless, even if it's correct, it's an untested assumption. It seems pretty clearly warranted for any time of recorded history, but just like newtonian physics making sense over basically everything you observe, and then general relativity seeming right, you can't really confidently use inductive reasoning in physics. **** just gets weird when you start looking at things. Like the sum of all positive integers arguably being -1/12 and that being meaningful in string theory.
 
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BeardoMSU

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johnson86-1 said:
Pretty sure that one is an assumption. I think I remember a recipient of a MacArthur grant recipient speculating that the assumption is wrong with respect to the time period immediately following the big bang and that during such period, even the speed of light was different. Can't remember what phenomena he was trying to explain. Regardless, even if it's correct, it's an untested assumption. It seems pretty clearly warranted for any time of recorded history, but just like newtonian physics making sense over basically everything you observe, and then general relativity seeming right, you can't really confidently use inductive reasoning in physics. **** just gets weird when you start looking at things. Like the sum of all positive integers arguably being -1/12 and that being meaningful in string theory.
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It's not, though. And it's not just physics.

The notion that natural phenomena are working in the same way they did in the past as they did today, and will continue in the future, refers to all the Earth's mechanisms. Gravity for example, has always been gravity...there may have been changes in how gravity was experienced on the planet (i.e., during the formation of the Solar System, with orbital and lunar paths being closer and/or further than they are now) but it was still gravity acting like gravity does. Other examples would be tectonics (and the rock-cycle), carbon cycle, hydrological cycle, isotopic decay....all of these things are constant in the nature of how they work.
 
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johnson86-1

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BeardoMSU said:
It's not, though. And it's not just physics.

The notion that natural phenomena are working in the same way they did in the past as they did today, and will continue in the future, refers to all the Earth's mechanisms. Gravity for example, has always been gravity...there may have been changes in how gravity was experienced on the planet (i.e., during the formation of the Solar System, with orbital and lunar paths being closer and/or further than they are now) but it was still gravity acting like gravity does. Other examples would be tectonics (and the rock-cycle), carbon cycle, hydrological cycle, isotopic decay....all of these things are constant in the nature of how they work.
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Most of that is basically physics, and as I said, it's an assumption. And gravity is a probably a good example. If you don't know what something is, it's really hard to say it has always been the same. Certainly it's possible, but I'm not even sure you can say it's probable without knowing what causes it. If you knew what causes it, it's possible you would say it almost certainly was different in the past.
 
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BeardoMSU

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johnson86-1 said:
Most of that is basically physics, and as I said, it's an assumption. And gravity is a probably a good example. If you don't know what something is, it's really hard to say it has always been the same. Certainly it's possible, but I'm not even sure you can say it's probable without knowing what causes it. If you knew what causes it, it's possible you would say it almost certainly was different in the past.
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I mean, can we say with 100000% certainty that this is always this and that is always that? No. I suppose we all could just be a bunch of brains in a jar in some alien's laboratory somewhere, and our existence as we know it is just some Matrix-esque experiment, lol.

That's why there are degrees of certainty in things (which you essentially also said in a roundabout way previously). The book is never closed in science, but there can be a consensus that's about as good as it gets based on the information currently had; and all of those mechanisms in how we observe the Earth and how it changes are about as close to certainty as it can possibly get. But to your point, yes, there is always room for more knowledge.
 
DesotoCountyDawg

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One of the former associate pastors at our church and I used to have breakfast a lot and we hashed it out and it’s pretty interesting. If you look at the order of days, when you get to the 5th “day”, animals are started to be created and it’s the fish in the sea and birds. This points to possibly dinosaurs and the creatures of the period because like what’s shown in the preserved dinosaur in the egg we see the feathers. Also the bone structure of modern birds are a striking resemblance to many of the two legged dinosaurs. Then came the animals and man on the 6th “day”, which falls right in with the extinction of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals.
 
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CookieMonster.sixpack

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Smoked Toag said:
Give further details.
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You might want to pick up some Meredith Kline. He's a day-age guy and has written extensively on it.

A couple things about the age of the universe intrigue me.

1. How can we be certain as to its age when we don't have another universe to compare it to? It's not like a normal science experiment where you give half the mice sugar than the other half sweet-n-low and measure the difference. There's not a control group universe and that has always bothered me. I'm sure scientist could educate me here.

