Demonstrating Deep Time: Geologic Dating Essay on Earth’s Age

The earth is about 4.6 billion years old, but the last 10,000 years refer to the human civilization period. The earth’s age is like the time it takes to empty a bottle full of water. Mayer (2019) asserts that emptying a bottle is a complex process, which involves water exiting and air entering the bottle through its single mouth. Since water has a molecular weight of 18 grams, a 1-liter bottle has water weighing 1,000 grams when full. If you want to empty a smaller bottle with 460 grams of water with each gram representing 10 million years of the earth’s existence, emptying the bottle translates to 460 × 10,000,000 years = 4.6 billion years (age of earth’s history). Given that 1 gram represents 10,000,000 years, 0.001 grams represent 10,000 years (the human civilization age). Therefore, 1 milligram (0.001 grams) represents 10,000 years. Accordingly, emptying the whole 460-gram bottle takes the equivalent of the entire earth’s history, while emptying 1 milligram of water takes the equivalent of the human civilization age.

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Using the prop of emptying water from a 460-gram bottle to compare the earth’s age and the age of human civilization is relatively accurate given the nature of scientific estimation of the universe’s period. Scientists arrived at the approximately 4.6 billion years as the earth’s age by evaluating the planet’s oldest rocks and heavenly bodies (Gonzaga, 2021). Notably, the process of dating the rocks and meteorites is relatable to tracking the time of releasing water molecules from a bottle.

References

Gonzaga, S. (2021, June 3). What is the age of Earth? EarthSky. https://earthsky.org/earth/age-of-earth-how-old-is-planet-earth/

Mayer, H. C. (2019). Bottle emptying: A fluid mechanics and measurements exercise for engineering undergraduate students. Fluids, 4(4), 183. https://doi.org/10.3390/fluids4040183