Bring It On!

By Chris Radulich on May 15, 2008 | Reply

I thought it was a sin to lie?

Scientists can use different chemicals for absolute dating:

* The best-known absolute dating technique is carbon-14 dating, which archaeologists prefer to use. However, the half-life of carbon-14 is only 5730 years, so the method cannot be used for materials older than about 70,000 years.
* Radiometric dating involves the use of isotope series, such as rubidium/strontium, thorium/lead, potassium/argon, argon/argon, or uranium/lead, all of which have very long half-lives, ranging from 0.7 to 48.6 billion years. Subtle differences in the relative proportions of the two isotopes can give good dates for rocks of any age.

Scientists can check their accuracy by using different isotopes.

The first radiometric dates, generated about 1920, showed that the Earth was hundreds of millions, or billions, of years old. Since then, geologists have made many tens of thousands of radiometric age determinations, and they have refined the earlier estimates. A key point is that it is no longer necessary simply to accept one chemical determination of a rock’s age. Age estimates can be cross-tested by using different isotope pairs. Results from different techniques, often measured in rival labs, continually confirm each other.
There is only a 1% chance of error with current dating technology.

Every few years, new geologic time scales are published, providing the latest dates for major time lines. Older dates may change by a few million years up and down, but younger dates are stable. For example, it has been known since the 1960s that the famous Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, the line marking the end of the dinosaurs, was 65 million years old. Repeated recalibrations and retests, using ever more sophisticated techniques and equipment, cannot shift that date. It is accurate to within a few thousand years. With modern, extremely precise, methods, error bars are often only 1% or so.

By rube cretin on May 15, 2008 | Reply

chris,
Thanks for providing the excellent technical info. I had completely forgotten how that stuff works, and was about to buy into the misinformation provided in the video. A little ignorance can result in lots of confusion among us cretins who can just look at my family members and know there was something back there somewhere a little less than the modern accepted model. Are you telling me there is no hope if i don’t believe in the stuff found in this video and other info they present? That there is no one up there watching over me? When i die I will not go to heaven and live happily ever after? I will just return to the earth and maybe some of my atoms will be reassembled into some other life form? I can handle that. What a ride.