Sorry I know people have asked similar questions before but I’m trying to find out how we know earth is ~4.5b years old and all the explanations are like “this is a vague explanation of what radiometric dating is and it says it’s about 4.5b years old”… which doesn’t really tell me anything about how we know it’s 4.5b. It’s not like we’ve existed for that long that we can have someone confirm that yeah, it’s billions of years old.
I’m not some religious person that doesn’t believe in science but I feel like it’s normal to carry a little bit of doubt in some of these things until you fully understand it, right?? I promise I’m happy to listen to any explanation as long as you remember that I do not study anything like this so any explanation that assumes I have knowledge in this subject matter is gonna mean nothing to me 🙁
In: Planetary Science
the principle is as follows – if I show you a tape measuret, being one meter. and I measure your step distance with it, and it corresponds to your step distance, you will no doubt agree with – “the distance of one of your steps is approximately 1 meter.”
now I ask you to walk 5 steps. I measure the distance, and show you that indeed it is approximately 5 meters (every step is slightly different, after all). again confirming – your step distance is approximately 1 meter, because 5 steps is 5 meters.
Now, I ask you to take 100 steps. What will the distance be? You should not need me to 100% accurately measure the distance to be able to tell you “it will be about 100 meters, with an error margin”.
Radiometric dating follows the same line of proof logic. We show through multiple small steps that the principle, the mechanism, is valid, and therefore we can use the principle to determine larger steps. only drawback being a larger amount of possible error.
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