Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHow do we know the age of the earth?
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Hey, Daniel, do you keep a family photo album?
You know we used to, but these days it's all digital. I think Mark Zuckerberg owns all of our family photos.
Hey it on is your family period?
Probably that too.
And how do you feel when you look back and see pictures of yourself when you were younger?
Trying to ignore all those signs of aging? You know, pretend that I look the same ten or twenty years ago as I do today.
I see myself as a fine wine, because you have turned. I just to get more expensive the older I get. For some reason. Well, you know, I've known you for over ten years or so, and I can say with confidence for those people listening, that you are, sir No Paul Rudd.
Unfortunately that's true in many ways.
Unfortunately, but it is kind of interesting how little clues can show you how old someone is, or how old something is. Right.
It's true, you know, a few wrinkles here and a few gray hairs there, and all of a sudden, you look like you're in your midlife crisis.
What's that look like a look of panic?
It's a look of gravitas. I always remember how dan Quayle died his temples gray in order to not look so much like a little.
Boy dan quail Man. That's a reference that totally tells everyone how old you are.
Nobody's fascinating how almost everything around us ages right. Everything from people around you, to the rocks around you, to the buildings around you always show their signs of age. Nothing in this world is permanent.
Hi, I am Poorhan. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm young and spry, and I have not written any web comics, but I'm the co author of the book We have no idea all about the unknown questions in the universe.
And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we take weird and amazing and young and old stuff in the universe and try to explain it to you, and not just telling you the answers, but sometimes digging in deeply and explaining how we know so that you can explain it to skeptical folks around you.
Yeah, we try to get you to think about the world around you and even the world you're standing on right now or sitting on or lying down on.
And one of the depending on how old you are, but one of the goals of this podcast is for you to have sort of a new perspective on the world around you. We want you to see everything around you as sort of a clue, something that can tell you how the world works, that can reveal secrets, that can answer questions. Because almost every question we have about the universe, the answers are all around us, and it just takes sort of a trained mind and a careful eye to see those clues everywhere.
And so there are clues all around you about where we come from and how long we've been here. And how long everything has been here? Right?
Yeah, exactly. And sometimes the answers are easy and obvious, and sometimes the answers are mind bogglingly surprising.
And so today on the podcast we'll be tackling, quite possibly the oldest question on earth. Would you say that's true? Daniel?
Is that who stole my dessert?
I think the answer is obvious, obviously it's your your children.
Well, you know, that's actually a question my kids asked me today. When was dessert invented?
Oh, sounds like a topic for a.
Podcast, you know, if that falls into a physics question, But it's sort of a fascinating question, and they were actually hypothesizing that dessert might be older than people, that maybe, like our pre human ancestors, enjoyed a sweet, sweet treat after dinner.
What do you think the little bacteria that that walled in the ocean or like, you know, I could use a little timi suit after consuming other other bacteria.
I don't know if we have enough in common with bacteria to say what they might like, but I can imagine some pre human homadid, you know, eating some berries and going, hm, that goes nicely with my antelope or whatever. They had for dinner.
Well anyway, So so really, uh, what I mean by it the oldest question on Earth is that it's probably really the oldest question that could be on Earth, Right.
Yeah, I think that's probably true. And it's an important question, right. It's the kind of question that we'd like to dig into because it's the kind of question where the answer could change the way we think about life and the universe and the humanity's rolled in it. Right. It has all sorts of things to do with creation and the context of our lives and therefore how we should live our lives and whether they have meaning.
And so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question how old is the earth? And is it even polite to ask?
That's? Right? And what does the earth do when it gets upset?
Right?
When he gets offended? And not just how old?
I had any work done? Has Earth had any work done? Is it trying to?
I think the Earth looks great? Doesn't look a day past four billion?
Full of bulltok? They'll probably rank me sure.
And just as important as the question how old is the Earth and the answer, which is you know, just a number, is how do we know? How do we have confidence in this answer, because you know, there are people out there who hold beliefs about the various age of the Earth. And one of our listeners actually wrote in and said, hey, could you tell me how we know the age of the Earth, so that when I discuss it with my friends who have strong opinions about the age of the Earth, I can tell them not just what scientists think, but how they know it.
