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
We can use math to calculate precisely how long it takes radioactive isotopes to lose exactly half of their energy and we call that number their “half life”. Using this, we can excavate various examples of these naturally occurring isotopes and based on exactly how radioactive they remain we can say they have gone through a certain number of these half-life cycles since they were originally created through whatever various natural processes created them. We have a fairly reasonable assurance that our methods of measuring and calculating these values is accurate but it’s not 100% impossible that some new discovery will alter our perception of how this works and change our reasoning about how many years ago something happened.
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