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Old 02-06-2002, 05:09 PM   #95
sdtPikachu
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"No... you constantly assume that I assume that everybody who isn't thinking the same as me will go to hell."

Well I'm sorry if you think I've misinterpreted you, but time and time again you seem to state as a fact that what you believe is the only possible truth. And because of the nature of what this is related to, I consider it to be somewhat offensive.

"I said IF (keyword: IF) you go to hell, you know who to blame."

But there are plenty of other occasions where the word "if" or "IMO" was absent. hence I could only assume that you were stating what you thought was a fact.
Even with the word "if" it can still be seen as offensive in some lights. What if I said if YOU go to hell you'll know who to blame? It still doesn't sound very nice.

"The fact is, a scientist 120million years ago would have to be studying it the WHOLE time to make an exact system on dating things."

You're right, and we are never going to know exactly down to the last electron and subatomic particle what happened 120 million years ago. But we know that some laws never change; we can infer. Obviously there is margin for error, and that is why we have to study as much as we can in order to formulate the best possible hypothesis/theory.

"I think carbon dating is BS, they are making estimates, and they don't have an exact system to it..."

Have you made an in-depth study into the processes behind carbon dating? If you did, you would know that C14 dating is one of our more imprecise methods of dating, due to the nature of C14 radioactivity, which only has a half life of about 5500 years. Hence dates can only go back about 30,000 years before the noise in the system becomes so dense that the margin for error exceeds the time period we are trying to date (basically, it will come up with a date like "this is 60,000 years old, plus or minus 100,000 years). But I assure you, C14 will date any organic remnant up to 15,000 years old very well indeed, with errors of only +/- 2000 years for an imprecise test... precise tests can give accuracies of +/- 500 years, or even less as techniques become more refined.
To say that just because in a few cases it has produced inconclusive results that the whole thing is crap is rather arrogant, no?

"If you take the fossil to 3 different carbon dating places, you will get three totally different answers."

Firstly, hardly any fossils are dated by carbon dating due to their a) being no carbon in them due to fossilisation and b) being far too old for carbon dating to take place anyway. Most fossils are dated by dating the rocks they lie in using one of the several other radiometric dating techniques we use.
And the answers are not totally different. Modern dating methods along with stratigraphical and morphological analysis typically provide dates of +/- 1 million years, with really good stratigraphical sequences getting +/- half a million years. You might think that this is a huge margin of error, but you'd be wrong: in geological time, a million years is nothing.

"What solid proof is there that dinosaurs came before humans."

Sigh... where do I begin?
1) Radiometric dating shows the rocks the fossils lie in were formed at least 65 millino years ago
2) Dinosaur and human remains have never been found together
3) In fact, they have been found to be separated by several kilometres of rock containing no dinosaur or human remains which ranges from 65 to 2 million years old
4) There are no human records of dinosaurs co-existing with humans (cave paintings and the like do not depict them at all; they depict the woolly mammoth and other fauna of the Holocene)

Is this not proof enough?
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"If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it you are deemed fit to govern the country." - Jonathan Meades