Yeah, And that's the thing I think we always try to do in this podcast, right, is try to get at how people know these things, not just tell people what scientists know, but how they know it.
That's right, And that also helps you understand with what confidence we know it, Like is this just sort of an educated guess back of the envelope calculation or is this something that people have been working on for hundreds of years and we have great confidence and have it nailed down to zero point oh one percent. And it's important because different things in science are known well, and some things in science are are known no, not very well, So it's important to know how we know.
Yeah, And so how old is the Earth is the question for today, and it's kind of I think it's a question most people know a little bit about right. I mean, I think everyone knows or has a sense that the Earth is very old.
Yeah, but you know, that sense that the Earth is like extremely old, like many orders of magnitude older than you or me or your parents, you know, is a fairly modern idea. I think thousands of years ago, people thought the Earth was only hundreds or thousands of years old. They thought it might have been created fairly recently. And it was only sort of in the eighteen hundreds that people started to understand that there were processes around us that we could see, specifically rocks and evolutions or geology and biology started to give hints that the answer was much much bigger than anything anybody had imagined. And I think that's wonderful. I'd love to live in a scientific era like that, where you're where something you thought you knew is upended and replaced with a completely different answer. That's like, or is a magnitude bigger?
Wow? Is that really true? Like it only in the last couple of hundred years do we have a sense of how old the Earth really is. Before it was totally up in the air.
Yeah, it was up in the air until about the eighteen hundreds, and then people started trying to do calculations and they're like, well, how long would it take to form a planet? You know, say you gathered it together with gravity, or you know, how long would it take to lay down layers of rock? You know, how long would it take glaciers to move this kind of stuff? And you know, geology is a fairly young field and that you know, it's a couple hundred years old. And so people started to look around and as soon as they started to explore these geological processes, they realized, wow, this stuff takes a long time. And you know, it's sort of like walking into a room and seeing somebody has written a book that's like five million pages long, and you're like, wow, you've been in this room a long time. You know, it shocks you into realizing that things, things are a much different scale than you imagined. And that's this. We've seen the story the earth all around us. We realize it's staggeringly long, much longer than we imagined, and that, yeah, that's a fairly new idea.
Yeah, that's a lot of party you've missed exactly we should things have been around for a long time.
Do you have a fear of missing out. There is that fomo about what happened.
To all the good desserts, fear of being in parties? Actually, to be honest.
What about all the desserts? They usually have good desserts of parties.
Old desserts or I just like I just like a fine dessert.
Wine.
So you show you show up at the beginning of a party, how the desserts, drink the wine, and then go home. That's how you know you're old or.
It sounds like a good party to me.
That is how you age old. Trick exactly. That's very age appropriate. The beginning of this field, like becoming scientific, before that was just speculation. But the beginning of the field becoming scientific was in the eighteen hundreds. But still that's very inaccurate. Like looking at rocks gives you clues about the sort of order of magnitude. But then people wanted to know very precisely, and that took some time to like basically to find clocks inside the earth, clocks that have been ticking since it was born. And that's in the end signs of aging, Yeah, signs of aging, very precise signs of aging that could tell us how old the Earth was.
So you're saying, like, you know, the people who started the United States, like the Founding father fathers, like the Founding Fathers, they had no idea how old we've been around, Like did they think we've been around for a few thousand years or few? But didn't they know about the you know, like ancient Egypt and things like that.
Yeah, but you know, that's thousands of years And so I think they had the idea that the Earth was, you know, thousands, many thousands of years old, right, because that's as long as written history is, and so they imagine it's on that time scale because that's the oldest thing, you know, And that's basically the game is like find the oldest thing you know and then assume that that's basically the age of the world, right, And that's frankly what we're still doing, except that we think that we found stuff that comes from the very beginning of the world. But you know, they knew about stuff that was thousands of years old, so they had no reason to believe that the Earth might be millions or even god forbid, billions of years old, right. Plus I think those guys were pretty religious.
All right, So it is an age old question and one that a lot of people have had answers to and seem to have answers to. But we were wondering what people out there right now in the world think about this question.
