This is split from the Hawking alien warning thread.
For starters, it's not what you said. You can differentiate stone age and the industrial age with techniques employed by geologists, but you couldn't delineate the arrival of computers.
For second, a geologic time scale is used to measure events which are relevant at that scale. There's nothing technically wrong with using milliseconds to measure your age, it's just not the scale that anyone would recognize what the numbers even mean. It's the same for using the geologic time scale to differentiate something which it can't even differentiate. It makes no sense.
We use the geologic time scale because many events take place over very long periods of time, so it's useful to have a scale that makes more sense. I'm sure most people can appreciate that a million is 6 zeros and another digit in front of it, but many if not most probably can't appreciate how big that really is.
So what is wrong with my statement, that on a geological time scale (which is measured in hundreds of millions or billions of years) we came out of stone age an instant ago?
For starters, it's not what you said. You can differentiate stone age and the industrial age with techniques employed by geologists, but you couldn't delineate the arrival of computers.
For second, a geologic time scale is used to measure events which are relevant at that scale. There's nothing technically wrong with using milliseconds to measure your age, it's just not the scale that anyone would recognize what the numbers even mean. It's the same for using the geologic time scale to differentiate something which it can't even differentiate. It makes no sense.
We use the geologic time scale because many events take place over very long periods of time, so it's useful to have a scale that makes more sense. I'm sure most people can appreciate that a million is 6 zeros and another digit in front of it, but many if not most probably can't appreciate how big that really is.
Yes, I said prof...university level. My prof would have a problem with it, he did have a problem with it. Someone brought up climate change, and referred to geologic scale events, and tried to tie that today. It's nonsensical to do this, because things which happen on that scale are essentially no different than 0 and 0.000001 when using the time scale we are familiar with.I don't see anything wrong with that. And I suspect neither would your geology teacher (did you have a geology prof. did you take geology at university level?) if he understood what is meant by geological time scale.