3 ms·

The margin of error seems to be +/- 500M years on these things. In no other area of "science" has there been such widely innacurate predictions and hypotheses t

• medstrom 2y ago
  It does not sound like a wide margin to me. 3,500M or 4,000M are kind of close targets, when you consider that the Earth has been a continually changing system (unlike a rock such as the moon). Pretty hard to construct a timeline accounting for all the changes that might have lead any one of your supporting conclusions down the wrong path. When you revise one of your conclusions, you have to revise all the conclusions it supported, and it might turn out that one of your numeric estimates was 500M off. Easy. Astronomy by contrast is much more regular, so then a 500M year difference can indeed be a big deal.
• vikramkr 2y ago
  This comment is a perfect reminder of how humans have a really rough time telling large numbers apart and don't have an intuition for orders of magnitude at these scales. 500 million/4 billion is only about 12%.
• bitcharmer 2y ago
  This is confidently incorrect. If you're making observations of very short-lived processes your margin of error will be in micro-, nano-, atto-seconds etc. If you're looking at processes that take billions of years, naturally the margin will be wider, especially that it's very hard to make accurate observations about stuff that took place a very long time ago. It's not that hard to grasp.
• eru 2y ago
  Astronomy can have even wider absolute error margins for dates. Especially for dates that are in the future.