Perhaps we must first realize that we really haven’t come very far yet.
Granted that the age of rocks in many parts of the world is now suddenly
known—and that this was a total mystery some dozen years ago. Granted
that enormous strides forward have been made. It’s only a beginning.
Vast areas of the world are still geologically unexplored. The geologic
time scale is still fragmentary and crude. Thousands of important
geologic questions remain to be defined, explored, and answered by
nuclear age determination. And—as is inevitable in science—many of them
will lead to new questions. It is apparent that dating techniques have
barely begun to be used and understood by geologists.
But apart from geologic work, what else is in store? It is difficult to
predict, but probably the most important advance in the next decade or
two will come when we obtain samples of rock from the moon. Will there
be young rocks there or will they all be 4550 million years old? Or will
they perhaps be some other age? The chemical composition and nuclear
ages of the first moon samples will probably be the most important
information we can hope to obtain from them. These results from the moon
will contribute enormously to our understanding of the processes that
formed the earth, made the continents, and determined the major features
of our world.
We have a long way to go.