Yeah, and this is one. This is a set of interviews. I was very curious to see what people thought. I was wondering if I would run into some sort of young Earth folks who thought the earth was from biblical ages, and even those people who were scientific. I was wondering, like, how precisely do people know the age of the Earth. So this I was very fascinated to hear the answers.
Like is it a million years, a bazillion years.
Twenty seven point two bajillion?
And so, as usual, Dane went out and asked people on this street how old they thought the Earth was. So think about it for a second. If you ran into a physicist in the street on today, how would you answer this question and no googling. Well, here's what people had to say.
I have no idea. Probably a billion years.
I don't exactly, but my understanding is it's a couple hundred million years old.
Okay, you know how we know?
So I don't actually like my physics knowledge is pretty limited. I think, like we've used carbon dating to date things within various geological epochs, but I don't actually know how we arrived at the calculation of the Earth's age A.
Million year millionaires, okay, maybe three billion.
Years old, five billion, tens of million of years billions, yeah, cool, four billion airs?
All right? And how do we know rock formation?
It's probably like millions of years old. I feel like, all right, a lot of millions and billions, right.
Yeah, exactly, not not a whole lot of really specific answers. I have to say I was a little bit disappointed. I guess I thought people were more interested in this, Like I remember wanting to know this number as precisely as possible when I was a kid. I was really curious about this, and so I was a little surprised that people were just sort of knew it was super old and were satisfied and didn't really care about the details. Although I'll say every single person here after I asked them the question, then they did turn around and ask me. They're like, well, how old is the Earth? So they wanted to know. I guess they just hadn't really spend any time looking it up.
All right, Well, let's get started on this topic, Daniel. And so, first of all, I think I feel like we should define what we mean by the Earth by the age of the Earth, right, Like do you mean like the planet, like the ball that it's Earth, or the rocks in the Earth, or the atoms that are that make up the Earth. What do you mean, like, what's the age of the Earth?
Yeah, it turns out that that's a bit of a fuzzy question, right, because the Earth has a sort of continuous history. It's not like somebody snapped their fingers and boomed, there was the Earth and you can start.
From the clock from then, right that you know of, right.
That we know of, that's right, Yeah, unless, of course it was a simulation, which case the answer is easy. But in the case that it was in the simulation, we have an idea about how the Earth was formed, and there's just a lot of stages there, and so you have to sort of make an arbitrary definition. And it's like a lot of things in science, you know, there's not necessarily a clear answer, So you just define it to be something arbitrary and then at least we can agree on it. But maybe we should recap sort of the brief history of the of the Earth and how it.
Was formed, yeah, like how it came to be. Yeah, and then at some point we're going to say this is when the Earth started, This is when the Earth was born.
That's right. This is when the party began, right, because you know, you invite people to a party nine o'clock and then they don't show up till ten, and by then you've eaten all the brownies.
And parties only really get started at one am.
That's right, unless you're in Spain, in which case it's four am. But you know, the very early history is that we basically started with a huge nebula of gas and dust. And this is stuff that's left over from the explosions of other stars and just gas from the Big Bang. And then of course gravity did its thing and it pulls all that stuff together and you get a sun, right, So most of the stuff went to the Sun, and then you get a disc of stuff that's rotating around the Sun. It's like rings around the Sun. And then the gravity pulls the stuff in that disk together to turning to turn that disk into planets. Right, And so we think that the Solar system started about four and a half billion years ago, and it took like a few million or one hundred million years to pull all that stuff and the disk together into sort of proto planets. Right, So you have this sort of loose collection of stuff that gravity's pulled together, and then gravity really gets to work and it starts squeezing it and it collects all this stuff, and the planet heats up and sort of melts the metal and you get the iron dropping to the core and the crust forming, And so you can sort of ask like, at what moment do you count the Earth forming? Is it like when you had the first big cluster of rocks, or maybe when it got gravitationally heated enough to sort of melt the metals and form the core. It's not really very clear.
Well, I always found this really fascinating, because we talked about this the other day, that something like the rings around Saturn are only temporary, right, Like at some point those rings might turn into little blobs.
