How can people date the age of the planet if they were not here at its conception?

Question

Can one absolutely say something is 1000 or a million years old if they were not here to see it come into existence. Persons say carbon dating... but these are GUESSES. And who can prove them WRONG? So how can scientists justify their guesses as being correct guesses or even close?

Carbon dating is a GUESS.

Answer 1

By measuring it.

<<Can one absolutely say something is 1000 or a million years old if they were not here to see it come into existence.>>

Can you absolutely say 1908 happened one hundred years ago?  You can, with a strong degree of confidence, despite you not having been here at the time.  A means of measurement exists.

<<Persons say carbon dating... but these are GUESSES.>>

Carbon dating doesn't actually apply to ages older than 50,000 years ago, and isn't about gussing despite your use of big letters.  It's about measuring.

<<And who can prove them WRONG?>>

The researchers attempt to prove themselves wrong every time they date the next sample.

Answer 2

Your additional details indicate that you aren't actually interested in an answer that doesn't agree with your prior narrow point of view.  However, lets try a few analogies.

If you see a mouldy sandwich on a bench what can you say about it?  Based on your point of view you can't say a d**n thing about it.  A scientist would see the sandwich and compare it with what they know about the rate of mold growth, then deduce what it must have been sitting there for a certain number of days.

Try another one, if there is a hole in a bucket and you know at some stage it was full of water, how long has it been sitting there so long as there is still some water left in it?  You would say you can't know since you didn't record the exact time the bucket was filled and watch it every second until it ran dry.  A scientist would say, based on what they know of the rate of water dripping that the bucket has been there for several hours and calculate that number of hours.

Final analogy, you have C14 and you know it decays at a certain rate with a certain half life.  You get a piece of once living material and observe that it has less C14 in it that is around today.  You notice that all the once living things also have the same observation, and that they all show different amounts of C14.  Some you already know from written records the approximate date they were made.  From your point of view you can't deduce a d**n thing about anything since you weren't there to see any of them being made.  A scientist sees this pattern and uses it to deduce the approximate age of the items put them in a time line to see if everything makes sense (i.e. no Cray computers dated back to 4000BC).

Extra credit.  You weren't here to see me type this message or make these points.  According to you I didn't write anything and therefore you aren't reading this right now.  According to me (a scientist) the very fact that it's here and the pattern created from other peoples' posts indicates that in fact we all exist and are typing messages on our computers all the time.

Answer 3

First these people are not guessing.  Guessing is just randomly picking an age where these poeple are able to find the approximate answer.  It may not be exactly the correct answer but it is within a few years!!  Guessing would be different.  These people are able to look at the layers of the earth and determine it by the particles.  If you would cut the earth like a cake you would be able to see different layers showing the earths age like a timeline.  You would be able to see when we went through an ice age or desert like stage by the texture of the particles (excuse my vocabulary)  You would be able to see if that area  was ever under water or if it was a mountainous area and so forth.  YOu can get a lot of information.  So from that they are able to calucate APPROXIMATELY how long this earth has been here.  The poeple who are doing this research are not just sitting there saying eenie meenie meynie mo and just randomly picking a year.  They try to determine it by the layers.  Did you ever go to earh science class??

Answer 4

The carbon in the earth. They have insterments they use. Some tims they can use the bible

Answer 5

on cutting a tree we can guess his age by circulations of rings

Answer 6

Well, 500 years ago, we were SURE the earth was flat.

120 years ago, to cure dementia and insanity we cut out the frontal lobe of the brain.

60 years ago, LSD was used as truth syrum.

40 years ago, homosexuality was a mental disorder.

Science is nothing but an organized system of ignorance. We have nothing but guesses for most things. That's how I'm sure there's God above.

Answer 7

Prove to me that you, me, or the world is real. You can't prove anything in this world.

Answer 8

You should ask this question in R&S where it belongs, because you seem to have no knowledge of science, and it seems you have no desire to learn science.

Answer 9

that might known by measuring mainland's movement and speed and guess that what was the first shape of that and...

Answer 10

Dendrochronology, stratigraphy, Banded Iron Formations (BIFS)...the list goes on. The fossil record, raindrop imprints, and yes, carbon-dating....

P.S. Sorry. I should have added this earlier (see below).

Answer 11

No, Carbon Dating is an ESTIMATE. No, it isn't exact at all, but it will definitely give you a good idea of how old something is.

Although carbon dating isn't even what was used to date the earth, so you obviously don't know even much about how it was estimated.

Edit: We do have knowledge of the past. By using radiometric age dating, we can determine through the number of molecules that have decayed about how old that object is. The oldest minerals found on earth have been dated at at least 4.404 billion years old. The oldest particles in rocks from our solar system are about 4.567 billion years old. These two estimated ages give us a range of how old the earth has to be.

ESTIMATE. Not a guess.

Answer 12

There is a difference between a "GUESS" and a scientific process based on theory.  Nice try though...really.  Have we not already explained this adequately?