Age of the Earth
Climates have been changing on the earth since the beginning of time. It has been said the early earth had less sunlight than we have today and the sun was only putting out about 70 percent of the sunlight it is today. It is said the earth was very hot however because some scientists believe it was in a collision which also created the moon, but eventually cooled down. The collision was said to be between two planets and what we have today is the result of that collision. It has been estimated it took ten million years for the earth to cool enough for life to begin. All this depends on the age of the earth being correct. The current most popular estimate is the earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
There are some who believe this estimate is wrong and the earth is far older than we suspect. If they are correct this would probably mean the sun and planets are also much older. Believe it or not, there are not only some scientists who think the earth is older, but a few which think it is younger. There are scientists who think the earth is only about 6,000 years old. Another group think the earth is only 20,000 years old. I do not understand this, especially when we have dated archaeological finds at much older than that. We seem to be able to trace some civilizations back much further than that, but I always try to keep an open mind even though I may not agree.
I believe there is much more of a chance the age of the earth is far older than younger. We have found remains of objects which were covered in stone which took hundreds of millions of years to form and had manufactured objects inside them. When this happens, the objects usually disappear. Over the years my opinion of the age of the earth has changed and I believe we are underestimating the age and also believe there could have been many races here before us and maybe not all were even human.
Not all scientists who believe the earth is older than the 4.5 million years believe it is a lot older. Some think it is about 3 million years older which is a cosmological drop in the bucket, but some think it could even be as much as 20 billion years old. Maybe someday we will be able to get into the earth deep enough to access the deepest rocks and we might get a better picture of the age. The earth being dynamic prevents the surface in most places from yielding this info, and even in places that have the oldest rocks, only have rocks that date back about 3 billion years.
Scientists who believe in the 4.5 billion year age of the earth claim life first appeared on the earth about 3.8 billion years ago. The also believe bacteria began to produce oxygen about one billion years later. It has been said scientists found a gold mine in the material being shot out of volcanoes and actually found some material which is 4.5 billion years old. They even went so far as to say the material could be 4.6 billion years old. I would love to know how they came to this conclusion. The material was found within volcanic rock on Baffin Island, in Canada. This means the material would have had to survive the dynamic motion of the planet for all that time. Scientists chalk this up to the fact they believe deep inside the earth the dynamic action is a lot less. Maybe they should also consider the fact they could be wrong or the fact just because the material might be that old, it may not represent the true age of the earth. One thing we do not know is could the earth have been struck by this so called planet after it was billions of years old and reduced back to a molten state and could that be what we are measuring from?
When we are dealing with dates so far back in the past, it is possible to make many mistakes. How many times were scientists sure something was true only to be proven wrong years later? I think one surer way of determining the true age of the earth will be by checking the age of the planets. If it turns out any are much older than the earth, we might figure something is wrong with our age calculations. Another way to be sure is to check the age of the moon. We may be able to get to the deepest part of the moon and measure the age of the material. Since at least some scientists think the earth and moon were created at the same time, the date would be interesting to know.
The creation idea of the earth is in flux right now, since many scientists also believe it formed without a collision. The idea is as the dust and debris from the sun coalesced, it built up on the earth in layers forming the planet. No one theory of the formation of the earth seems to be entirely correct. We may find out in the future all the theories are incorrect and the earth was formed in a way we just can’t imagine today.
We are suffering from lack of information. For all we know the earth could have been spit out of a black hole, or for that matter, the entire solar system, or galaxy could have been. Until we learn how everything works in the universe, we are limited in our theories of creation. We do see some stars which seem to be creating planets out of dust clouds, and I am sure with the Webb telescope we will see a lot more, but does this mean this is the only way planets are created? I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion yet. Perhaps there are unknown forces in the universe which attract far stronger than gravity and are yet to be discovered?
We are at the stage of our technology where we are learning a lot about space, but until we get out there in long range missions and perhaps even to other galaxies, there could be information we are missing. Incomplete information leads to faulty theories. It could even turn out space is a far more mysterious place than we give it credit for and our current physics just doesn’t work that well outside our solar system or galaxy. I guess none of us alive today will be around to find that out