That's right. Gravity is very weak, but very very patient, and so it just keeps working and you give it enough time, it will gather things together. And so the stuff that's orbiting Saturn eventually gravity will pull it together in two moons.
Even the asteroid belt, is that at some point going to turn into more planets for our Solar system?
Yeah, eventually gravity. I mean it's very slow and those things are mostly stable orbits, but eventually that stuff will get pulled together. I mean also there's disruption, right if you just left the Solar system all by itself, then yes, eventually it'll just gather together into a smaller and smaller number of objects. But this disruption from stuff that comes outside, you know, and comets, things from the ort cloud, even things like supernovas from other Solar systems can disrupt things happening in our Solar system. So but yes, eventually gravity will pull all this stuff together. It's really incredible over these time scales what gravity can do, and that's one of my favorite things. It's just realizing that these processes are really slow, so things must have been around for a super long time to make it happen, right.
Right, Well, I guess I would maybe count the birth of the Earth is when it was form, you know, when all those asteroids and rocks out there clump together into a ball about the size of the ball that we have now, Like you know, when it kind of snapped into shape. I would maybe count that as the age of when the Earth started.
Yeah, yeah, and that's totally reasonable. That's totally reasonable. I think one common definition is that you measure the age of the Earth is sort of the age of the oldest rock in the Earth. And then you can ask the question, well, what does it mean for a rock to be old? Like, you know, a rock is just a gravitational and pulled together clump of dust. But rocks are are formed right there, they melt and then they're cooled, and so the age of a rock is usually like the last time it was melted, right, So it's the time since it was last melted, and so.
A lot of people just like the time that it cooled off, the last.
Time it really chilled out. And so you can imagine like all these rocks came together, as you said, and formed the Earth and got squeezed together and probably melted and then cooled, right the crust at least cooled, and so you can ask, like, maybe that last moment the last moment of cooling of the crust. So the age of the oldest cooled rock on the Earth could be a definition of the age of the Earth, because otherwise, how do you know when these rocks came together?
Right?
Otherwise I don't know unless you have, like you know, CCTV of the formation of the Solar System. It's pretty hard to pin that down.
Or you could say, is it well, but you just gave me a number. You said that it was maybe it took around one hundred million years to form that the ball of the Earth.
Yeah, that's I said. I said between a few and one hundred million years, right, So that's a pretty big uncertainty. We don't really know how long it took and what moment do you define, like do you need one more rock? Because you know, custic stuff kept getting added to the Earth. And so some people say, well, the age of the Earth is sort of just let's just call it the age of the Solar System because that's pretty close to the age of the Earth. Or you could say it's the age of the oldest rock on the Earth. So I think both of those are sort of acceptable, and anyway, that's really all we can probe. In the end. What we do is we measure the age of the oldest rock we can find on the Earth, and we say that's pretty close to the age of the Earth.
So the time that it formed into a ball is kind of in between those two numbers, right, yeah, exactly, it's between when the solar system formed and when the ball that it's the Earth started getting.
Crusty, exactly exactly when it started getting crusty and grumpy and eating desserted parties and going home.
Like a teenager. So somewhere between conception and teenage years, that's when you're born.
That's right. And you know, we have the same question about people, right, I wonder about that sometimes, you know, how do you count somebody's age if they're If somebody is born premature, they're older. You know, even then somebody who was born it was conceived at the same moment but then born at full term. So even the age of people is sort of hard to define sometimes.
All right, well, we've determined, we've determined what we mean by the age of the Earth, and so now let's get into how we know how old Earth is and what that means. But first let's take a quick break.
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Okay, so we're defining the age of the Earth is how old the oldest rock was formed that we know about right on Earth.
That's right exactly.
Let's say, so when the Earth was like a ball of lava, that doesn't count, but once it started solidifying, then we're saying that's when the Earth was born.
Yeah, exactly, because we're imagining that. Yeah, we're imagining that the formation of the Earth probably melted a lot of the rocks because it was this early lava period as you as you mentioned, and so as it's cooled down and formed the crust, then it made rocks. And it turns out we can figure out how old a rock is, and so that's really our best handle in figuring out how old the Earth is. And in the end, it's a lower bound, right we say, well, here's an old, super old rock on the Earth, so the earth must be at least that old.
