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RE: The End Of Reason: A Glimpse Behind The Curve
Carbon dating has a limitation in how many years back it can date something like a bone for example. There are many examples of how people bring in something to be dated, something that is only a few decades or centuries old in many cases, in most cases. The people end up dating these things and will generally say they are thousands or even millions of years old. When dating things, it's important to understand the rate of decay that certain elements may have in the present. Now, in the past, however, things may have been different. We assume that the past was the same as the present. That delves more into historical science as opposed to observational science.
May I ask you two questions?
First, there is no such thing as historical science. All science is based on observation. Based on the observations, models are made to make predictions and theories are structured to explain what we see and suggest how the world works. Again, based on observed facts. Theories then grow in strength over time as 1. It survives continuous efforts to falsify key assumptions that must be true for the theory to hold. And 2. Further facts are discovered that aligns with the assumptions of the theory. Both contributing to decreasing the likelihood that we’ve arrived at the theory by mere accidence. So, if I say that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, or that the world is close to 4.5 billion years old, those statements are based on observational science. I didn’t have to be there to make the observations. I can make them today and still know that it happened.
As for carbon dating, I’ve heard what you said many times before from people who deny the evidence for an old earth or for evolution. But it makes no sense to even bring it up since we don’t rely on carbon dating to estimate either the age of rocks nor of fossils (it is useful when you dig up remnants from older human civilizations like from the Viking era, Roman era, etc that are more recent). Instead, when an archaeologist discovers fossils that are very old, they will instead examine the rocks above and below the fossil-containing elements such as potassium with a half-life time of 1,250,000,000 years.
Today, millions of fossils have been documented, and the location of their discovery with regards to geological layers has always fitted the model of evolution and it with the estimated age of the earth. In other words, we’ve never found rabbit bones in the Pre-Cambrian.
Now, you may say – and indeed did say – that perhaps these laws may have changed. After all, we were not there to see and observe, right? Well, there’s two issues with that. First, we have now relied on these methods for decades and they have not changed one percent of one percent (such a change would have actually added many meters added inaccuracy over time to our satellites which rely on atomic clocks due to the fact that they never change). Second, this is not intellectually honest, and you are doing exactly what the people in the documentary are doing, which is to respond to evidence contradicting your beliefs by coming up with some alternative explanation – for which there is no evidence – in order to not have to change your mind according to new observations.
If you are going to always ask “but what if”, then you are never going to change your mind and never going to learn anything. Because you can always resort to saying that. I don’t think I can put it better than Bertrand Russell when he gave his thoughts on it here.
So finally, how come I am so confident to say that I know that evolutions are true and the age of the Earth? Because we have completely independent branches of research that support the same theory and because the resulting model allows us, continuously, to make accurate predictions of future events. In genetics, we can now look at the DNA of different species and literally count our way back to the common ancestor. Computers have done this now for millions of species to make cross-examinations and judge how old a species is and how long ago it is since it shared a common ancestor with any other of the millions of species. The result can be plotted as a family tree. Guess what? It matches, perfectly, with the tree you get based on the dated age of all the discovered fossils.
So what is the likelihood, not only that each of these would produce consistent results on their own, but jointly by accident? It’s about as likely as you are winning the lottery every single week for the rest of your life, and then realizing that everyone in the states chose the exact same numbers when choosing theirs at random. Except, I haven’t even mentioned the also confirming evidence from RNA, geological distribution of species and how they match continental changes etc.
So yes we can know these things, no we don't need carbon dating to know them (which you're right about) and no there is no such thing as historical science, models that accurately predict the future should be used to assume the past until otherwise is proven.
Thousands of scientists disagree with you and you did not observe earth form, step by step, day by day, like you would in a scientific experiment where you take something and you test it, take notes, come back the next day, observe it, take more notes, and continue to observe it, step by step and day by day. That is observational science and thousands of scientists would tell you that. If you do not know that, then you are in fact ignoring those scientists.
