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
It’s like having a wind up clock that was fully wound up at the start, but has now run down half way. If you watch how much time it takes per turn and how many turns the spring can take, you can figure out how long ago it was fully wound. Sure, that doesn’t mean you were there at the beginning, or that someone didn’t set it up in a way to fool you. But if the time matches up with other evidence that it was two days ago, you’ve put together a good argument that is likely to be true
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