Chance the Rapper should be busy. He’s a father, recently married his longtime partner in March, is prepping the release of his debut studio album in July and playing Woodstock 50 in August. Nevertheless, Chance still found time to ask the hard hitting questions on Twitter, during a day when most people were still busy dragging Daniel Caesar over the coals for earnestly asking, “Why are we being so mean to white people right now?”
The question that ignited the maelstrom was simple: “So yall think shit been goin on for a billion years? Idk.” Chance then followed that observation up by giving “this joint” aka Earth, “A million [years] on the high side.” But the icing on the public schools are failing our children cake was the earnest question, “Does ‘dinosaur’ refer to how old they are or just that they was animals and not humans?”
Now, I’m not here to co-sign the white man’s science, but it’s hard to fathom where to begin in this cornucopia of ignorance. By most accounts the world is around 4.54 billion years old and according to Space, has an “error range of 50 million years.” I’m a rap writer who almost failed biology and geology, but radiometric dating seems more precise than throwing a wild guess at the wall concerning the age of Mother Earth.
Thankfully for Chance, the dinosaur question is far more simple. Sir Richard Owens created the name “Dinosauria” in 1842 to describe what he believed were “terrible lizards,” reports the BBC. So the name “dinosaur” has more to do with how terrible the giant, scaly chickens are and less to do with their age. Either way, it’s nice to know Chance the Psuedoscientist is still curious.