No, thousands of scientists do not disagree with that. Or at least you'll have to provide a source for that claim, instead of just asserting it and expecting me or others to take it seriously.
Being "there" doesn't make a difference. The evidence is just as overwhelming as I laid out in great detail. I have not been to the future either, but I can tell you for sure - 100% - that on the 26. of May 2021 we will see a total lunar eclipse (or often called "blood moon") that I invite anyone of you to note in your callenders and then go out and witness. I don't need anything but knowing that the laws of gravity stays fixed, like the radiometric dating, to be sure this will happen.
I'm also curious if you don't think we could ever gain knowledge about something like a murder without having eye-witnesses. If a detective arrives at the scene of a crime, and make all sorts of discoveries that all point in the direction of a certain answer as to who commited teh crime, then that is evidence. Likewise, I don't need to observe day-by-day evolution taking place, or the formating of the earth to know a lot about how it happened.
Last point. The burden of proof is on you, or any other "scientist" who would argue that the many natural laws demonstrated to make accurate predictions going forward can somehow not do the same looking backwards. As they continue to be robust and independent branches of science from biology, chemistry, geology, etc, confirms the same models, the default position is that they can. If we are to form our believes based on what is most likely to be true, and not on what we wish to be true, then this should be our frame of mind.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said the world is going to end in twelve years. Is she right about that?
No, the world won't end by 2030. But we may have caused irreversible damage to the climate that, although not necessarily an existential threat, may be very costly in terms of parts of the globe becoming less habitable due to droughts, resulting in mass migration, etc. But no, the world will still be here :)
Did you see the geoengineering chemicals they spray from airplanes, jets, which is what caused, in part, the 2018 Californian Fires?
EDIT: Because the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years, it is only reliable for dating objects up to about 60,000 years old. However, the principle of carbon-14 dating applies to other isotopes as well. Potassium-40 is another radioactive element naturally found in your body and has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Other useful radioisotopes for radioactive dating include Uranium -235 (half-life = 704 million years), Uranium -238 (half-life = 4.5 billion years), Thorium-232 (half-life = 14 billion years) and Rubidium-87 (half-life = 49 billion years).
Maybe the simple explanation for those cases is that the samples where contaminated?
Are you saying that the laws of physics were different in the past? If this is the case are there any studies that make this case for isotope dating (not just carbon dating but also dating with other elements).
How often do people date things inaccurately? How often are the dates proven wrong and in how many cases? I'm asking these questions because some people haven't taken the time to look at the statistics. If you don't already know how often, then that might be your blind spot.
So what is the argument? That the majority of scientists are inept at dating ancient fossils and/or rocks?
The argument is about the rate of decay. DO you know how the Grand Canyon was formed? But before you answer, please compare and contrast that with what happened to Mount St. Helens in 1980 in Washington State, USA. That is only one example. There are so many examples of these things. Did you see the leaves that were frozen inside the mummified mastodons? Did you see the seashells on top of mountains? How did they get there?
You'll have to point me to the leaves, but the shells on mountain tops are easy: The rocks they fossilized on were once under water.
We've dated many of these shells to be hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years old. And we can also measure the rate that tectonic plates move and the resulting creation of mountains. So once you know that the fossils are older than the mountains, it's easy to see that they died there and that the mountains later formed. This is only a mystery if you believe that both the mountains and the sea both always existed in their present forms, which we know they did not do.
Thousands of scientists disagree with you. Thousands of them. It is too bad that you pretend that those scientists do not exist.
You keep repeating that, but it doesn't matter. It's not about the numbers of people who believe X, Y or Z, but about what the evidence tells us.
I have provided evidence for my statements, you have not replied to either of my comments addressing the points that I've made, or suggested why they are not sufficient to prove the theories. Instead, you resort to telling me that someone disagrees, which is not an argument.
