Myths and Misconceptions: Young Earth

The Earth is observed to be just over 4.5 billion years old, and yet ancient oral traditions of a young Earth are still believed by some, asserting an age of a few thousand at most.

While there doesn’t appear to be any consensus as to why this primitive belief has any relevance today, we’re fortunate enough to live in an era in which we no longer have to guess. So how exactly do scientists measure the age of things?

Scientists have to work like detectives, piecing together clues about the universe to reveal a picture of what happened, with no guarantee we’ll ever find anything conclusive. For centuries scientists puzzled over the distances of celestial bodies, the ages of the mountains and the longevity of the solar system. In the 20th century, with the rise of modern physics came an understanding of the behavior of light that allowed us to measure distances to both near and distant stars, giving us our first picture of the Milky Way.

Next we began to gaze further into surrounding galaxies and groups of galaxies, eventually imaging the still visible glow of the Big Bang, called the Cosmic Microwave Background, a topic for another time. But what about here on Earth? Armed with the knowledge of astronomical distances and timescales, being able to peer back through time 2.5 million years to see the Andromeda Galaxy and noting that our Sun is 4.6 billion years old left little room to reason that the Earth had formed recently.

The scientific method is constantly skeptical, and cosmological observations were challenged by independent disciplines including biology, geology and chemistry, all of which independently reached similar conclusions. Accurately ranging the age of the Earth is a monumental feat of modern science, and paints the story of a far more captivating, beautiful and mysterious universe than we could have imagined thousands of years ago, truly an amazing time to be alive.

How Science Figured Out the Age of Earth

Editor's note: The following is the introduction to a special e-publication called Determining the Age of the Earth (click the link to see a table of contents). Published earlier this year, the collection draws articles from the archives of Scientific American. In the collection, this introduction appears with the title, " Stumbling Toward an Understanding of Geologic Timescales."

To read more about the methods and history, check out Scientific American:

If you want to learn more about the young Earth hypothesis and other curious ideas born of the modern era, you can check out notorious proponents of pseudoscience Mr. Kent Hovind (a.k.a. "The Science Gent") and "Flat Earth Society". 

 “The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked up in the safe.” - Peter De Vries

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