Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum Age of the Earth

http://creation.com/age-of-the-earth

Pointless Paul. What does your post mean? What help is it to see things your way; that we can know nothing? Your tagline indicates you have your own perspective, which you hint at again with your completely "Not-Quite-Science" link here (hint, hint, AR). What is your point? Of what use is your perspective?

Even if the Earth is “really” only some 6000 years old, it is constructed to appear as if it is billions of years old. Consistently, from many different perspectives and with many different techniques, the apparent age is billions of years old.

Do you think there is no purpose in this? Don’t you think we are meant to learn a story about how fragile, difficult, torturous, and cruel life could be, and how lucky we are now?

~

Samwik, you're a smart person. You must know that a religious fundamentalist will never accept as true any fact that contradicts their literal interpretation of the religious texts of their particular religion; and you must know that you are attempting rational argument against a seething wall of fabrication, denial/perversion of factual knowledge and willful ignorance. The degradation of science in the USA is the one factor that can, and I think probably will, lead to its demise as a dominant world culture.

Thanks rede, I'm hoping there is another path. Isn't that the moral imperative?

I know individuals can always find a bone to chew, or a bone that is wholly unacceptable; but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still try to collect all the bones.

It's more rewarding to find a perspective where the truth can be seen in both sides, rather than choose a side and nitpick about misunderstood perspectives.

Sam, your problem here is that you are trying to reason with Paul. People have been trying that for many years and nobody has ever managed to even make a dent in his attitude. I have gotten so that I don't bother replying to him, I just point out a few of his simple errors to other readers. That way I can at least feel that I have hopefully kept some of them from thinking he may actually be right.

In fact once in a while Paul does say something that seems to make sense. When that happens I think we should congratulate him.

Bill Gill

Sure Bill, I may seem fairly oblique; but I'm not blind, and occasionally enjoy a bit of longanimity. Plus, Paul's questions have led me more than once to either more thoroughly learn about some foundational paradigm, or to learn more about some new research or perspective. I've always been pleasantly surprised.

p.s. (BOT) Do you know how old that crater is on the moon--the one with the photographed Apollo footprint in it? Is there a thread here, where the depth of dust on the moon has been discussed already?

~Thanks

I don't recall such a discussion, but this might be of interest:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/books/lunar_stratigraphy/chapter_6.pdf

"The surface of the moon is blanketed by a thin layer of weakly-cohesive detrital materials which is generally referred to as 'soil' or 'regolith'"..."Oberbeck and Quaide (1968) found that they could recognize four types of soil thickness distributions, with median thickness values of 3.3, 4.6, 7.5, and 16 meters"..."As a result of the Apollo missions these thickness estimates were, in general, confirmed on the basis of both active and passive seismic experiments (Watkins and Kovach, 1973; Cooper et al., 1974; Nakamura et al., 1975). From these experiments it was concluded that the moon is covered with a layer of low-velocity material that ranges in thickness from between 3.7 and 12.2m at the Apollo landing sites."

"...between 3.7 and 12.2m at the Apollo landing sites."

I guess that lays to rest Paul's argument about lunar dust only being a couple inches thick. I wonder what he will say to that.

3/4 inch of dust build up on the moon in 4.527 billion years,LOL

meaning dust that was not originally a part of the moon.
the part of the soil that has accumulated in 4.5 billion years
that is not original moon material.

cosmic dust?
micro meteorites?
etc...

Paul, do you have link to that data?

Bill Gill

data?

I suppose you mean for the following



cosmic dust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_dust



micro meteorites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_meteor



I think I know what your thinking , that the moon soil and rock
samples taken on the apollo moon missions were not originally moon material , and unless the samples were taken down below
the dust that has accumulated then you are in fact correct.

which possibly makes the moon much younger according to
logical thinking.

the age of what accumulated is not the age of the moon
and what accumulated is older than the moon.

was that what you were thinking.

now did the astronauts dig down
3.3, 4.6, 7.5, or 16 meters
when they took samples?

I need to find that info , I can say that
if they didn't , then they merely scraped the surface layer
of what had accumulated in an unknown number of years.

the surveyor missions prior to the apollo missions did dig down
0.13 meters ( 13 cm )however.

Paul, What I was wondering is if you have a link to the amount of dust that has accumulated in the life of the Earth/Moon system, compared to the amount that was from some other source, which is what you seem to be implying.

Bill Gill

I don't believe we can calculate how much dust should have built up on the moon in the earth moon system until we determine how old the moon is.

some say 4.5 billion years , some say 3.7 some 3.1 billion
it may be much younger , it may be much older.

we need to go back to the moon and drill down 16 meters
and get samples at that or a feasible depth to be sure.

until then ( unless there already is data that shows a clear
difference in the layers before the accumulation of dust began)
then we really have no means of determining the moons age.

we most certainly cannot calculate the age of the moon
by using samples taken from a depth of only only 0.13 meters.



the depth of the layers would not tell us the age of the moon.

because we dont know how much dust was being accumulated at
any point in time , there's not much accumulation occurring now
but billions of years ago there most likely was more available
to accumulate each year.

its like a gradient , and we only know one side of the gradient.

