The latest xkcd makes the point that science changes over time, and that the early days of space flight preceded the widespread acceptance of plate tectonics. Ha ha, there were astronauts in the 1960s who hadn’t yet caught up on the latest ideas in geology, and thought the continents were static.
The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
—xkcd
How far we’ve come. Now, in the 2020s, we have astronauts who think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that the continents zipped into their current position at hyperspeed, four thousand years ago.
Somebody should tell Ken Ham that most astronauts weren’t selected for their scientific knowledge, and that he is intentionally selecting from the bottom of the spaceman barrel.
Don’t know much about geology
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about how long it took
But they do know that Jesus saves
And the bible says if they owned slaves
What a wonderful world this would be
Ironically, the continents on the Moon have been stable.
@ ^ Reginald Selkirk : Well, our Moon has no continents – although it does have seas that were once liquid – abeit lava.
Aswe as we know so far Earth is actually the only planet withcontinents or atleats plate tectonics. venus and Mars might have had or been starting to have them but now don’t at leats not moving ones.
^ As far as we know..
The Cytherean continents namely Ishtar Terra here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Terra
As well as Aphrodite and Lada Terra :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada_Terra
Plus the Martian kinda equaivalent fo continents like Tharsis bulge are intresting and kinda continent~ish but not really the same as we get on Earth :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tharsis
How many exoplanets – obvs for the rocky ones – actually have plate tectonics like our globes rather than the sort of crustal activities / areas that we see on Venus and Mars is a fascinating question that we still don’t know what the answer is.
I was taking geology courses in college in 1972 and by this time plate tectonics was just accepted as proven and our textbooks were now obsolete. It was kind of sobering. Science is not static and can change radically and suddenly.
I was reading geology books ca. 1972 and they brought up both the old views and plate tectonics.
In retrospective it seems obvious that a world without plate tectonics would stagnate.
.
The fundie astronaut launched by the private company was not selecred by NASA. Ironically the capsule had such problems the crew had to stay up on ISS for months.
The presence of plate tectonics (and the collision with Theia that brought non-refractory elements and water along with creating the moon) is probably part of the “cosmic filter”.
The final cosmic filter ahead of us is represented by corrupt do-nothing politicians.
Well, that’s what you get with “pluralism,” where the superstitious delusions of filthy primitives are respected and have the protection of law. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Not much has changed. Remember when the crew of Apollo 8 read the Genesis creation account on TV on Christmas Eve, 1968?
Somewhat related, but, apparently, it was the geologists who were the first to accept the extreme age of the Earth, and by extension, the universe when the greatest physicists of the day still believed stars were powered by chemical reactions, rather than the nuclear ones they’re really powered by, and would burn out within a few hundred thousand years time.
The geologists, by studying sediments, realized the Earth had to be billions of years old but that didn’t make sense to physicists who thought the Sun couldn’t be more than a million years old.
It took the discovery of radiation to set the physicists on the right direction that the geologists were already on.
More related: I would’ve assumed the concept of continental drift, if not the more developed plate tectonics, would’ve been unanimously accepted by NASA personnel by the 1960s. Interesting.
I took “earthj science” in high school in 1967-8. Our teacher told us that continental drift was controversial. Almost like a religion with geologists saying “I believe in drift” or “I don’t believe in drift.” IIRC it was sea floor spreading that was the decider. Being able to easily measure the motion of the continents, using differential GPS, was icing on the cake.
#10: not only do I remember it, it was a major moment in my total disillusionment with religion.
Walter Solomon @11:
Which period does ‘of the day’ refer to? In the 19th century, Kelvin calculated the age of the Earth as no less than 20 million years (based on cooling from a molten state), and the age of the sun as about 20 million years (based on gravitational energy).
While both (some) geologists and (some) biologists thought those numbers too small to explain their observations, it wasn’t until the 1920s that radiometric dating was accepted, and an age in the billions of years started to be accepted. By then, of course, we were also beginning to recognize nuclear fusion as the primary source of stars’ energy.
#12 @ Walter Solomon
Geology didn’t really become an actual science degree in any serious way until 1969. And yes:
#13 @ Ted Lawry it really was controversial and an intelligent person who had studied the field could in fact sanely reject this theory. Many of my geology professors remembered this argument as part of their living memory.
This time in history and scientific history is when the magnetic anomalies were matched to the observable shapes of the continents. So while certain geologist supposed that ‘yep, those cont’nts over thar they’uns sure look like they jes fit’ for about one hundred years ago (and one other renaissance wild guesser, TIL so says Wikipedia)? Proof of continental drift is very recent. Back when libraries had actual magazines and microfiches/microfilms, you could literally read the articles of discovery in Scientific American, within my lifetime.
It was exciting!
If any NASA personnel held this position, it would have been idiosyncratic.
I think it was astronomers (such as Herschel) who advanced the concept of Deep Time well before the geologists.
“it wasn’t until the 1920s that radiometric dating was accepted, and an age in the billions of years started to be accepted.” The same time s the Scopes trial but I don’t think this was introduced as evidence because the judge wasn’t ruling on the science, he was ruling on the cretinist idiot law.