Because like we've talked about it, like you mentioned like trying to figure out how old the earth is. The only thing we can do is sort of look around and see how old the things in it are, right, and like, what's the oldest thing in it? We know it has to be at least that old.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's about all we can do. And you know what you can do otherwise to sort of form a theory. You say, I have a concept for how this might have worked, and then you can fit data to it and say, well, I expect, you know, to see these sort of rocks in that case, and you can use that a theory to sort of extrapolate a little bit past the data you observe. But that's very but that's speculative, right, It's based on your concept for how things happen. So the hardest number, the one that you know best, is the oldest thing that you can find. And the oldest thing we find our rocks. And so what we do is we try to turn one question into another question. The question we can answer is what's the age of the oldest rock on the Earth.
Wouldn't that tell us like if we found a really old rock, what if that rock came from before the Earth was formed? Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, Yeah, there are some of those actually, like meteorites, Right, meteorites tell us the age of the Solar system, because we think meteorites were formed in the beginning of the Solar system. Right, the first stage is gathered together gas and dust into rocks, right, And so those rocks from space tell us the age of the Solar System. But we can tell which rocks came from space and which rocks are from Earth, and so we can distinguish those two.
How can we tell?
Oh, they're clearly labeled, you know, they have they have they ever turn address? Right that says somewhere near Neptune. It's it's actually quite interesting. The sort of the distribution of metals in these rocks is very different for meteorites than it is for rocks on the Earth.
Oh I see, Yeah, it's like a different group of rocks.
Yeah, It's like they have more nickel in them where they have this other rare stuff. And that's a whole they're fascinating field. And also so these rocks are different from Earth, and they tell us like what else is out there in the Solar System and what was out there when the Solar System was formed. They're like little time capsules from the very beginning of the Solar System, and they actually tell us another interesting story. Right, So those rocks, we can tell how old they are, and they tell us how old the Solar System is. So we can answer two questions. We can find a bunch of rocks. We can say, oh, these came from somewhere in the Solar System. They're x y z old. These rocks are here on Earth. They're only you know, ABC old.
All right. So then so it all comes down to the question of how do you tell how old the rock is?
Yeah, right, exactly exactly, or a meteorite, which is the same, which is the same because a meteorite is just basically a rock from space that landed on Earth. And the way we do it is something called radiometric dating, which is not the same as carbon dating, right, but it works.
Which is not the same as online dating either.
It turns out to be actually kind of similar.
There's a lot of swiping, there's a lot of lying about your age, as well.
So carbon dating and radiometric dating have similar principles, and we should have a whole podcast episode about how carbon dating works. Carbon dating relates to organic stuff like living beings. Radiometric dating relates to how old rocks are.
Okay, so you find a rock and you're you're staring at it, and you're like, I wonder when this rock became a rock? Yeah, exactly when this turned from lava to this heavy thing that I'm holding, And so we can actually tell yeah, right, we can look at the stuff in it and tell how old when it was formed? How many millions of years ago?
Its cool exactly. And I have so much respect for scientists who developed these techniques. You know, they look at a rock and they say, I want to know how old this rock is? How could I tell? Can I find something inside the rock that I can use as a clock, something which changes reliably and steadily every year, so that I can like count it and project back and figure out when that clock started or something. And this is hard to do.
You know.
You have to find something which is steady and rely and can be calibrated. It's not trivial, right, You can't just say oh, I'm just going a measure X Y z property. You have to invent these techniques and it takes time and sweat and tears, and so I have so much respect for folks who did this. And and in the case of rocks, it turns out to be very dependent on the special kind of mineral called zircon.
Zircon like the fake diamond.
Like, Yeah, it's related exactly. Zirconium and zircon is a special kind of mineral. And it's special because it has two properties. One, it likes it's a crystal, and it likes to absorb uranium into it. Right, it gobbles up uranium. So when the rock forms, if it has some zircon in it, then it will grab any uranium that's around it. And the second important.
Property, But wait, what is zircon made out of? Is it?
What?
