Deep time

Deep time is the idea, held to be credible by natural researchers since the early 19th century, that the Earth is millions or billions of years old, rather than the few thousand that young Earth creationism claims.

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History

The concept was first formally proposed by James Hutton, a Scottish geologist, in 1788. Hutton and his various contemporaries challenged the then-standard concept of a 6,000 year old Earth by studying the geological strata and stating he could find no rational "beginning of time", if layers were consistently formed, a basis of Lyell's Uniformitarianism. The continuing process whereby rocks are eroded and new sedimentary rocks form out of the remains of older eroded rocks was previously known. Hutton, however, observed further this process takes so long that the Earth must be much older than a few thousand years.[1]

Evidence
See the main article on this topic: Evidence against a recent creation

Evidence for deep time includes:

  • Geological strata
  • Geological formations, like canyons cut by rivers, and the Triassic Cliffs cut by the sea.
  • Fossil records, though there is large dependence on the geological strata, for fossils to "prove" an age of the Earth.
  • Radiometric dating systems, which use the constant rate of radioactive decay of unstable nuclides in the Earth's crust to place the age of the Earth at 4.5 billion years.
  • Dating of the Sun and Moon
  • Dating of the formation of our Solar system
  • Evidence for the age of the Universe

Other uses

In cosmology, "deep time" can mean forecasts about the ultimate fate of the universe. Such forecasts often look trillions of years into the future,[2] many many times the universe's current age.

gollark: I quite like the industrial revolution. We have things like computers, good medicine and electricity now, it's cool.
gollark: You *can* still say vaguely beeish things about a condition you yourself have.
gollark: It's not like pedophiles choose to be pedophiles, probably.
gollark: Only medical doctors. PhDs from each discipline form separate, smaller ones.
gollark: Doctors are actually merged into a collective consciousness upon graduating from medical school.

See also
  • 101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe — a "side by side" rebuttal.

References
  1. James Hutton: The Founder of Modern Geology
  2. And sometimes still far, far moreFile:Wikipedia's W.svg away
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