In case you're not aware, I've spent the better part of my working career in the space sector working at the European Space Agency (Europe's equivalent of NASA). Working with astrophysicists who can calculate the age of the Universe and the distance to stars and galaxies with measurements relying on the consistency of the speed of light traveling at known speeds which allow them to know the distances between them, again adding evidence to an old universe. I've been working with geologists and geophysicists making research instruments for experiments that are to be sent to Mars or different asteroids, as well as research results from previous probes. These too, have provided insight into the age of the age of the solar system and the different planets as well as the building blocks that make up our own. I work with biologists and chemists creating experiments, or again analyzing results from old ones, to study how life can have originated, been possible on other planets, or perhaps existing there today.
Literally 100%, not as in "most" but as in every single one, of the people I've worked with here. -which are in the thousands for the space agency alone - not just "believes" that the Earth is approximate ~4.5 billion years old, the Universe ~13.8bn, that life has evolved etc, but continues to make progress with models holding those assumptions, which would be impossible if it wasn't true.
Why are you ignoring them? You know you are wrong, right? Is this your blind spot? You seriously have no idea what I'm talking about.
Those are fair questions. Reality is complex and I don't think that we can have definitive answers for everything but we can make assertions based on our current body of knowledge. Then we find new facts that may need a new explanation that expands our understanding. I still don't see were you are going with your line of reasoning.
You are correct, carbon dating has its limitations, which is why scientists use other more accurate forms to compliment it as shown here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
I'm not totally sure if you are trying to engage me in debate on the subject of flat earth/dinosaurs etc, or you're just making a general statement?
Cg
I'm not really sure how old the earth is because I was not there. I didn't observe the earth form. I believe the earth is round. I wonder, are Flat Earthers leftists?
I agree that we can't know exactly how old the earth is. However according to the current radiological dating it's 4.5 billion years old (give or take a few million due to unavoidable margins of error) and it's fairly well documented.
Out of curiosity, how old do you think the earth is?
What about the scientists that strongly disagree with what you said? Are those scientists very retarded and stupid?
The thing about science is that is not based on dogma. So everyone can disagree but at some point old theories that are less adequate to explain reality need to be discarded or understood in the context of more accurate representations of nature.
Take Newton's theory of gravity for example...it's very good at predicting the movement of planets but it can't explain some oddities in Mercury's rotation around the Sun, however General Relativity can be used to do this with extreme precision.
On the other hand General Relativity brakes down when trying to represent what happens at the singularity of a black hole so a new theory needs to be devised and tested (spolier, we are still not there yet).
Does the fact that Newton's theory of gravity fail to hold up under certain conditions made him stupid? No, it just proves he didn't have the whole picture as I am sure that we do not have the whole picture about alot of things.
Is there a difference between a theory and observational science of actually observing a chemistry experiment in live-time, in real-life, in-person, as it happens, in the flesh, not hypothetically, not theoretically, but simple observations LIVE, you know what I mean? How often do people contrast historical science with observational science?
Modern science has become so specialized and it requires so much time invested into it that ordinary people do not do it (and it would not be practical for the average Joe which is a unfortunate). Science and Engineering students on the other hand have to do it at least during their formation years (although not all institutions are at the same level).
The answer is yes, it is done, all the time, every year, around the world. In a more practical way every time that a plane takes off and lands is a testament that what we know about thermodinamics, friction, fluid dinamics, electricity, etc is accurate to an acceptable degree; every time that a transistor in your smart phone works proves that quantum tunneling is an accurate description of what happens at the subatomic level (to name a couple of examples). But the body of knowledge is so vast that no human being can test every theory out there and we have to defer to specialist even within the same fields.
A healthy dose of sckepticism about what we know is always good. Otherwise we would stagnate.
But there is a difference between what we know about our world and what we guess concerning things that happened long ago. For example, the Grand Canyon and Mount St. Helens.
I would say the two are constantly feeding into each other, so for instance, if I might come up with a theory that 10,000 years ago, when an ancient tribe performed a particular dance, it rained.