...Well, you're right Paul, we can't calculate the age of the moon by seeing how much dust has built up. You seem to be the only one suggesting that method must logically mean the moon can't the so old.

Wouldn't scientists just get some rocks kicked up from some impact, and then test the age of those rocks? At the rim of impact craters, they could even get samples from different depths below the original surface.

Do you think thousands of scientist, working over decades, haven't already worked through the logic underlying your objections? Do you think you see more clearly and broadly than all of them collectively? For any individual to see as much as that, would be a great feat.

...they had a geologist helping them decide which rock samples to choose, didn't they?

Paul, I wonder if you think there is bedrock at the base of that footprint... or do you wonder why the moon lander didn't sink into the meters of "dust" they speak of at the landing sites.... Do you know about rheology? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheology
...and the effect of heating/cooling cycles as well as gravitational cycles on compressed aggregates....
===

And as always, I learned something new from your posts. Your citation: "In October 2011, scientists reported that cosmic dust contains complex organic matter ("amorphous organic solids with a mixed aromatic-aliphatic structure") that could be created naturally, and rapidly, by stars," confirmed my notion that "humus" or humic substances [HS] exist in space. Those same "organic solids with a mixed aromatic-aliphatic structure" are called "humus" when they are found in the soil. Those chemicals also form "naturally, and rapidly," in a "reducing" atmosphere, such as existed on early earth. Another name for HS would be the pre-biotic soup, or primordial soup.

When they simulate primordial conditions in the lab, to generate HS, some of the molecules, which naturally and rapidly form, are the same as molecules used, currently and broadly, by life. Carbonaceous chondrites contain larger fractions of this "dusty" material, than do other meteor types, which are more "ashy" (metals & chemical salts); but it's all either ashes or dust, in the beginning.

~

sam

do you think that a rock on the surface of the moon is a moon rock?

look at all of the impact craters on the moon , do you think
that the impacting rock would have vanished completely upon impact , would a slow moving rock have even made a crater , why do scientist even bother to get ice cores when they can simply pick up rocks laying around on top of the ice?

what good is an ice core anyway , can you think of any usefull
information that a 16 meter moon core could provide that would
greatly improve our knowledge about our closest planetoid the moon.

just suppose you were to go out into your backyard , how far down would you need to dig to reach the layer of earth that is 4.5 billion years old?

Anadarko Basin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anadarko_Basin



its much better to land a rover on the moon so that astronauts can take joy rides on the surface than to build a core driller
that could have easily provided much better data than how a car
would ride on the moon in low gravity , wouldnt you think , of course you would your defending their choices.

arent you?

...It's not so much "defending their choices," as finding their choices more reasonable, when compared with your narrowly focused criticisms. If anything, I'm trying to defend the scientific method, rather than their choices. Plus, I'd bet they very strongly wanted a core sample.

...how many core samples do you think they could have taken?
===

Your other points would make good sense, if all those geological processes, which you mentioned, also occurred on the moon; but the moon has had a much different history. Some geological processes shaped the surface during its cooling phase (first few hundred million years?), but since then the only changes are external inputs (meteors, dust, or other cosmic stuff). And they can easily tell the difference between the foreign stuff and the lunar material, right?

They can even identify moon rocks that have landed here on Earth after being ejected from the moon by an impact; and the same is true for Martian rocks from Mars. Most of Earth's original surface has been reprocessed geologically, but the moon's original surface hasn't been changed as much.

Without a complete, big-n-heavy, drilling rig, it would be hard to get a sample of something that would also be difficult to stabilize for collection... and which also must have been provisionally characterized enough to permit landing and driving upon.

Essentially the meteors had already done the drilling, and the rover allowed them to collect many different samples from the side of the "drilled" hole. That does assume geologists can try discriminating between the sides of a hole in the ground, and the fairly pulverized impactor.

Hopefully, geologists can tell the difference...
between their assumptions, and a hole in the ground.

~

sam



http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/samples/apollo/tools/













its not that they didnt take core samples , they only went down
3 meters deep according to the above.

so I see that the $38,000,000.00 moon land rover was capable of
transporting the $38.00 electric drill.
( I assume the cost based on the fact that you can buy a electric drill on earth for $2.00 in a yard sale )

here's the final report from nasa.

NASA Report, Apollo Lunar Surface Drill /ALSD/ Final report, Web Address when accessed: here.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690002958_1969002958.pdf

loads of info there , believe it or not...

even so , 3 meters is pretty deep , but if the three meters came from a impact site then its not worth much as far as determining the age of the moon.

you would need to find an area that has no impacts so that the
surface would not be jumbled up by all the tossing and turning of ejecta thrown from the various impacts that tend to overlap
each other.

which seems scientifically sound and logical to me.

of course I tend to have a tendency to focus my criticism rather narrowly. when I do focus my criticism , its just my way of logical thinking.

Well, then it's a good thing they had a rover, so they could get to an undisturbed area. I wonder if their core samples confirmed what they predicted about the surface and dust accumulation.

~

what would be your honest guess?

I'd expect they were right enough about the major predictions, such as general structure and extent, and surprised by some details of composition or chronology.

~

p.s.
It kinda sounds as if "your honest guess" would be that they faked data to match preconceived conclusions. That can't be right, eh?