online business

HOW OLD IS THE EARTH:

Below is a list of radionuclides (radioactive elements). These are unstable elements that have a tendency to undergo radioactive decay. The list contains every known radionuclide with a half life longer than 300 years. A half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of a quantity of radioactive material to decay. So, if we start with 1.0 kg of Carbon-14, then after one half life (5,730 years), 0.5 kg of Carbon-14 will remain (and 0.5 kg of the decay product: Nitrogen-14). After another half-life, one half of the remaining Carbon-14 will exist (0.25 kg), and so on. A radionuclide will decay to nearly nothing after about 20 half-lifes. After that amount of time, the amount of radionuclide will be 1 / 2^20 (about one millionth) of it’s original quantity.

The second column of the list says how long the half-life of the element is. The fourth and fifth columns show how many half-lifes would have occurred in 4.5 billion years (the scientific estimate of the age of the earth), and 6,000 years (the age of the earth according to young earth creationists).There are 92 radionuclides on this chart, and they show an interesting pattern. A lot of the radionuclides with long half-lifes exist in nature, but none of the radionuclides with short half-lifes exist. Now, as I mentioned earlier, radionuclides who have existed for more than 20 half-lifes would decay out of existence (at least as far as our being able to detect them). If evolutionists are right in claiming the earth to be 4.5 billion years old, we would expect radionuclides experiencing 20+ half-lifes within 4.5 billion years to have disappeared. (The number of half-lifes within 4.5 billion years can be found in column 4.) Any with longer half-lifes would still be around - assuming they existed on earth in the first place. Looking back at the list, we can see that all long-lived radionuclides exist on earth, and radionuclides with 20+ half-lifes don’t exist on earth with some exceptions.

There are some short-lived radionuclides that can be found on earth which are produced they are either decay products from long-lived radionuclides, or produced by some continual process. So, it is not surprising that they still exist even in a very old earth:Finding Plutonium 244. Its half life is 82 million years, so 4.55 billion years is 55 half lives. You might reasonably ask how come Plutonium 244 isn’t listed as no. The answer is that someone made a very serious effort to find it: their article is referenced below. Eighty five kilograms of molybdenum ore were chemically concentrated, and then the lot was tediously run through a mass spectrometer. The amount of Plutonium 244 they found, 10-14 grams, was so small that it would have averaged one single radioactive decay every six years. Clearly, they could not have detected this Plutonium 244 with a geiger counter. However, 55 half lives ago, it would have been about one kilogram of plutonium metal. That’s believable in 85 kilograms of metal ore.

Samarium 146’s half life is 103 million years, so 4.55 billion years is 44 half lives. This means that Samarium 146 could be 200 billion times rarer than Uranium 235, but could be a thousand times commoner than Plutonium 244. I predict that if anyone tries very very hard to find Samarium 146, they will succeed. Curium 247, at almost 300 half lives, is completely out of the question.U-235, which appears right above the 20 half-life dividing line, would have gone through 6.39 half-lifes in 4.5 billion years.