Is it like a made out of iron? Or what is carbon? What is this mineral made out I think it's.
Made out of leftover desserts. No, it's it's a mineral. It's made out of zirconium and silicon and oxygen.
Oh, so zirconium is like an element like carbon or iron.
Yes, zirconium is an element and it's sort of like a silver metal. It's atomic number forty. You know, doesn't really play a lot of roles and stuff other than like cubic zirconium. It's not like a famous metal like some of its friends and neighbors. But it plays an important role in aging rocks.
So this element is all around us in all the rocks, and it forms a special crystal. You're saying that when it forms it likes to capture uranium.
That's right. It captures uranium and it rejects lead. So the moment that the rock is created, it creates a special thing, which is zircon with just uranium in it. And you might wonder, like, well, how is that helpful? Right? Well, uranium, as you might know, is radioactive. It doesn't just sit around and stay uranium forever. It very reliably decays and it decays into lead.
But wait, why does or cercon like uranium in white, doesn't it? You mean, like when it forms the crystals, it forms a little structure and it just it just likes uranium, like uranium likes being inside of zircon crystal.
I mean, I don't want to get in the mind of uranium or the mind of zircon. I mean they did some carbon dating online and they decided they were a good match. But no, no, some chemical, some business with the chemical bonds. You know, the way the crystal structure of zircon forms fits very nicely with uranium and doesn't fit very nicely with lead, right, I see.
Yeah, So like a rock, I have a bunch of lava and it cools and it slowly turns into rock. And in that process is when you're saying this crystal form.
Yeah, and zircon is not. It doesn't have to be all over the rock. It's not like a whole rock full of zircon. It's just these little chips of zircon. And what they do is they repel all the lead inside them and they grab some uranium. And your uranium is like a clock. It decays very reliably. So every million years or so, some uranium turns into lead. And so after one million years, some fraction of the uranium and then zircon has turned into lead. After two million years, another fraction is turned into lead. After a billion years, a very predictable fraction is turned into lead. So what you do is you take a rock, you look at that you find some zircon crystals and you ask how much of the uranium has turned into lead, and that tells you how much time it's had to turn into lead.
It's kind of like a like an aging process, right, like wine. Yes, if you leave wine there, it's going to change. It's characteristic exactly, It's going to change into something else.
Exactly, and you need That's why it works so well as a clock, because uranium is something that we know reliably. We understand it, we know how it decays, we know how long it takes. We know you know, after one hundred thousand years what fraction of uranium atoms will turn into lead. And the other key thing, of course is that it starts with a blank slate. That when you form these zircon crystals, it rejects lead. Right, So you start out like with an empty bucket, and then slowly the uranium bucket fills the lead bucket, and so you can just measure the uranium lead fraction and that tells you how long the uranium has been turning into lead. It's really amazing. It's really just chance that this happens and that somebody figured this out.
So like if you find a rock and you find the little little zircon chip inside of it, and it's like, let's say it's full of uranium, then you know it's a pretty new rock exactly. But if it's full of lead, then you know it's really old rock exactly.
It's exactly right. So rockstart start out pure uranium, no lead, and then as they age, the uranium turns into lead. And so a rock with almost no uranium is going to be like super duper old, right, and new lead can't just come in from the outside because now it's crystallized, right, it's hard for lead to get in any other way. All The only way you can get lead inside the zircon is for uranium to turn into lead.
So the rock sort of you might say, like it spoils or it ages by looking at that. Yeah, it turns into leads.
Right exactly. And whether it spoils or ages beautifully depends on you know, your preference for how rock's taste.
I suppose whether U swype bright or left for rocks.
Right. But you know, it took a long time to figure this out. People tried all sorts of other strategies first before they discovered this one. And there's lots of scientific careers and phdpcs that were frustrated in people trying to figure out a way to do radiometric dating before people stumbled onto this one.
Wow, and this is not one of these things that you have to calibrate, right because I imagine you have probably very scientific information about the decay of uranium, right, like it's very physics space like, you don't have to calibrate it to anything else, do you.