Then you come along and make lots of current observations about rainfall, after a while you report that you cannot find any modern incidences of a dance-rain connection.
What's more you report that you have discovered that precipitation has a lot to do with rain, and so therefore my theory breaks down. There might still be some people that agree with me, however your theory gains much more traction because it is backed up by observational evidence.
In the real world this happens all the time, so for instance Albert Einstein gave us the mathematics for discovering gravitational waves, however it took decades of observation and advances in technology before we could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
So we are constantly comparing historical science with current observational science.
Cg
Would you know how many times it rained in that ancient tribe without a scroll, a book, markings on the wall, or something that would say how many times it rained long ago? My question is all about trying to measure what we did not see ourselves, what we did not personally observed, seen.
I would like to see why those scientists disagree with the current consensus.
Your argument is that because it is popular, it is then automatically right and perfect?
No, scientific consensus is built based on the ability of the scientific community to replicate the conclusions of an experiment or observation. Sometimes the consensus is wrong and it has to be discarded in favor of a more accurate representation of reality. That is why I would like to see how are they drawing their conclusions. There are no sacred ideas or authority figures in science.
Can we replicate the Big Bang?
First of all let me say, really great debating @joeyarnoldvn and @onthewayout, thank you for enriching this post with your discourse!
You were not around before you were born, yet you can still accept things happening without you being there.
The dating methods scientists use are very accurate because they measure the incidents of particular chemicals which are extremely steady. If you'll indulge me a second I'll give an analogy.
Imagine a room that has a giant ball pit and in that pit is a solitary baby. This particular baby is very OCD and throws one ball out of the pit every 10 seconds without fail.
Then you come along, count all the balls outside of the pit and you can calculate with absolute accuracy how long the baby has been in there. This is rather like counting the amount of radioactive isotopes in a piece of rock.
At a guess, I would say that they range across the political spectrum.
Cg
Some scientists disagree with you. That is the thing that should be talked about. Don't ignore those scientists who disagree with you.
Of course, it's not science if some don't disagree, and nobody who disagrees is ignored.
Instead what we do is look at how they disagree, so for instance one scientist might say that a piece of rock is 4.5 billion years old, and he then presents reasons why, namely that he has measured radioactive isotopes in the rock that indicate its age.
Then we look at the method of dating, and conclude that indeed the decay of whatever isotope he is monitoring is stable, and we do that through observation.
Then another scientist comes and says I disagree, at that point we ask why?
If the scientist casts doubt on the original method, demonstrating via experiment that the method is flawed, yet can't come up with their own method, then we say, hmm, he appears to be onto something.
If however the new scientist comes along and says I disagree, yet doesn't provide any concrete reasons as to why he disagrees, then we say well, until you can articulate why, then we'll just carry on doing it our way.
That might seem like we're ignoring you, but we aren't, we are merely waiting for you to come up with some kind of evidence, because after all, we're scientists, and evidence is King.
Cg
They do disagree and they provide not only concrete reasons but also concrete evidence for the actual age for certain things through a variety of means. The fact you are not talking about it may mean that you do not know what I'm talking about which means you do not know the full story, the whole story, because you're not talking about it.
Radiometric dating
Radiometric dating, radioactive dating or radioisotope dating is a technique used to date materials such as rocks or carbon, in which trace radioactive impurities were selectively incorporated when they were formed. The method compares the abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope within the material to the abundance of its decay products, which form at a known constant rate of decay. The use of radiometric dating was first published in 1907 by Bertram Boltwood and is now the principal source of information about the absolute age of rocks and other geological features, including the age of fossilized life forms or the age of the Earth itself, and can also be used to date a wide range of natural and man-made materials.
Together with stratigraphic principles, radiometric dating methods are used in geochronology to establish the geologic time scale.
That's great @wikitextbot, but can you please start using paragraphs!
:-)
Cg