# First (maybe just early?) "Holy shit" moment in evolutionary timeline? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 29, 2022, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901 "2022-03-29T13:39:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2022, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/21 "2022-03-29T22:08:07Z")
Until the discovery of nuclear reactions, there was a serious problem between the geological and biological evidence indicating that the earth was several billion years old and the physicists’ calculations that the only known long-term energy source for the sun (gravitational collapse) and the remaining internal heat of the earth (from its original gravitational collapse) indicated an age of a hundred million years or so at best. That was an ongoing “holy shit” paradox through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2022, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/22 "2022-03-29T22:27:11Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > I don’t mean to hijack, but we’re coming close to the century anniversary of a “holy shit” moment in terms of scale. > > Prior to Hubble’s work in the early 1920s, it was thought that our galaxy was likely the whole universe (it wasn’t settled, but that was the main view). He showed that Andromeda was another galaxy, and since then we’ve seen another one or two galaxies. > > Another one or two _trillion_ that is. To go with Hubble, there’s this guy, who was the first to propose the Big Bang theory. > **[Georges Lemaître](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre)** > > Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître (/ləˈmɛtrə/ lə-MET-rə; .mw-parser-output .IPA-label-small{font-size:85%}.mw-parser-output .references .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .infobox .IPA-label-small,.mw-parser-output .navbox .IPA-label-small{font-size:100%}French: \[ʒɔʁʒ ləmɛːtʁ\] ⓘ; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to theorize that the r Ironically, he was a Roman Catholic priest. From what I can gather, the Young Earth, Young Universe, Young Human Race stuff comes from contemporary Christians, not dogma from 18th or 19th century popes. ---
**Author:** ![Retzbu\_Tox](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/retzbu_tox/32/11829_2.png) [@Retzbu\_Tox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Retzbu_Tox)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2022, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/23 "2022-03-29T22:54:43Z")
> [@Roger\_That](#): > > > [@Crane](#): > > > > it was Darwin. > > Really? No one before him had entertained the possibility? Well, before Charles Darwin, there was his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, upon whose foundations Charles built his own theories. Erasmus had already expressed the notion that “modern” life forms had sprung from earlier and simpler forms, and ultimately from inorganic compounds. Charles Darwin may have formalized the Theory of Evolution, but he was a giant standing on the shoulders of earlier giants. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2022, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/24 "2022-03-30T20:58:33Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > It should be noted that even the early geologists didn’t get the age of the Earth right, or even close. They were mostly thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of millions of years. As I understand it, the early geologists didn’t encounter any rocks older than the Cambrian (about 540 million years old). There are some tiny outcroppings of older rocks in England and Ireland but they would have had no way of sequencing these or recognising their great age. So it made sense that the Earth’s history was about 600m years old because there was no evidence for anything older. I’m not sure where and when the first older rocks were identified, extending geological time back into the thousands of millions of years - there are some very old rocks in the northwest of Scotland. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2022, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/25 "2022-03-30T21:09:28Z")
> [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > Ironically, he was a Roman Catholic priest. From what I can gather, the Young Earth, Young Universe, Young Human Race stuff comes from contemporary Christians, not dogma from 18th or 19th century popes. Late 19th century, I think. No one had a real problem with Earth being much older than the Bible implied, but Darwin suggested that the creation of species could happen without God’s intervention, so certain folks declared war on anything remotely associated with Darwin, including previously unexceptional geological findings. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2022, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/26 "2022-03-30T21:26:29Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Prior to Hubble’s work in the early 1920s, it was thought that our galaxy was likely the whole universe (it wasn’t settled, but that was the main view). One of the first people to suggest that spiral nebulae were extragalactic objects was Immanuel Kant. Because no-one could resolve individual stars in these nebulae, the majority of astronomers believed they were local objects within the Milky Way. ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2022, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/27 "2022-03-30T22:02:14Z")
> [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > Ironically, he was a Roman Catholic priest. AFAIK, the church did not have any disagreements with science by that point. The “bible is literal truth” mantra comes from more recent fundamentalists. We’ve had this discussion in other thread in the last few years… the Church’s disagreement with Galileo was because he was playing into the hands of Zuniga and other cultist numerologists of the day who questioned church dogma, not because they had a strong beef with heliocentric theories or science in general. The church was fine with bible as allegory, as long as it did not lead to outright rejection of church dogma. In fact, the pope (who was his friend) went out of his way to tell Galileo to just STFU and stay out of the discussion, and Galileo, being a self-important twit, would not listen. ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2022, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/28 "2022-03-30T22:25:04Z")
If you’re talking about literally the first people who postulated a very old Universe, I assume it’s not going to be modern scientists, but some primitive religious people. Given the vast number of religions and creation myths that have existed in human history, it seems inevitable some of them must have gotten it approximately right just by chance. ---
**Author:** ![Roger\_That](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roger_that/32/8505_2.png) [@Roger\_That](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roger_That)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2022, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/29 "2022-03-30T22:26:22Z")
And before them, out and out crazy people. But that’s not really what we’re discussing here, is it? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2022, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/30 "2022-03-30T22:42:20Z")
