Roston: The Carbon Age

Belief that the Earth is only several thousand years old carries a curious implication. The physical evidence for the Earth's age emerged from the same atomic discoveries that later gave the world nuclear weaponry and power plants. The scientific understanding of uranium isotopes that produce the date 4.5 billion years ago is the same understanding of uranium isotopes that led to the production and detonation of nuclear bombs. If scientists do not understand uranium decay well enough to date the Earth, there also cannot he, and can never have been, nuclear weaponry. Certainly a world and a history absent these weapons are desirable, but they are counterfactual. [p. 237, note 7]