I'll put it another way: do you believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old?
Denial of Evolution VI.
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I'll put it another way: do you believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old?
Here's an easy answer.
As you know, nuclear reactors transmute nuclear fuel into nuclear waste via a very well understood set of nuclear reactions. Some of these waste isotopes are very radioactive and have short half-lifes. Some are only slightly radioactive and have very long half-lives. So if you measured the percentages of each waste isotope you could, very accurately, determine when the reactor that created them ran.
The Oklo reactors first started up about 1.7 billion years ago, when a vein of natural uranium was contaminated by groundwater. The groundwater first concentrated the uranium (since it is the heaviest element it tends to sink to the bottom of a mixture) and then provided the moderator to start the reactor. It ran for a few hundred thousand years, producing about 100kW of heat. Then it shut down when it ran out of fuel.
We found it in 1972 when we were mining for uranium in Gabon. Tests based on radioisotope concentrations indicate it is 1.7 billion years old. Since we can test for literally dozens of radioisotopes it is a very well supported number.
But do you have a conviction about it? Is a younger earth one of the cornerstones of your world-view?
The thing about that is that many things can alter the outcome of the test when we get into billions of years because we dont know what the young Earth's climate or condition was or occurrences which may skew the tests. I know the tests work, what i am alluding to are extraneous occurrences. Do you think it is possible that the reactors can be around ten thousand years old?
No.
What reason do you have to believe that?
Let's assume that's true and it's to be applied across the board. An error of a thousand out of a billion is a millionth, which makes dating of the oldest rocks 99.9999% accurate.
Here is one of many sources of evidence.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s004100050465
So you dont think that Earth can be less than billions of years old? Why?
That's the great thing about isotope tests! Normal environmental variations don't matter. Decay rate is unaffected by them.
No. The tests could be off by a slight percentage due to measurement error. It might be 1.66 billion instead of 1.7 billion years old. But there is no way that all those isotope ratios are simultaneously so wrong that it could add up to a 10,000 year old reactor.
Perhaps I was not clear enough. The conditions could have been so drastically different as to skew the tests, IOW's what looks to be billions is really thousands or say tens of thousands. When we date like this we dont take that into account. I know that the methods for dating are accurate otherwise so I am not disputing that. What I am saying is conditions could have been such in the early few thousand years that it fools the dating methods due to increased carbon, soot, ash etc. in the atmosphere during the Earths formative years.
exchemist
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No, we don't, because science doesn't, and the reasons why are amply documented all over the internet, for anyone to read who genuinely wants to know.
Others can decide for themselves, but I myself do not think it is the job of this forum to get scientifically trained people to waste their time reciting well-known standard science, in their own words, merely as debating fodder for creationists. It is the creationists who are trying to overturn the accepted view, so the onus should be on THEM to state THEIR objections and THEIR alternative theories, if any.
You assume that to be true, but it's false. Nuclear decay rates are highly stable and unaffected by any of that.
Those have no effect, and if they did, science would be the first to explain it. This strikes me as a naive view coupled with a cynical opinion of science.
Did I say that? Did I state any opinion one way or the other? No.
All I asked is why you believe it could be under 10K years old.
It's more that once you understand the processes that create sedimentary layers, it becomes intellectually perverse to entertain the possibility that they could have formed in mere thousands of years, even just for the sake of argument. And that's before you even begin doing all the other things that are necessary in order to maintain such a position, such as completely throwing out our understanding of fossilization, and rejecting the many different methods of radiometric dating.
All this just from a consideration of rocks, which is a mere drop in the ocean with respect to the greater body of evidence across many different disciplines that points to an old earth.
Check out the following documentary if you haven't already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Earth_Was_Made
I'm sure you'd be stunned by just how much we know, and how we know it, and how we know we know it.
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You should look into that further. I have credible links that say otherwise, i suggest you search them and let me know what you think. What I am referring to only matters for long term where the sun and earth were much different, which has to be accounted for and the reasons should be obvious. I am talking about immense differences, I suspect the Sun comes into play here.
Anyone attacking the stability of nuclear decay rates is in denial of physics. As sure as the Sun will shine, the isotopes will decay at highly stable rates, and always have.
That does not affect the stability of nuclear decay rates.
That nuclear decay rates are SIGNIFICANTLY affected by temperature? I would be interested to see them.
Things like temperature, neutrino exposure etc have very slight effects on decay rates. For example, when you take Polonium 210 to -261 degrees C, it decays six percent slower. That means that if you take it to just (say) -10C (colder than you'll ever see underground) it will decay at 99.3% of its original rate at 20C. That's why the age might be slightly off as mentioned above.
But again, it's not going to change 1.7 billion years to 10,000.
How about an atmosphere completely alien to us like when the earth and solar system was forming? How can we know the Sun and\or temperature during that period can make thousands of years look to be 1.7 billion?
Would you use the same methods on mars or saturn and expect to get the same results?
Well, the reactor wouldn't have been able to form and run without a stable vein of uranium and rainwater to act as a moderator - so it could not have started up before the Earth was formed, had a stable surface and was cool enough to have rain fall.
Because we can to to far greater temperature extremes in the lab and we don't get a significant change in decay rates.
Similar methods on Mars, yes. In fact we've detected very faint signs of such ancient reactors on Mars as well.
Since Saturn does not have a well defined surface it would be tougher. But if we could find a region in its rocky core that has held together for billions of years, had liquid water for use as a moderator, and ran as a reactor for a while, then yes, we could use the same methods.
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