…but it all depends on when you decide to call Earth Earth. Was this ball of rock a planet when still a geological embryo? Apparently not, and apparently that process took three times longer than was originally thought. Earth as a brand new baby planet marks its birthday quite late, as it happens, making the planet quite a bit younger than anyone thought. Aww, whosa-wee-sweet-lil-baby-erf!? You are!
Scientists have in the past estimated that the Earth’s development, a process known as accretion where gas, dust and other material clumped together to form the planet, happened over just 30 million years.
But the new research suggests this process may have taken up to 100 million years – more than three times longer than previous estimates.
Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, however, the researchers claim that while the Earth probably grew to 60% of its current size relatively quickly, the process may well have then slowed, taking about 100 million years in all.
“The whole issue hinges on working out how long it took for the core of the Earth to form, which is one of the big unknowns in this area of science,” said Dr John Rudge, one of the authors at the University of Cambridge.
I think it’s totally awesome that people look into this kind of stuff. Why should we care, you might ask? Why shouldn’t we? This is damned interesting, world formation. What isn’t cool about how that came about?
One Minion's Opinion 
I’m not sure how this has anything to do with anyone winning any argument. So the Earth took longer to form than scientists first thought how would that relate to a Christian such as myself thinking that I have a better chance in arguing my way into converting someone?
Which I think is complete crap, people that call themselves religious then go and get into a heated debate over beliefs don’t do anything for their religion, if I want to show someone what I believe I act on my beliefs and attempt to hold to the values of Christianity I believe in. I don’t sit down and argue with someone.
The people that see anything of value in this from a religious standpoint are the people that drive any legitimate rational debate out the window. I feel sorry for the agnostics and atheists that have to deal with that kind of behavior.
Scientific process in general is trial and error, this is just another step toward something more accurate.
It was a joke title anyway, not meant to be taken seriously. There are those Christians though who are prone to thinking that an error in science means all of science is flawed and wrong; they’re not picking up on the fact (like you have) that so much of the work is going to be self-correcting or peer reviewed and it’s better we (as in human beings) find out we’re wrong early enough and not waste so much ruddy time chasing flawed results and thinking we’ve solved the riddles.