How Old is the Earth in Pennies?
November 16, 2011 in Thought experiments
So now let’s play with our pennies.
Young Earth creationists say the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old. Here are 6,000 pennies:
However, scientists say the Earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old. What does that look like in pennies? Well, each block of pennies is about the size of a school bus. And we will need about 24 school buses of pennies to equal 4.6 billion years:
Here’s another way to look at the same pennies…
If you laid out the pennies with their edges touching, the area of 6,000 “penny-years” would cover 23.4 sq feet.
That’s about the mattress surface of a twin size bed. More or less.
In contrast, 4.6 billion pennies would cover 3,906,321 square feet, or the area of a football field. Not once, but 68 times!
So you see, the theory of evolution is easy to dismiss if you can’t even begin to visualize the immense geologic time involved.
Now I admit, this penny demonstration won’t convince any young Earth “true believers” they’re wrong, but the average guy—like you and me—can at least begin to grasp the vast amounts of time it took to make something as perfect as…well, us.
We are not attempting in this little thought experiment to answer any of the “controversies” surrounding the creation vs. evolution debate. All we’ve done is clearly illustrate how large the difference is between 6,000 and 4.6 billion. Starting out we knew 4.6 billion was a lot, but now we can see how muchity-much-much more it really is. That is the first step to understanding the process of evolution—it takes a long, long time. Share this with your children; They may not learn it at school.
If you are interested in how scientists try to date the Earth the TalkOrigins Archive has a nice article.
For the pennies go to: MegaPenny Project
