An average person's notion of the age of the Earth

[RedImperator]

What was that about bad analogies? The Universal Gravitational Constant, when compared to things like "how old is the planet" or "when did the dinosaurs die" is relatively obscure. Most people, given a very basic science education (the age of the planet is 6th grade stuff here) should at the very least be able to get the billions of years ballpark figure, while pinpointing the time the dinosaurs died to a millions of years ago.

Obscurity isn't as important as day-to-day utility for a piece of knowledge. I'm sure we all learned a lot of stuff in grade school that we wouldn't remember now, and physical constants are just as useful as the age of the earth to the average person.

I'd be more concerned if someone couldn't correctly give the voltage of a wall socket, or identify how many miles you can drive before needing to change your tires.

Nobody is going to die if they don't know the age of the earth (or the Universal Gravitational constant). It doesn't matter, and neither is a good indicator of scientific knowledge. Not knowing how to figure out the data is more troublesome. Memorization of data is basically meaningless.

I see where you're coming from and I mostly agree with you, but I think there's a third class of facts that people should know because they form the basis of society's philosophical assumptions, and the age of Earth is one of them. It's not a practical piece of information like when to change your tires, but it would be a lot harder for religious charlatans to take advantage of a population that understands a few fundamental facts.

The age of Earth isn't the only one of these facts. You could put a lot of quacks, conmen, and politicians out of a job if most people understood the very basics of history, biology, economics, and medicine.

[Darth Wong]

If I could, I'd like to have gone back in time to watch the Darwin vs. Kelvan debate on the age of the earth. Kelvan was wrong, because he didn't know about radioactive decay.

Lord Kelvin, not Kelvan. The Kelvans were an alien species in Star Trek

[Macunaima]

That's why I believe the concept of that "Cosmic Calendar" presented by Carl Sagan in the Cosmos TV series could be of some help to put things in perspective to someone who wouldn't have any idea about at least the magnitude of Earth's real age. Putting the age of the universe in a one-year timeframe can help to illustrate the relative value of the Earth's age in contrast with other events: if the big bang happened on January 1st, Earth would be born around September, all our history would have happened during the last ten seconds of December 31, and so on.

[Stark]

Isn't it wierd? As soon as I saw the thread title, I thought '4.5 billion years'. I'm an IT postgrad! A *lazy* one! I learnt it when I was a kid, and it's a cool thing to know. It's not a 'big' number, the way pi-to-a-dozen-digits is, so if you ever heard it you'd remember, right?

Actually, I guess I can blame 'simEarth' rather than any science curriculum. Ironic?

[Mr Flibble]

I don't get this. How could you make it through high school, let alone college, without seeing a timeline of Earth's history? How could you not ever have watched Discovery channel, or ever read any article about dinosaurs?

If you have much of a brain at all, you should *accidentally* have picked up 4.5 billion years, or at least "billions of years".

Shit, I just read an article on Yahoo news the other day about a 4 billion year old crystal that they suspect is the oldest example of sedimentary rock ever found.

Even if you have 0 interest in science, how do these things escape you? I, for example, have <0 interest in Hollywood gossip. Yet, I am aware that Tom Cruise proposed to Katie Holmes on the Eiffel Tower recently. I learned that out of my fucking peripheral vision.

I guess it requires no interest in science, no interest in any sort of news, or any sort of television that isn't a sitcom, or in anything you were ever taught in school.

That is what I don't understand either. Several of the people I asked, I know have an interest in science, one in particular owns copies of several documentaries such as The Planets and Walking with Cavemen along with having diligently watched Walking with Dinosaurs and many others. So it is not as if he would never have come across the age, or least something to give an idea to the order of magnitude.

I agree the world would not fall apart if peope did not know the age of the Earth. However as RI said it is an important basic. It is important for understanding of biology and geology, and it is one of the answers most people want to know. All the people I asked (excluding my geo friend) were guessing, they reallly had no clue, and just picked a random big number. I think what is more disturbing is hat if I had asked them how long ago the dinosaurs became extinct, I bet most of them would have got it right. It is not like 4.5 billion is a particularly hard number to remember anyway.