There’s a horrible irony (?) in the fact that the first geologist and, indeed, the only scientist to walk on our Moon was not only on the very last Apollo mission to fly but also later (?) became a Climate Science Denier. Sigh.
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt#Views_on_climate_change
I briefly studied geology in the 90s, and had a couple profs who started studying geology before the wide acceptance of plate tectonics, and always though that was really interesting. Kinda like “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution”, I feel like much of geology doesn’t make sense, except in light of tectonics. I can’t imagine how interesting it would have been to have been actively studying in a field when such a massive paradigm shift happened (at the same time, I could see that being really stressful, and am sorta glad I didn’t have to personally experience it…)
As to the age of the Earth, I’ve always found that segment of history of geology interesting, because people were doing their best with the knowledge (sometimes completely wrong and irrelevant) available to them to try and address a question way beyond their comprehension. So, it led to some problematic attempts (like the bishop of Ulster’s biblical tally of the Earth being ~6,000 years old, which modern creationists mistake for biblical fiat), but I found it really interesting in just how people attempted to address this question with very limited info available to them. And just how all the various attempts to age the Earth (so many of which reinforce tectonics/continental drift), help to narrow in and converge on a very specific age of the Earth. Stuff like flipping poles marking the orientation of magnetically oriented molecules in oceanic rift basalt, and how that correlates to magnetically oriented molecules in sediment on continents, radiological dating of crystals, some of which went through several transitions of rock formation (crystalized from magma/lava, partially eroded, lithified in sediment, only to be partially eroded and relithified in conglomerate sediment, etc.
I just think it’s really neat to think about stuff that happens on the scale of millions, or even billions of years, when most of the human perspective has trouble considering much over decades, let alone centuries.
I just think it’s neat
re: “I think it was astronomers (such as Herschel) who advanced the concept of Deep Time well before the geologists.”
Not according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_time#Origins_and_definition
“The philosophical concept of geological time was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton;[2][3] his “system of the habitable Earth” was a deistic mechanism keeping the world eternally suitable for humans.[4] The modern concept entails huge changes over the age of the Earth which has been determined to be, after a long and complex history of developments, around 4.55 billion years.[5]
James Hutton based his view of deep time on a form of geochemistry that had developed in Scotland and Scandinavia from the 1750s onward.[6] As mathematician John Playfair, one of Hutton’s friends and colleagues in the Scottish Enlightenment, remarked upon seeing the strata of the angular unconformity at Siccar Point with Hutton and James Hall in June 1788, “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time”.[7][8]”
There’s a non-Wikipedia source to the same effect: https://press.rebus.community/historyoftech/chapter/the-discovery-of-deep-time/
—
I remember Josh the geologist, from Titanoboa days.
</nostalgia>
[musings]
Mind you, ‘deep time’ for the Internet is a bit more accelerated.
I reckon the internet’s Cambrian explosion occurred between 1989 and 1995, when competing protocols (e.g. X.25 vs TCP/IP), monetisation models (micropayments vs advertising), and application types (Gopher, FTP, Usenet, early web browsers) proliferated.
Selective pressures such as bandwidth constraints, user accessibility, and commercial viability gave us TCP/IP and ad-funded content (argh!), while other “species” went extinct or became niche.
(I had to append this so people get the Titanoboa ref
https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/05/titanoboa ]
I remember around 1970 being taught that mountains were pushed up from below and then sank back, as with the Rockies vs the White Mountains. By the end of the 1970’s we were being taught about plate subduction, earthquakes and what happened at plate boundaries. We were taught about Pangaea but nobody seemed to know what came before that.
@ ^ pilgham : Previous cycles of supercontinents and their breaking up and recycling – eg Rodinia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodinia
Plus Pannotia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannotia
Along with others :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent
Which we’re fairly sure of now although the details & specific arrangements of them still get discussed and debated from what I gather.
I vaguely recall reading of previous ideas of Earth as a plate tectonics alternative either shrinking or expanding albeit in history and very old books not being taught as current knowledge – even in my youth!
Geologists noticed that far-apart continents seemed to be connected somehow a long while back. Pointing this out was uncontroversial in the 18th and 19th centuries, but they assumed the answer had to do with rising and sinking continents in the middle. (Sometimes continents do sink into the ocean, as is the case with Zealandia and the Kerguelen Plateau). Continental drift gained popularity as a speculative hypothesis in the 1910s, but it didn’t have a plausible physical model until plate tectonics in the 1960s.
@20 lochaber
Well, it is biblical fiat. Not that the bible helps us very much — geology had the good sense to discard that and start reckoning with their notions of deep time back in the 18th century.
@24 StevoR
pilgham likely has the right of it. They were talking about contemporary knowledge of supercontinents in the ’70s, which seems to agree with Wikipedia’s blurb about Rodinia:
Even now we have a pretty good reconstruction of Rodinia, but anything earlier than about 700 million years ago is so fragmented and mostly unavailable to us that any plate locations are mostly guesswork.