You're right, And we can basically use simple physics arguments to argue how long uranium takes to decay into lead, and so it gives us pretty clear descriptions, but you know, we also want to get confidence in it, and so people do that have various other sort of radiometric methods, not just uranium to lead, but other stuff, things that decay faster, things that decay slower, and so you can use those to sort of cross calibrate. But uranium to lead is sort of the cleanest one. But you know, like everywhere in science, you want to check everything three different ways and then make sure you get consistent answers.
All right, that's pretty cool. That's how we can tell how old the rock is. Then rock can't lie. It can't lie about its age.
That's right, that's right. You can lie, but we'll know you are.
All right, Let's get into the as right now, Daniel, how old Earth is and how old the solar system is. But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, Daniel, let's let's break it down for people. How old is the Earth, or at least the oldest rocks on Earth?
Yeah, the oldest rocks on Earth come from Australia. And I don't know why, but that's not surprising to me. It seems like Australia is the land of extremes, and so you'd expect the craziest, weirdest, oldest rock to be in Australia.
And they have the biggest spiders, the biggest crocodiles, and the oldest.
Rocks, the deadliest everything.
The biggest best stars, it seems, and the best podcast listening fans.
Right.
No, we got a lot of good email questions from Australia. But the oldest rock on Earth come from the jack Hills of Australia and it's four point zero four billion years old.
So these are rocks that we do we have to dig up for them, dig for them or are they were they pretty close to the surface or.
Yeah, it's it's fascinating. Actually these rocks just sort of sit on outcrops and people recently discovered that they have that the oldest rocks are there, and you know it's the Earth itself of course, has had lots of geologic activity and so some of these really old rocks get buried and then there's geological activity that brings them up to the surface, and so it just happens to be at this spot on the Earth, these really old rocks got pushed up and so they're not that far underground. They're on this outcropping of rocks in Western Australia.
But you almost kind of expect them to be close to the surface, right because that's you know, I would imagine that if we were once a ball of lava, then the stuff sort of cools from the outside inwards.
That's true, but you know, then there's all these sedimentary processes right where old things get buried. But then there's tectonic activity and all sorts of other crazy stuff that brings stuff up and mixes everything around. So there's a lot of stuff going on there. I think it's not that simple. But in the end, the oldest thing we found on Earth is almost four and a half billion years old. It's four billion, four hundred and four million years old. And you know, that's a staggering answer. It's hard to really comprehend what that means.
For billion years old, that's a lot.
It's a lot of dessert parties. Yeah, I mean, if.
Their history was a lot of party missed.
Yeah, I think. I think what you said earlier about how we came to the party pretty late. It's sort of shocking. You know, the first people to like learn these numbers, to know that the Earth was billions of years old. It must have made humans feel sort of small and recent and and you know, maybe transient, right, Like the Earth has had a long history and we are only the very last little bit of it.
Yeah, I mean it's a difference between I mean human history is maybe what like ten twenty thousand years.
Old, yeah, one hundred thousand. If you're really generous.
Yeah, but the Earth has been around for four point four.
Billion years old exactly. It's not too impressed. It's been there, It's seen a lot of stuff. You know, it'll be here when we're done. You know, people always talk about how humans going to destroy the Earth, and I don't think that's likely. I think the humans might destroy ourselves or life on Earth, but the Earth will be here when we're done.
Unless I hear some physicists are trying to make black holes down at the Large Patron Collider.
Yeah, but we just want to understand the universe. Man, We're not threatening the world. There's no danger there. Trust me. And can I have ten more billion dollars to build a bigger.
One one year for every one dollar for every year that the Earth has been away?
Yeah, that's right, that sounds good. But you know, that's the oldest rock on Earth that we think is part of the Earth. It was part of the formation of the Earth. But of course we have found rocks on Earth that are meteorites, right, that came from space, that are older than the Earth itself.
So late comers to the party.
That's right, they heard there was something cool happening down here. In the third rock from the Sun and they've fell on in to figure it out. And those rocks are four point five six billion years old, So that's like one hundred and fifty million years older than the oldest rocks on Earth.
That's the oldest meteorite that we found. And I think that you were saying that that kind of tells what the oldest meteorite right at all is in our solar system, right.