Yeah, it really didn’t help matters that Galileo was, to use the technical term, a total dick. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2022, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/31 "2022-03-30T23:01:55Z")
> [@hibernicus](#): > > As I understand it, the early geologists didn’t encounter any rocks older than the Cambrian (about 540 million years old). There are some tiny outcroppings of older rocks in England and Ireland but they would have had no way of sequencing these or recognising their great age. So it made sense that the Earth’s history was about 600m years old because there was no evidence for anything older. The “Cambrian Explosion” was recognized (in fact if not in name) by the early 1800s. > **[Cambrian explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion)** > > The Cambrian explosion, Cambrian radiation, Cambrian diversification, or the Biological Big Bang refers to an interval of time approximately 538.8 million years ago in the Cambrian Period of early Paleozoic when there was a sudden radiation of complex life and practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record. It lasted for about 13 – 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla. The event was accompanied Before early Cambrian diversificat... But before radiometric dating, distinct periods and age estimates were based on index fossils. Everything older than (known) fossils sort of lumps together. > **[Index Fossils](https://www.collectingfossils.org/figures/index-fossils.htm)** > > Index Fossils ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2022, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/32 "2022-03-31T01:57:13Z")
> [@hibernicus](#): > > As I understand it, the early geologists didn’t encounter any rocks older than the Cambrian (about 540 million years old). There are some tiny outcroppings of older rocks in England and Ireland but they would have had no way of sequencing these or recognising their great age. So it made sense that the Earth’s history was about 600m years old because there was no evidence for anything older. But even then, I understand that they usually underestimated the age of various fossils and rocks, so when radiometric dating came along, there was a huge increase in the ages of everything. I’m not sure what they used for those estimates but perhaps sedimentation rates. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2022, 11:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/33 "2022-03-31T11:14:36Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > perhaps sedimentation rates Yes. (Discourse character) ---
**Author:** ![Limmin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f04885/32.png) [@Limmin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Limmin)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2022, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/34 "2022-03-31T19:53:43Z")
I just happened upon a discussion of this very thing today. It was realized that nuclear reactions occurring within the Earth would extend the cool-down time which should, in turn, lead to the age of the Earth today. Problem is, it did not extend this period out to billions of years, the figure the geologists were claiming. The final resolution was that the Earth’s core was found to be liquid and moving; this apparently helped keep things hotter longer and give rise to plate tectonics. When this was accepted, it must have been a “holy s\*\*\*” moment, that the Earth itself really was billions of years old. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2022, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/35 "2022-03-31T20:02:56Z")
This article [https://www.americanscientist.org/article/kelvin-perry-and-the-age-of-the-earth](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/kelvin-perry-and-the-age-of-the-earth) tells of someone who showed that even without radioactivity, a model of the Earth with a convecting core could be billions of years old. > Perry’s calculation shows that if the Earth has a conducting lid of 50 kilometers’ thickness, with a perfectly convecting fluid underneath, then the measured thermal gradients near the surface are consistent with any age up to 2 billion or 3 billion years. Recognizing that heat transfer in the mantle cannot be perfectly efficient, Perry subsequently modeled the deep interior as a solid with high “quasi-diffusivity.” His results agreed with the original simple calculation in suggesting that the Earth could be several billions of years old. Full calculations of convection in the mantle (which were impossible until the advent of computers) confirm that Perry’s reasoning was sound. > > In other words, Perry was able to reconcile a physical calculation of Earth’s thermal evolution with the great age that geologists required. Perry needed nothing more than to introduce the idea that heat moved in the deep interior of the Earth more readily than it moved in the outermost layers. Yet to this day, most geologists believe that Kelvin’s (understandable) mistake was not to have known about Earth’s internal radioactivity. ---
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2022, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/36 "2022-03-31T20:04:33Z")
I always thought holy shit moment or two was when man dropped a piece of beast in a fire by accident and dug it out and decided he liked the effect and another when said man didn’t have meat he ate some leaves that didn’t kill him for once … ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2022, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/37 "2022-03-31T20:48:51Z")
IIRC, even when Einstein was doing his theory of relativity, the concept of a universe with a start and end was not the current theory. Albert had to add a “fudge factor” to Relativity to account for a steady state universe. Big Bang theory came later. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [April 1, 2022, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/38 "2022-04-01T19:04:46Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > a model of the Earth with a convecting core could be billions of years old. I had a lot of trouble visualising this, until someone came up with a model based on the difference between a hot, cooked turkey and a hot-water-bottle. If the Earth was non-convecting (like a turkey) then the outer skin would cool down more quickly than if it were just a thin skin spread over a warm, fluid interior like a hot water bottle. Kelvin’s model was based on a solid Earth with a hot core and a cool skin, while Perry’s model had fluids transporting heat to the surface. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [April 1, 2022, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901/39 "2022-04-01T19:49:09Z")
I like that book (of course). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/first-maybe-just-early-holy-shit-moment-in-evolutionary-timeline/961901.md?page=1)