(December 7, 2022 at 5:26 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(December 6, 2022 at 8:58 pm)Jehanne Wrote: That our World is approximately 4.5 billion years old is a fact; such will never change, and it is unreasonable, in my opinion, to conclude otherwise.
But science is not just a collection of facts - it is primarily a method for arriving at a close approximation of those facts. It is not inconceivable that a different methodology will someday establish an age for the world of, say, 4.61 billion years or 4.48 billion years. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that somewhere there is at least one credible geologist or cosmologist working on refining this data.
ALL scientific knowledge is provisional. As it should be.
Boru
We'll have to agree to disagree. On an existential level, I think that you are absolutely correct; we may all be, in fact, brains in vats. On a practical level, the age of the Earth will, a billion years from now, be calculated as being 5.543 billion years +/- a few million years.