Replies

How are the theories regarding the formation of life challenged by pushing back the time of liquid water? Life is believed to have evolved in liquid water anyway. Whether the Earth was covered in water or steam before this time makes no difference from an evolutionary standpoint.

Eh, you've got to understand the creationidiot mindset. Every time there's some study where someone theorizes species X evolved from Y instead of X evolving from Z, or species X was on earth Z millions of years earlier than previously thought, or something about the early earth geologically may have been different than thought, they have these wild fantasies that somehow all science is totally undermined and evolution is on its last legs.

The problem is they don't get science, at all. The idea of tens of thousands of really intelligent people OUT IN THE FIELD actually digging things up, studying them, debating them, etc. is totally alien to their mindset....and the idea that you can have an overarching theory and have the details modified or changed every once in a while by new data, WITHOUT undermining the overarching theory, is totally incomprehensible to them.

I'm aiming my comment to you because, unlike so many other posters here, you do not seem to accept as given that the definitive account of the evolution of the earth is contained in Genesis.

On the other hand, you seem open to different but considered ideas, and so, I heartily recommend to you, "The Hot Deep Biosphere" by Thomas Gold. Gold is the discoverer of Pulsars, among other things, and is Professor Emiritus of Physics at Cornell University. Gold's recent book is fascinating at the very least, and if Gold is correct in his interpretation of the data, revolutionary. According to Gold, the Earth was never all that hot. If you tnink about it, if is the Earth really were "hot as Hades" that extreme heat would have driven away all the water as well as most other lighter elements and compounds. Today's Earth would be a barren ball of stone with just a wisp of an atmosphere and not much else.

If you don't have the $15 to buy the book, you can do a Google search on Thomas Gold and you will find plenty of written material on the web.

I'd be very interested to hear his take on these zircons.