this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 9 hours ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 hours ago (5 children)

Earth will be created in 2036. This is just a rehearsal.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

I remember a time when all of this happens again

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

We're doing the extra-silly speedthrough right now. Next time will be much more comprehensible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

"After extensive beta testing we have decided to shelve this project. It just wasn't working."

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 222 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (17 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (5 children)

Also this doesn’t say anything about the Earth.

Plus you can give a liberal reading of the bible to be:

  1. god created the heaven and the earth. God created the heavenly bodies.
  2. God created the sky - earths atmosphere and climate
  3. God separates oceans - creates continental forms, and plant based life
  4. God creates the moon and sun and stars. This one seems out of order to me… maybe just the earth and solar system stabilize. I don’t know how pll ok ants exist without the sun, so maybe it’s microbes or something.
  5. God creates birds and sea creatures. Maybe birds are dinosaurs.
  6. God creates modern land animals, then creates man and woman. That makes sense, mankind is certainly new with only a few hundred thousand years of records before civilization starts.

That doesn’t have to imply the earth is 4000 years old. Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

The Bible is a couple thousand chapters long. The creation story is the first two chapters. It's pretty obviously only attempting to establish that God created the universe in some ambiguous way and move on with the story. That doesn't stop people from inferring all sorts of things from what is essentially a poem.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 hours ago

It's literally a poem in the original language.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

So you are saying when the Bible says Jesus died for our sins, it doesn't mean he actually died, it's only a metaphor.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

I know it's tough to pay attention for four whole sentences but if you read them again slowly I think you'll see that I did not use the words Jesus, sin, or metaphor in any form which should make it pretty clear that, no, I'm not saying that at all.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.

Most people don't know that the Hebrew word "yom" (day) can be and is used to denote wildly different lengths of time.

If anyone is interested you can read a fine destruction of the stupid "Young Earth" argument at the link I provided.

The "Young Earth" people, both Christian and Jew, are trying to shoe horn something into the Bible that doesn't fit and doesn't need to exist. It's nothing more than a desperate attempt to hold onto an old, wrong headed, and man-made theory.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 hours ago

Also I'm amazed by how people don't seem to understand what half-life is. It's not the time it takes for an atom to decay. It's the time it takes for half of the atoms to decay, meaning there will be some U-238 that decay into Ra-226 in just a couple of seconds.

So even if the Earth was created 4000 years ago with uranium but not lead (for some weird reason), some of that lead would have decayed into lead by now.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

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[–] [email protected] 108 points 10 hours ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

That does explain why I can never get the hang of Thursdays

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

“God did it to trick you” is pretty hard to disprove

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

It's also hard to argue while also claiming your god is moral, which is why creationists usually scapegoat the task of planting fossils to Satan.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

"It Is Useless To Attempt To Reason A Man Out Of A Thing He Was Never Reasoned Into." - Jonathan Swift

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

And the fun scientific counterpart of the Boltzmann brain. The idea that in an infinite universe (at least in a couple of the spatial dimensions if not also a time dimension) random fluctuations could combine to form your brain. Including all of your memories, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.

When taken to its natural conclusion, the entire Earth of even the solar system or galaxy might have just been created by random chance. The perfect storm of randomness. It may have been created longer ago or just nanoseconds before now. There is no way of telling.

Thermodynamics has been used to counter and strengthen this idea. And with infinity on the table anything goes.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

It's an ad hoc argument. You can't argue against any ad hoc arguments with logic

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

In the begining, was uranium, and the uranium was not stable?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (6 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 hours ago

So even if you’re working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?

You can't. The "Young Earth" people are morons.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 hours ago

Because anti-evolutionists decided a myth that the Earth is only 4000 years old is the quickest way to refute claims of evolution.

It's not an argument one forms by observing evidence.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 11 hours ago (5 children)

Real question: Is the decay of uranium the only natural way to produce lead? If so TIL.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

No. God can produce as much lead as he wants. Duh!

[–] [email protected] 102 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

you can also lead by example

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

Instructions unclear. Got diagnosed with lead poisoning

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

Instructions unclear. ~~Got~~ God diagnosed with lead poisoning

Well, that certainly explains the platypus!

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Iron is the heaviest element capable of being created inside stars, via fusion. Once iron is fused, the star begins to rapidly collapse.

Elements heavier than iron (28) are the result of supernova explosions, which produce energies high enough to create these heavier atoms. It is further possible, as described in the image, for very heavy elements to decay into lighter more stable elements, those still being heavier than iron.

Lead is 82.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

That's what I learned in school, but there's been some research since suggesting stars produces significant quantities of elements up to lead during their lifetimes, even though it's a net energy loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-process

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 hours ago

No. Nucleosynthesis of lead within stars generated from supernovae make up the bulk of the existing lead on Earth. Uranium decay does provide some additional lead inventory but would be fairly small in comparison.

But the presence of it in the first place within second generation stars proves that lead is billions of years old.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago

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."

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Lol, look at this guy, trying to use science and facts to disprove my fairytale. What a joke!

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

The correct answer would have been: "Why should I? You're an idiot."

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