The Age of the Earth

From The Alpha and the Omega - Chapter One
by Jim A. Cornwell, Copyright © 1995, all rights reserved " The Age of the Earth "

"To summarize chapter one: man is more ancient than our minds would like to believe. The earth has experienced violent cataclysms, mainly due to axis shifts and falls of huge meteorites. In these geological upheavals great civilizations disappeared without a trace.

Bhagavata Purana, a sacred book of India, speaks of four ages which have passed, each destroyed by the fury of the elements. Our present cycle is the fifth.

Hesiod was an eighth century B.C., Greek poet, whose major epics ascribed to him are Works and Days, a valuable account of ancient rural life, and Theogony, a description of the gods and the beginning of the world. In his Theogony he writes about a similar belief.

There were four ages in the past.

First, the gods created a golden race.    They were mortal yet lived like gods.
The second race was silver.    They were of inferior intelligence.
The next cycle was that of brass.    Men were then strong and warlike and they destroyed themselves.
The fourth era was the age of heroes whose adventures inspired men ever since.
According to ancient Greek lore we are now in the fifth age--the age of iron.    They believed we should likewise be destroyed by Zeus as were the other races.    Censorinus (b. 238 A.D.) writes that the Greeks thought the world was either inundated or burnt after each epoch.

Ancient Egyptians divided history into three principal eras.

First was the kingdoms of the gods.
In the second period demigods and heroes ruled on earth.
Then with their departure, men reigned over Egypt and the world.

Even in China the people of Yunnan have preserved the memory of such ages." - "The Home of the Gods" Andrew Thomas page 129.

    "In India, the number of years assigned to an eon (A 'Great Cycle' Mahayuga of cosmic time) is 4,320,000; whereas in Icelandic Poetic Edda it is declared that in Othin's warrior hall, Valhall, there are 540 doors, through each of which, on the 'day of the war of the wolf,' 800 battle-ready warriors will pass to engage the antigods in combat.    But 540 times 800 equals 432,000!"
    In "Hamlet's Mill" by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Gambit Inc. 1969 it states on page 162, "Odin in Valhalla says the Grinmnismal (23): 'Five hundred gates and forty more - are in the mighty building of Valhalla - eight hundred 'Einherier' come out of each one gate - on the time they go out on defence against the Wolf."
    It continues with, "That makes 432,000 in all, a number significance from old."
    "This number must have very ancient meaning, for it is also the number of syllables in the Rigveda.    But it goes back to the basic figure 10,800, the number of stanzas in the Rigveda (40 syllables to a stanza) which together with 108 occurs insistently in Indian tradition.    10,800 is also the number which has been given by Heraclitus for the duration of the Aion, according to Censorius (Dedienatali, 18), whereas Berossos made the Babylonian Great Year to last 432,000 years."

Moreover, a Chaldean priest, Berossos, writing in Greek ca. 289 B.C., reported that according to Mesopotamian belief 432,000 years elapsed between the crowning of the first earthly king and the coming of the deluge. [The early Sumerian king list names eight kings with a total of 241,200 years from the time when "the kingship was lowered from heaven" to the time when "the Flood swept" over the land once more "the kingship was lowered from heaven" (Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List, 1939, pp. 71, 77).]

No one, I should think, would wish to argue that these figures could have arisen independently in India, Iceland, and Babylon.

To complete one cycle of the zodiac--or, as it is called, one 'Great' or 'Platonic Year'--requires 25,920 years; which sum, divided by 60, (One soss, the founding unit of the old Mesopotamia sexagenary scale, still used for the measurement of circles, whether of space or time), yields, once again the number 432. So that the mythological count of 432,000 years not only cannot have been the product of any psychological archetype or elementary idea, but must have been discovered only through centuries of controlled astronomical observation." - "The Mythic Image" Joseph Campbell page 72-74.

The age of the Earth is 4,500,000,000 (4 1/2 billion) years. The definition of Earth

Tiny crystal offers a big look at history of Earth
By Ryan J. Foley, Associated Press
April 10, 2005     Madison, Wis. -- Call it much ado about almost nothing.
    To create buzz about an arcane subject, the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed off a tiny speck of zircon crystal believed to be -- at the age of about 4.4 billion years -- the oldest known piece of Earth.
    "This is it -- the oldest thing ever.    One day only," said Joe Skulan, director of the UW-Madison Geology Museum, where the object was displayed under police guard.
    Though scientists acknowledge there was not much to see, spectators used a microscope to check out the tiny grain, which measures less than two human hairs in diameter.    Analysis of the object in 2001 by John Valley, a UW-Madison professor of geology and geophysics, startled researchers around the world by concluding that the early Earth, instead of being a roiling ocean of magma, was cool enough to have oceans and continents -- key conditions for life.
    "It's not very much to look at because it's so very small.    But to me, the miraculous thing about the crystal is that we've been able to make such wide-ranging inferences about the early Earth," Valley said.    "This is our first glimpse into the earliest history of the Earth."
    Before its discovery, the oldest evidence for liquid water on the planet was from a rock estimated to be much younger -- 3.8 billion years old.
    The object will return to its native Australia with Simon Wilde, professor at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, who made the discovery in 1984.    The sample will eventually be put on display at a natural history museum in that country.

Moon dated to be near Earth's age
Sources: The Los Angeles Times; The Washington Post
December 5, 2005     Most scientists agree the moon is a celestial child of the Earth, having been blasted away by an impact with a Mars-sized object during the solar system's infancy.
    Now a team of European researchers says it has discovered the moon's age, hidden in rock and soil samples retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1970s.
    The scientists from Germany, Switzerland and Britain determined the moon's age by measuring the amount of tungsten-182 in the metals in the lunar materials.    It was concluded the collison occurred about 30 million to 50 million years after the solar system was formed.
    That's just a blip compared to the 4.5 billion years the Earth and solar system have existed.    That means the moon is almost as old as its parent.
    Heat from the impact melted much of what would become the moon, forming a gigantic magma ocean that cooled into a dense, inorganic planetoid, said the article published online Thursday by the journal Science.

This file was updated on March 14, 2005, and also on January 7, 2006.

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