2. When you read creation stories (including the Hebrew Bible's) the people that are created aren't babies. At least, that's not how it's presented. Adam & Eve are fully developed adults. Otherwise that "be fruitful and multiply" command wouldn't make much sense. So if they were created as adults, could the universe also have been created as an adult? I'm not sure. But it's interesting to think about it.
 
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Miketice

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Uncle Ruckus said:
The principle at my previous school (one of the best high schools in MS) didn’t believe dinosaurs were real. So, not only do they vote, but they have influence.
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Thought u went to Morton. ( Not one of the best high schools) .
 
dorndawg

dorndawg

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Mobile Bay said:
If one drills far enough down into science there is a fundamental assumption. It's called the principal of uniformitarianism. It is the assumption that throughout the entire universe and throughout all time the fundamental laws of physics have applied exactly as we perceive them today. But it's just that, an assumption. It's a useful assumption. But the fact that it may not be true should always be in the back of ones mind, lest hubris set in.
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It's turtles all the way down.
 
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Smoked Toag

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CookieMonster said:
You might want to pick up some Meredith Kline. He's a day-age guy and has written extensively on it.

A couple things about the age of the universe intrigue me.

1. How can we be certain as to its age when we don't have another universe to compare it to? It's not like a normal science experiment where you give half the mice sugar than the other half sweet-n-low and measure the difference. There's not a control group universe and that has always bothered me. I'm sure scientist could educate me here.

2. When you read creation stories (including the Hebrew Bible's) the people that are created aren't babies. At least, that's not how it's presented. Adam & Eve are fully developed adults. Otherwise that "be fruitful and multiply" command wouldn't make much sense. So if they were created as adults, could the universe also have been created as an adult? I'm not sure. But it's interesting to think about it.
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Sarah Salviander is my go-to, generally. Atheist astrophysicist turned Christian.
 
GloryDawg

GloryDawg

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Dawg496 said:
There’s not really people who think the earth is 6000 years old are there?
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They can't think out side the box. Maybe Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden for a billion years before they munched down on the fruit and the earth developed while they were protected. Who knows. People take the bible too literal.
 
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Wizard.sixpack

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patdog said:
It takes a lot of willful ignorance, or a belief God is playing a very elaborate trick on us, to believe the earth is only 6,000 years old.
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I think ignorant to think that any human can date something 66,000,000 million years old. It's not only ignorant it's actually pretty laughable. We just taking a man's word for it?
 
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BeardoMSU

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Wizard said:
I think ignorant to think that any human can date something 66,000,000 million years old. It's not only ignorant it's actually pretty laughable. We just taking a man's word for it?
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Lol, ok I guess...

You mentioned "ignorance"....Its pretty ignorant to make such sweeping statements if you know nothing about basic isotope geochemistry.

FYI, Dating methods are in fact extremely robust, have been tested exhaustively (and are still being constantly being calibrated), and are never used in isolation, as there is always redundancy with multiple methods being used, both of the relative variety and absolute.

 
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BeardoMSU

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Cooterpoot said:
How will people be able to carbon date things once we eliminate carbon? Hmm***
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Lol. The world certainly wouldn't have to worry about any living organisms ******* everything up if we did that!**

Jokes aside, just for the benefit of the room, carbon dating isn't used to date dinosaurs....sometime I fear often isn't clear.
 
PooPopsBaldHead

PooPopsBaldHead

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Yeah. I have 2 little boys that watch and read everything dino 24/7. We did a tour of Craters of the Moon national monument this summer where they discussed the use of carbon dating on trees and animals to calculate when the flows happened over the last 12000 years.

The next day we went to Hagerman fossil beds and I made the mistake of saying carbon dating for the million plus year old fossils, my 7 year old corrected me and explained radiometric dating and mass spectrometry.

6000 year old earthers are almost as silly as flat earthers.
 
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patdog

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The Maroon Pug said:
Someone didn't pay attention in math class***
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Or science. It's actually pretty easy to at least ballpark how old these fossils are. We can argue whether it's 66M years old, 50M years old, or 80M years old. But it damn sure isn't 6,000 years old.
 
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patdog

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If you read Genesis with the understanding that a "day" isn't literally 24 hours, but an epoch, it pretty much lines up exactly with modern scientific theory. Which is remarkable if the book wasn't inspired by some higher being than humans.
 
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