Technically this could all be true even if the universe were created 4000 years ago. As somebody says in Robert Heinlein's novel Job: A Comedy of Justice, "Yes, the universe is billions of years old, but it was created 4000 years ago. It was created old." (approximate quote from memory)
I absolutely agree with science, but strictly speaking we can't know for sure the universe isn't the creation of some superbeing operating outside of it - or it could even be a simulation.
But the half life of polonium 210 is just 138 days. other is a few days. radium 226 is 1602 years. Why couldn't the earth have started with a lot of radium 226? Checkmate round earthers.
Yeah, this is broken because all lead did not have to come from polonium, that's how half-lives work.
It's still 100% bullshit in every way, someone just needs to have chatgpt4 sort out the current mass fraction to explain why, I'm way too lazy to argue against insanity.
When I was being raised as a young earth creationist, the earth was supposedly 12,000-20,000 years old. Then it was 10,000 years old. Then only 6,000. After I outgrew that nonsense, I joked that in a few decades YECs would say that their god created the earth in 1980, and anyone older than 40 are agents of the devil sent to test your faith.
Not to argue for creationism, but this argument sucks.
Lead can be produced by supernova, not just through decay of heavier elements. But even that's besides the point, since if you believe some entity created the universe, surely said entity could have created whatever ratio of lead to uranium they wanted. It's not a falsifiable claim, there's really no disproving it, unfortunately.
(Not so fun fact: the environmental impact of leaded gasoline was discovered by trying to estimate the age of the earth using the radio of lead to uranium in uranium deposits, but the pollution from leaded gasoline was throwing the measurements off.)
Pretty sure the point of creationism is that everything was put on the earth when it was created, including fossils etc. You can't argue this with logic. My favorite spin off of this is Last Thursdayism where the earth was created last Thursday (regardless of what day it's now) which basically uses the same argument.
I'm not even sure how you get to 4000 years old from biblical literalisim.
Edit: going strictly by the biblical account, Adam lived to 930 years, and Noah 950. IIRC, their lives did not overlap. Jesus lived 2000 years ago. A whole bunch of stuff happens in between Noah and Jesus. So even if you're working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?
I had a dude come up to me at the reference desk and tell me that the earth can’t be billions (he said trillions, lol) of years old because erosion from the Mississippi River would make it wider and deeper than it is. I pulled up some info including the idea that the Mississippi was something that came about more recently because of plate shifting, etc and he just said, "Nah."
Lead 204 is entirely primordial and the other isotopes found on earth would be found at roughly the same concentration were all of the lead on earth primordial. It's the excess ratios of the other isotopes of lead that can be attributed to radioactive decay. That is a substantial proportion of the lead on earth, but to say the "existence of lead" is proof of the age of the earth is entirely incorrect.
I mean, the existence of lead doesn't necessarily prove the age of the earth so much as that those elements have existed for that long.
HOWEVER -- you're basically guaranteed to find lead in uranium deposits found around the earth, and the ratio of lead/uranium is how we calculated the 4.6 billion years.
Uranium is formed in Neutron stars or Supernova, so at the very least - the uranium found on earth itself is 4.6 billion years old. Whether "Earth" was "Earth" back then, who knows. This could be pre-moon? Could be before the earth even cooled down to have a solid outer layer? So the estimate is bound to be off by a little...
Just not by 4.5 billion years.
I'm pretty sure just soap has been around for more than 4.5k years and that means civilization too. So even if you do some backflips in justification here, there's no way you get 4k.
There's evidence of human civilization and agriculture going back at least 10,000 years. You have to be extremely willfully ignorant to think the earth is only 4,000 years old. Hell the pyramid of Giza is older than that.
Yeah this doesn’t do squat to prove or disprove anything to these nutters.
I’ve done the same with a variety of other things and you will get told the same thing:
God put it here.
Thing is you cannot argue with the above statement because it falls into that sort of argument you used to have when you were a child when the other kid would say ‘Nyah! Last word!!’ or ‘I can’t hear you!!’
Young earth creationists make up new element called "creationite" from which all elements came from, thereby filling in the radioactive decay plot hole in their narrative.
This would mean that there was more uranium around millions and billions of years in the past so why isn't there any evidence of prehistoric nukes in the fossil record
This is false, the Flying Spaghetti Monster in his infinite noodly wisdom and power created the world yesterday and made the Earth appear billions of years old and the universe appear even older.