Yeah, using the same logic, this is the oldest thing we found. Yeah, so it's probably the sort of the age of the solar system. Right, that's when we think the gas and the dust got accumulated together to form the Sun and the planets and all that stuff. But the first stage of that was to form smaller rocks, and so we think these things are remnants of those times.
Right, But wait, didn't the sun? Hasn't the Sun? Our Sun already been through a couple of cycles, like as in it exploded a few times already.
Well, our Sun hasn't exploded, but its materials, right have been through several solar cycles. Everything around us, all that stuff is left over from one or two or three solar cycles of a sun lasting for you know, one, two, see three billion years and then blowing up and spreading its materials around. So everything around us is all the components of the Solar system are probably been recycled. But it's not like our sun formed and then we started and formed and restarted. It was a different it was from a different star.
Oh I see, So our current sun is maybe around four point five billion years old.
Yeah, that's what we think. That's the history of our solar system. And remember, for context, the Milky Way is something like thirteen billion years old, and the universe is just a little bit older than that, like almost fourteen billion years old. So there's a lot of history before even our sun, our solar system was formed, and then a lot of history before we came around. And so like that's the cosmic context that we're standing in.
And so that's the oldest thing we found in the Solar system, but that's older than the oldest thing we found that is part of the Earth. So somewhere between those two numbers is when maybe the ball of the Earth formed.
That's right, that's what we call the whore Heey date, the whore hate definition of the age of the Earth.
The ball date or his bal date.
That's right, that's right. And so you know there's a window there about one hundred and fifty million years, which seems like a huge number. You know, that's like a.
Hundred company it's pretty small, I think compared to.
Exactly Geologically speaking, it's a blink of an.
Eye, yeah, or universe speaking, is it's pretty accurate?
Yeah, exactly. And you know, we know these numbers two plus or minus twenty five or fifty million years based on the uncertainty of radiometric dating, and so because of the hard work of a lot of scientists to develop these things and to cross check them and understand them across various other processes. Now we've looked around us and we've gathered these clues from everyday objects around us, you know, the rocks at our feet, the rocks in Australia give us clues about these fantastic numbers that would just blow the minds of our ancestors, and those clues we are around for them to discover also, And so of course that makes you wonder, like what clues are there laying around at our feet now that would tell us secrets of the universe that our descendants will know and wonder why we couldn't figure it out.
It's not just like an opinion, right, It's pretty based on evidence, and it's pretty based on science and physics.
These numbers, Yeah, exactly, these things we know pretty well. We have a lot of confidence in them. People have been working on these processes for decades and decades, a lot of you know, grumpy competition between rivals to make more and more accurate measurements. You know, this is not a conspiracy of scientists all working together in harmony. You know, this is a bunch of people racing to develop better and better techniques and trying to find older and older rocks. Remember, science is a competitive field and everybody wants to one up the other to get the more accurate, the more reliable, the more verifiable answer. So, yeah, we have a lot of confidence in this knowledge.
Yeah, it's like it's all around the evidence is all around us, and you're you're standing on it.
Yeah, exactly. And even if you can't do radiometric dating in your head, of course, because you can't see the zircon crystals, you know, you just look around you and you see lots of things around you which take a long time to form. You know, how long does it take a mountain to form? It's a very slow process, and so all around us on the Earth we see evidence of very very slow processes which have accomplished a great deal, which tells you that they've been doing it for a long long time.
Yeah, like you said, who knows what else is lying under our feet?
That's right, exactly. So I think we answered that question about the age of the earth.
Yeah. Yeah, So grab a glass of wine and sit back and enjoy it.
That's right. And no matter how old you are, remember you can always enjoy one more brownie.
See you next time.
Thanks for tuning in and thanks for asking great questions. This question was inspired by an email from a listener, so if you have a question you'd like to know the answer to, please send it to us at questions at Danielandjorge dot com. Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Horny dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
As a United Explorer Card member, you can earn fifty thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary Traveler ward bards, including a free checked bag, two times the miles on United purchases and two times the miles on dining and at hotels. Become an Explorer and seek out unforgettable places while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA member FDIC subject to credit approval offer subject to change terms apply.
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